Benchmarks: Vitals and Battery Life
A new generation of Intel CPU does little to change a recurring theme as the Core i5 struggles to maintain peak speeds for any meaningful length of time. It doesn't take long for core temperature to climb over 90°C, and our logs show the Blender benchmark begins at 3.8GHz across all cores but quickly falls to 3.0GHz in order to get a better handle on temps.
As tends to be the case in thin-and-light laptops, it is a balancing act of heat and performance, and the XPS 13 2-in-1 does have its work cut out when the going gets tough. Though the chassis never becomes uncomfortably warm, expelling all that heat results in clearly noticeable fan noise during most tasks. Our review unit also exhibits some clear coil whine, though this may be an isolated issue.
We use a pair of PCMark 10 benchmarks to gauge battery life; Modern Office, which intermittently uses the writing, web browsing and video conferencing workloads from the main PCMark 10 benchmark; and Gaming, which repeats the common Fire Strike test to provide a worst case scenario.
In order to make the results comparable between laptops, each system is configured with a purpose-built power plan, wireless radios disabled, and screen brightness set as close to 200 nits as possible using a calibration device.
Ignoring the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7, whose mutant battery longevity continues to mystify, the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 does well to deliver almost 14 hours of use from its relatively small 51Wh battery. More than enough juice to get through a full day's work.
