Dell XPS 15 Touch Screen Laptop Review

Performance Summary: You would expect a fair amount of performance for the kind of investment it takes to own a top-of-the-line XPS 15 Touch system, and Dell's spunky laptop certainly delivered. Compared to its Ultrabook kin, it took them behind the barn and gave them all a thorough beating in practically every benchmark. It topped the Cinebench chart in OpenGL performance and scurried to the front of the class in PCMark 7, and when it came time to game, the XPS 15 Touch posted framerates more in line with dedicated gaming laptops that Ultrabooks.


Have you ever street raced against a sleeper car? That's sort of what Dell has on its hands with the XPS 15 Touch. It looks like an Ultrabook and feels like one too, but hidden inside that unassuming exterior is some seriously fast hardware. Between the fast Intel Core i7 4702HQ processor, 16GB of DDR3L-1600 memory, 512GB mSATA SSD, and discrete NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M GPU, there's nary bottleneck to be found, at least in terms of speed.

Despite the presence of discrete graphics, this isn't a dedicated gaming laptop, though our benchmarks prove you can certainly play games on this machine. In addition, the GPU is there to make sure working with applications and media with its brilliant QHD+ (3200x1200) touch-enable panel never overwhelms the system. In our testing, it never did. The display is absolutely gorgeous, though be warned -- once you've spent time on a QHD+ laptop, it's difficult to go back to just a full HD 1080p display.

Other than craving more storage space beyond what the 512GB SSD provides (Dell does offer the option to configure a machine with up to a 1TB HDD), the only real knock against a system like this is the price tag. We've mentioned it's not a gaming laptop, but at $2,350 for the configuration we reviewed, it's priced somewhat like one. It's hard to support the notion of spending a king's ransom on a laptop these days. So, is it a deal killer?

Not in our opinion, though you'll have to make your judgment call on that one. We should also point out that you can find less expensive configurations, especially with a standard HDD and 32GB SSD hybrid setup. All told, it would be a different story if you didn't get much in return for your hard earned dollars. However, if you've got the budget for a system like the model we tested, Dell delivers not only an all-around computing experience, but a superb one at that. Whether it's editing photos and video, burying yourself in productivity software, or even playing games, the XPS 15 Touch has the hardware to do it all, and do it with aplomb.  We're so fond of the XPS 15 touch, with it's svelte 4.4 lb profile, that hits like a heavyweight, that we're giving it our Editor's Choice award.