Dell XPS 17 Review: Heavy-duty laptop that can do everything, but has a huge price tag!

In today’s fast-paced world, laptops have become a must-have. If you don’t have one, you’re lagging behind in every facet of life - professional and private. Rarely does anyone now sit behind a PC for any purpose, be it content creation, browsing the web, binge-watching shows or even gaming. Why must you sit tethered to one spot all day when you can do everything mentioned above wherever you like? Laptops offer that flexibility where you can do whatever you like, whenever you like, and wherever way you like. Purchasing a laptop today depends on its use, and there are varied offerings for students, content creators, graphic designers, professionals, and gamers. But what if you need to do a bit of everything from creating PDFs, and editing photos to playing your favourite video games?

This is where the Dell XPS 17 excels. With supercharged specs, a massive display and an extremely high price, is it worth buying, especially now that Apple has introduced its M3-powered MacBook Pro? At the outset, after spending a few weeks with the Dell XPS 17, I certainly think so. Here’s why.

Gorgeous Display

One of the most striking features of the Dell XPS 17 is its gorgeous, and massive display. It sports a 17-inch 4K UHD+ InfinityEdge display that is absolutely stunning to look at. While Apple is often credited with making the best displays, the Dell XPS 17 has even the top-spec’d MacBooks beat. Equipped with HDR, the Dell XPS 17 has stunning viewing angles, anti-reflective coating, and excellent colour reproduction. If you’re a graphic designer or a video editor, the laptop has your back with multiple colour profiles and a 16:10 aspect ratio. The Dell XPS 17 offers 500 nits brightness which is more than enough for most situations. It is durable too with Gorilla Glass 6.

It is nearly perfect, except for one thing - the refresh rate. Considering the supercharged specs powering the Dell XPS 17, it is common to think it might also feature an ultra-high refresh rate, except it doesn’t. Despite featuring a gorgeous 17-inch 4K display, the display supports only a 60Hz refresh rate, which is a bummer for gamers. Having said that, the display is perfect in most scenarios.

Sturdy Design

The laptop features exceptional build quality. It is made of CNC-machined aluminium and comes in a platinum silver finish which looks and feels premium, matching or perhaps even surpassing the build quality of even the highest-priced MacBook Pros. It gets a black carbon fiber composite around the keyboard which is a soft touch material. While it does not attract any fingerprints at all, the surface can get a bit stained if you have oily skin, but it is not a deal-breaker.

As is the case with most premium laptops nowadays, the Dell XPS 17 does not feature any USB-A ports. Instead, it gets 4 Thunderbolt 4 ports which fulfill multiple purposes. However, it does come with an SD card reader as well as a 3.5mm headphone jack. If you still wish to plugin your USB-A-equipped device to the laptop, you can make use of the USB-Type-C to USB-A v3.0 and HDMI v2.0 adapter that is shipped along with the laptop.

In terms of battery life, the Dell XPS 17 delivers an outstanding performance, lasting almost 11 hours on a single charge in balanced mode. Turning that up to performance hampers the battery life a bit but it also results in increased performance. It comes with a 130W charger that juices up the 97Whr battery fairly quickly.

Dell XPS 17: Verdict

Should you go for Dell XPS 17? Definitely, if you have an unlimited budget. Priced at a hefty Rs. 364,289, it certainly isn’t a bang-for-your-buck device, but then do you really expect a laptop priced at more than Rs. 3.5 lakh to be? For that price, you get a top-of-the-line 13th Gen i9 chip, 32GB RAM, 1TB storage and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU, which will fulfill all your tasks and then some. It also sports a 17-inch 4K display that is gorgeous to look at but it is stuck at 60Hz. While the laptop gets all the top-of-the-line specs, it is quite massive and even bulky, which can be a deal-breaker for some.