Dell XPS 15 9510 Laptop review - TLDR; I like it.

 

I'm not a laptop guy. Well, maybe I am now. 

     Recently I was lucky enough to get my hands on a Dell XPX 15, 9510. A 15 inch laptop with a 4k OLED screen, an i9 11900k, RTX 3060ti, 32gb of decent ram, and a 1tb hard drive complete with charger and docking system for the low low price of $225 from a place called OCM Recycling in Oldsmar Florida. I've always wanted one of these laptops after meeting with someone at a tradeshow who had one, and how well made it was. Literally a wolf in sleek sheep's clothing of business class PC's. How did I get such a good deal you ask? Keep reading.

This is how it was waiting for me. Dirty. Tempting.

     Short version, I know someone who works there and he gave me a deal. OCM Recycling has multiple warehouses full of decommissioned medical and office equipment, and I happen to be there on a day when they were processing 200 + laptops. The man that was going through them, said, "Can you believe someone would want to throw out an i9?!" I was like, how much that? Name your price. Out the door for $225. It came with a fresh install of Windows 11, a charger, and a WD19TBS Dell Performance Dock which adds a ton of functionality to the 2x thunderbolt 4 ports. The 3060ti on board is more than enough to push 4k out to the new 3 video ports added with the dock.

I've actually always wanted one of these. 

Initial thoughts:

• Build quality is amazing. Feels very very solid, has a good weight to it. Macbook feel is the best description I can come up with. Sleek, very thin, and heavy for the size coming in at 4.5 pounds without the charger and docking station. Full CNC'd aluminium chassis, carbon fiber keyboard deck. Feels like a well oiled machine when opening it. Zero flex at all. Hinges on the monitor feel amazing and strong, even when laying the laptop flat and opening gently on a flat surface. It looks cool. I feel like a bad ass using it.
• Monitor is bezel free, crisp, with accurate color. Very bright with inky dark blacks. I'm not use to this level of color outside of the newer Mac Book Pros and desktop PC monitors over $200. I can't tell the difference between 4k and 1080p because of the size, but that's not a bad thing, and I'm not much of a resolution whore anyways.
• Touch pad is huge, or maybe just bigger than I'm use to. Again, more like the size of the Macbook pro, but just slightly smaller when I put them side by side. Not finicky. Zero issues and I actually like using it. My daily driver work mouse is an MX Master 4, and I found myself not using it as much and enjoying the touchpad. Multi touch features work without issues.
• Keyboard is gently lighted from below, and has a really premium feel to it. Soft touch keys. I find myself altering my typing style over the right, which is mildly infuriating. The capslock key is huge for no reason, moving everything over to the right. I wrote this blog post on the laptop to just get acclimated to the new position of the keys, then emailed it to myself.
• Audio is crazy. 4 Speakers total, two tweeters and two woofers give it a little thump and it's plenty loud. Speakers are on the sides of the keyboard. I was listening to a movie at medium volume and it felt like there was some level of surround sound software being used. Stereo music was way better than I thought. Second best sound I've ever heard on a laptop. 
• Performance in desktop tasks is great, marginally better than my other laptop with similar specs I've reviewed previously. That laptop went to my wife, and has been her daily driver for over 2 years without any issues. MSI makes a great quality product at the high end, but this is on a different level. The price for that aforementioned laptop was almost $3000 USD, and this was almost $4000 new, not sure it would be worth that extra money just for superior build quality.
• The only game I played was Overwatch, and It easily maxed everything out on Epic settings at 60hz, when hooked up to an external monitor 2k at 120hz was available at high settings, with everything turned up. Overall, color me impressed. Thermals drastically increased, as outlined below.
• Heat-wise, the thermals are.. meh. The dock is louder than the laptop with two fans in it, so that's positive. I never experienced thermal throttling, (close!) but the keyboard area warms up quite a bit. My hands are always cold, so maybe this is a blessing. The laptop does have some internal heat piping that is impressive, but a hot chip like the 11900h, there is only so much you can do to cool it off under load. I have not been using a lap top cooling pad, but if it thermal throttles, I'll add that to the kit. *Edit* - Flying a little close to the sun with light gaming on a hard surface has verified what others said in reviews; it runs hot. 85c watching 4k youtube videos with a bunch of Chrome tab open on High performance mode in the worst case is enough for me to invest in a high quality, silent, metal, cooling solution for office work which will arrive tomorrow and I will report on that then. 
• Charging is adequate, but you can't use a 90 watt charger to the thunderbolt port without warnings of slow charging. You need at least a 130 watt charger, or the dock to keep you topped off while working. I noticed if you plug the dock and the charger in at the same time, neither will charge, but you will have the functions of the laptop while it steadily decreases in power. I had no idea the dock charged the PC, so that's my fault, and I corrected that. I did order a new charger, as the one at the recycling center was 90 watt. It's worth mentioning the WD19tb docking station delivers over 200 watts of power delivery, so no extra charger needed. 
• Battery life is really good if you keep the settings optimized for longer use. I just attended a meeting where I was using a large screen as a second monitor to give a presentation for about 45 minutes, then a one hour zoom. Still had 1.5 hours of battery left. Not sure what all the reviews talking about terrible battery life were talking about because this is right about what I expected. If you are gaming on this laptop, your battery will not last which is obvious. 
• I had to disable the on-board Intel Iris graphics to get the RTX video card to stay on for Overwatch, then strangely, I had to enable it again when framerate dropped. When the onboard video is disabled in favor of the 3050ti, both disappear from the control panel as a selectable device. The sweet spot is to touch nothing and just hope for the best, and let the application decide what is going on.
• Bloatware was intense upon clean install. All the Dell garbage had to go right away, freeing up tons of resources and open programs. 
• Killer Wifi so far is fine, but I'm experiencing the same problem as other people, when resuming from sleep or closed lid, around 10% of the time the WiFi does not seem like it's going as fast as it should, restarting the WiFi fixes it, or restarting the PC.
• When plugging into the dock when cold booting from the first start of the day, there is a VERY small chance that the secondary monitor will not come on and stay black for over 30 seconds. Unplugging and plugging it back in seems to fix this, but I should not have to do that. It's not that big of a deal, and I wondered if I should event mention it here. 
• Cost at launch was close to $4000 for the model that I have, and a used model runs around $1500 with the dock in the condition and spec I purchased mine for, so cost is a little high for what you get as far as specs are concerned... in today's technology universe. An Intel 14500hx or similar performing laptop new from Bestbuy runs around $1300-$1500 new, so for what I paid, the value is there. Now that I own one and daily drive it, I can see where the cost comes from.. it's all in the build quality. 
• IO kind of sucks. I'm fine with using dongles and carry a bag with me almost anywhere, but this is a little lacking. You get 2x Thunderbolt 4 ports, one Type C gen 3, a headphone port, SD card reader, and a headphone jack. My external monitor, phone chargers, almost everything I use is of a Type C variant style plug, so I suppose for me, it's not a big deal at all unless I'm visiting an office and they hand you an HDMI cable.. and you forgot your dongle. The WD19TBS dock cures all these issues with it's crazy amount of extra features, but it weighs about as much as the laptop itself and really does not lend itself to realistic travel. I wish it just had a displayport or HDMI port. A small con, but still a con when I use laptops for work almost exclusively. 

Overall thoughts

     I've only had this PC about a a month, and I'm phasing out my old laptop currently, which an HP Walmart special with the fake 11th gen garbage i7 ( I could go on forever about this one), on board graphics, and 16gb ram that has been sat on in key West, run over by a golf cart, and generally just treated like total shit for 4 years of loyal service. For a $500 laptop I could not really ask for more, except now I know I can definitely ask for more. I feel lucky when I take this out of my bag to begin my work day, it really makes me day easier in terms of functional quality of life. I run around 12 Chrome tabs of different windows, of varying complexity, and this PC does exactly what I need. Speaking of: Life is too short to not have a premium laptop that feels like cold steel machinery when opening, has the durability of a 1980's Toyota pickup, and looks like a modern device from a sci-fi movie. As mentioned previously, this is my dream laptop. I recently had the option to take a used Mac Book Pro from 2019, which is a good machine, and has tons of features I like, but nothing like this in terms of overall performance. I want a Windows machine with specs that are not hindered and turned down. I don't want a 17 inch, I want this one specifically with these exact specs or similar, and it does not hurt that it is like new and was so damn cheap. The dock was this insane added bonus that would normally be $179.99 on Amazon, and I use multiple monitors (Acer Predator XB32u) at work, so this is perfect for me. Mileage may vary obviously. 

8.7/10