Welcome to a laptop battery specialist of the dell laptop battery
The advantages of going to a fully metal jacket for a notebook aren't as huge as you would imagine. Sure, it scratches a little less, and if you do some nifty designwork on the inside you might be able to use it as a passive heatsink. The cons are there, though; metal is heavy, it's cold in winter and can get hot in summer, it's definitely more expensive and if you do it wrong, it's going to look like a Macbook ripoff. Whoops.
Dell's new premium notebook line culminates in the XPS 15z for its full size offerings. This is a 15.6in notebook formfactor, with a 1,920 x 1,080 screen and nice wide design. It's surprisingly big in the hand, and quite heavy as well at 2.51kg.
This model is packed with an Intel Second Generation Core i7 2620M with battery like dell Inspiron 8500 battery
, dell 8N544 battery
, dell Inspiron 8600 battery
,Dell Precision M60 battery
, dell Inspiron 6400 battery
, dell Inspiron E1505 battery
, dell Inspiron 1501 battery
, dell GD761 battery
, dell KD476 battery
, dell TD347 battery
processor which runs at 2.7GHz, bursting to 3.4GHz when heat permits. This is a great chip, and one we're going to see a lot more of at the mid to upper end of the notebook market from here on out. The processor is paired with 8GB of DDR 1,333MHz memory, as we would expect for a premium design model.
Graphics for the XPS 15z are driven by an NVIDIA GeForce GT525M with 2GB of dedicated memory. This isn't a record breaking card, but is adequate for casual 3D gaming, and is more than enough for OS and video decoding duties.
Surprisingly, running through the Dell web site, we found that beyond the choice of a Core i5 or Core i7 model, there's no customisation available for the hardware in this unit. Most disappointingly, you're stuck with a mechanical hard disk drive, unless you're comfortable enough buying aftermarket and installing one yourself. At least the drive is 750GB and 7,200rpm, so it could be worse. The system is installed with Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit, of course) and a whole load of shovelware.
Physically, the XPS 15z is a strange beast. It's obviously a big change in design from Dell's usual notebooks, and we are quite undecided on whether we like it or not. The metal exterior casing is fine, and the cutouts for speakers and cooling are some of the nicest design touches we've seen on any computing range (it also appears on some of the Inspiron models). But the strange asymmetrical design for the clamshell is a miss, and the inclusion of cheap looking silver plastic covering on the hinge is awful. Connections include two USB 3.0 ports, a USB 2.0 port, card reader, DisplayPort and HDMI, plus a slot-load DVD-RW.
The unit's keyboard is a strange looker, but a pleasure to use. The keys are rounded slightly, making them look even more spaced than they are, touch typists won't be phased by it at all, and hunt and peck users will get along as always. The keyboard layout is sensible but the key travel is extremely short. Thankfully, there's resistive pressure behind them, so it remains extremely comfortable to use.
On the bench the XPS 15z managed to kick out a PCMark Vantage score of 8,301. That's a great result for a mid-range notebook, and more than adequate for the vast majority of users that aren't looking for a gaming notebook.
Battery life saw the system survive for a hair under four hours with Wi-Fi on and web-centric actual use. Not terrible, but considering some of the all-day results we've been seeing from some units these days, it's behind the curve a little.