In this article, I give you my Dell XPS 15 9570 VS Razer Blade 15 comparison with specs included. We have the incumbent the 2018 razor blade 15. I say incumbent because we were reviewed at first. And now we have the dell XPS 15 for 2018 this to model 95 70.
Both of these are a higher and 15-inch Windows 10 laptops with 6 core cpus inside. The new Intel eighth generation. They have dedicated graphics. They cross over from your a high-end 15-inch. Could almost be an ultra boat because they’re so thin and light kind of laptop to being something more performant. So first off is price.
And this is a place where Dell just always wins. Because they’re a huge company with great scale manufacturing. It comes in cheaper for inequivalent and configuration. The model that we have sells for $2,100 and that’s the core i7 dish 8750 HCP at least until eighth-generation here for both of these models that we’re talking about.
16 gigs of DDR for two six six six megahertz Ram a 512 gig nvme SSD and a 4k glossy touchscreen. That secretly supports Wacom a EES pen Dells active pen for example. We don’t know how long that will go on though because Dell doesn’t even mention that fact so they couldn’t change display manufacturers anyway. That one is $2,100.
Now razor starts at 1899. With that one you do get the same core i7 processor you get the same 16 gigs over to 666 megahertz Ram. You only get a 256 gig nvme SSD and you get a full HD matte non-touch display. Now dell also offers a matte non touch full HD display as well which we drop the price down some if you were going to configure it that way.
That was a standard 60 Hertz to spike. Now the one that we have is the higher-end model. That one is $25.99. So this was coming in more expensive than our dell. This one doesn’t have a 4k display but it does have a hundred forty-four Hertz fast refresh display. Which is nice particularly the gamers.
But I can tell you even when you’re not gaming once you get used to that fast refresh display and you don’t see webpages doing the smear thing when you’re scrolling can count and get hooked on it pretty fast. Same core i7 same 16 gigs of ram same 512 gig nvme SSD inside. So there you have it.
The Razer is going to cost you or. If you want that 4k display on the razor which I don’t believe is actually shipping to customers yet. They sent out a few reviewed learners. We didn’t get the 4k display. But it should be competitive with the Dell 4k display – the secret pen feature on the Dell. So what are you getting for that extra money.
Let’s talk about design and build quality. It’s really hard to argue that the razor blade 15 isn’t one of the most high-end looking well-built impeccable looking laptops that’s currently on the market. It’s up there with the surface book – in the 15-inch macbook Pro.
It has a unified look. No multiple colors no multiple finishes. It’s hard to find a seam on the thing it is rock-solid. It is just sweetness it’s nice. If you really like high-end stuff it’s got that high-end stuff look. It’s only available in matte black. It’s an updated matte black finish versus what razor blade used to use.
It’s less fingerprint prone but it still gets disgusting really pretty fast. The XPS 15 is a nice looking machine and it looks fairly high-end. I don’t think they’ve ever quite gotten in design cues there to put it in that rarefied company on the surface book – we’re on the 15 inch MacBook pro.
You got a two-tone finish. It’s a little lighter this year the silver finish on the top which looks slightly grainy. I don’t think that has anything to the quality I think it’s their choice. I think if they went for a more unified metal finish on it it would look a little classier. It’s sandwiched with black in the middle.
The interior has a carbon fiber Tom Pomerance. Which is pretty darn cool. Though you got that multiple finishes which disrupt the look a little bit okay maybe I’m being picky. But the only drawback with the carbon fiber finish which I actually really do like the feel of is that it too gets icky icky.
At least your keys are in the inside though where other people won’t see them when it’s closed. So razor wins on that it’s fair it should it costs more. When it comes to performance and here’s where these two laptops divide. And you know I it depends on what you want here.
So I’m not just going to go poopoo on the Dell XPS 15 even though it’s not as performant as the Razer Blade 15. Because it depends on what you want to do with it. For those of you who are just doing some vms which really depends on having available cores and having available memory more than it depends on how superduper fast your laptop is it’s fine.
So if you’re doing coding it’s good if you’re doing your everyday office stuff your streaming video your occasional Photoshop your occasional W the XPS 15 is fine. Gaming the NVidia gtx 1050 Teac max cues and that’s the less performance-oriented version of it is kind of weak.
It will get you into these triple A’s titles but at a kind of watery with 40 frames per second for some titles. Dependence far cry 5 is going to be not really good at all. For tonight it’s gonna be fine at high and you’ll get 60 frames per second on it. So it’s not super strong for gaming.
But the worst thing is is the cooling is not designed for gaming honestly. That’s been the Dell XPS 15 s problem since this chassis design came out. This is the third iteration of it. It’s much like the 15-inch macbook Pro in that respect. It will run hot. And worse yet I’ve had it just reboot.
And I’m not the only one if you search the web for this complaint. It just sweet boots when you’re gaming. Sometimes as soon as three minutes into a game. And I’m testing games that aren’t super hard. You know I’m not testing for a Cry 5. Overwatch fortnight.
So there’s a GPU stability issue here as well. So for those of you who are heavy lifters you do actually want a game with this thing and play today’s triple-a titles and you expect 60 frames per second or higher. Whereas the dela is going to be a 42 frames per second in Far Cry 5.
The razorblade 15 with our gtx 1070 max q is it about a hundred 18 frames Wow. Much much better they’re. Not only that the cooling is much more advanced on it. Because they have a gaming laptop heritage and they’ve learned lessons from the 14 inch that used to run too hot.
You know vapor chamber cooling. You have a cooling heatsink design that doesn’t just cover the CPU and GPU it covers ancillary chips as well. So the thing can handle some gaming. It can handle hours of video editing.
It can handle doing blender projects and not even break a sweat in terms of the CPU and GPU core temperatures there. Okay so the remains are blade 15 whether you get the GTX 1060 or 1070 you’re getting something that really can game.
That can handle hours long workstation level loads with 3d rendering with video editing with those sorts of things. But here’s the flip side of that. So for those who would say I’m not even gonna really do that stuff so much you know.
Maybe the occasional a little bit of Fortnight on the dowel that sort of thing. Well the Dell is going to run quieter and cooler to the touch generally speaking as well. Now if you’re pushing the Dell and you’re playing over oh I’m just going to get pretty darn hot on the underside.
But for everyday productivity work for your occasional Adobe Premiere and it’s that sort of thing it doesn’t get that hot to the touch. You might even be able to keep it on your lap which is pretty neat. Again sort of more like the 15-inch macbook Pro experience there. And the fans are a lot quieter.
Because they haven’t tuned them to be hyper cooling because they know you’re really gonna hammer it with a lot of work. So a lot of people just want a class act. Something that has a really nice build quality have some beautiful display options is well built and they’re not going to hammer it.
So in that case you might actually prefer the XPS 15. When it comes to networking you know you sure we don’t talk about this but some people really hate killer networking. I usually don’t have any issues with killer. But Dell is using basic last year’s killer 1535 AC card. Not the 1550 which actually uses an Intel chipset.
And some of you hate killers so I have to mention that. Both of these have socketed Wi-Fi cards so you can replace the card if you want. And I have had some problems with the killer card in our Dell. Even after various software updates now that the products kind of mature in terms of that.
I’d sometimes they just disconnects sometimes it doesn’t resume after asleep. You could change the card they only cost about 35 bucks and it’s not hard. Razer goes with the Intel 90 260 a see the latest generation Intel card. Surprisingly even though a gaming company they didn’t go with killer so there’s that.
When it comes to displays now they’re almost on even ground here. Because both of them have a Full HD matte non-touch display option with 75% of Adobe RGB full srgb coverage. And they have 4k touch glossy screen options as well.
So with razor it gets interesting because they have the standard 60 Hertz panel with those specs. And they have 144 Hertz option in the full HD matte non-touch -. Like I said that’s really cool for gamers and it’s nice anyway. You just get used to seeing nothing smearing when you’re scrolling and you don’t see Mouse ghosting and you’re like yeah nice on the eyes.
But Dell fights back because their display is 400 nits of brightness and razors is only 300 nits of brightness. Now it comes to the 4k display options both of those are glossy and they are touchscreen and they’re wide gamut approaching full Adobe RGB pretty sweet.
I’m pretty sure they’re both using sharp panels so technology which means the color accuracy terms of what the color Riveter sees isn’t awesome but you can calibrate it and get it better. Dell secret sauce is like I said currently it secretly supports Wacom ES active pens.
We don’t know if that’s going to continue since this isn’t this feature that they advertise. They’re using the same panel is on the XPS 15 two and one. Probably makes sense them to throw the same panel in there. We don’t know if they’re gonna keep doing that or not.
So don’t count on that six months from now who knows. When it comes to stability usually you would think the gaming laptop isn’t going to be the one that wins. In this case it is. The razor blade 15 has been pretty bulletproof.
I’ve been using one since they came out and no blue screens no unexpected reboots. I’m thrown heavy-duty video at it’s at it I’ve played Far Cry 5 way too much and some other games on it and it’s just pretty much rock-solid. It’s a very clean windows build.
There’s no blow air whatsoever other than Razer zone synapse 3. Which is their control center so you can control the RGB backlighting on the keyboard but fan profiles and also Razer peripherals if you want to use them.
There is one bug with the Razer Blade 15 where sometimes does not charge if you plug it in when the laptop is shut down. This is a bug that they’re working on and I have seen that one happened. And that’s a pretty nasty stupid bug.
Really I hope they get that one fixed down. Anyway the Dell XPS 15 again it’s been on the market a couple of months now for consumers. They were late getting review units out to us reviewers. So all the updates are installed the latest bios in is installed and it’s still not as stable as I would like.
Which is saying I’ve just noticed with the Dell XPS 15 over the iterations. And clearly this Intel 8th generation CPU is giving everybody a little extra hard time here in terms of PC manufacturers. But besides the killer Wi-Fi issue disconnecting sometimes the GPU is really where I see most of the problems with it.
Just suddenly rebooting when gaming or pushing it hard sometimes even an Adobe Premiere Pro. If you’re not hitting the GPU much it’s pretty solid it’s pretty reliable there. So how about the keyboards. Well neither of these is really my favorite keyboard but I would give the Dell XPS 15 the win here.
It has larger keys and a little bit more travel and tactile feel going on. Even though it’s still really a pretty low travel keyboard. It has white backlighting. The Razer keyboard isn’t bad the keys are kind of smaller which is a little bit weird. We also have the right shift key with the arrow in between issue.
But you can remap the keyboard using Razer synapse for that to make that problem sort of go away. You do get that chroma RGB backlighting this customizable those. So that’s a win particularly if your gamer types who like to do that.
Or for those of us who actually use that feature to make the brightness up and down keys in the volume up and down Keys different colors. Because for some reason the multimedia keys are not backlit on the razer keyboard. Track pads on these are very similar.
They’re Microsoft precision trackpad I like them both quite well. Speakers on these are both equally mediocre. For 15-inch gaming/multimedia / impressive laptops they both have fairly lacking bass and just okay volume. When it comes to upgrading and servicing the internals these are identical.
You have to Ram slots inside you have one m2 SSD slot you have a socket and Wi-Fi card. And a battery once you unscrew the bottom cover which is not hard on either of these. Would be of a Torx t5 screwdriver you could unscrew the battery disconnect it and put in a replacement as well.
So then that’s pretty even. Andry pasting the CPU GPU the heatsink isn’t too hard on either of these. Dell is the winner on battery life. It has a larger 97-watt-hour battery versus the 80-watt-hour battery in the Razer Blade. Well done that’s gonna be a big difference in capacity there.
Also it’s gonna depend on whether you have a 4k or a full HD display for either of these. You’re going to see a couple of hours difference in runtime. But typically the full HD Dell XPS 15 runs us about nine hours on a charge sometimes a bit longer.
Our razor blade obviously but this has a smaller battery full HD display and it’s more like a seven to eight-hour laptop. Sometimes eight and a half of you’re really doing light work. So yeah winner Dell. The XPS 15 ships with a more compact 130-watt adapter.
The razor blade needs more power for the GPU so it ships with a 230-watt adapter for the gtx 1070 max cube version. Last one is support and availability. Dell is a huge company. They’re just about every country in the world. You got service you have support.
So that stands in their favor there. That you sell on-site warranties if that’s your gig and you don’t want to be sending it in. As PC support goes there their supports pretty decent. I mean nobody’s happy with any PC support honestly but it’s pretty fun.
Now razorblade had a terrible customer support reputation. And as I mentioned just before the blade 15 launched they so totally turned that around. It’s actually quite good now. They’re responsive they’ll send you replacements they’ll fix things. So there you have it the XPS 15 versus the Razer Blade 15.
Obviously like I said the Dell is gonna be the less expensive model. That’s their thing. They come in just under the competition in terms of pricing and they’re good at that. And they sell high volume they can do that. And even though it’s the loser on performance and on cooling effectiveness that doesn’t mean it’s a bad laptop.
It just means it’s for a different target audience. The Razer Blade 15 is targeted more obviously and gamers as we found out and people who are using true mobile workstation kind of professional kind of software out there. You’re doing 3d rendering in blender you’re doing a lot of video end codes that sort of thing.
The XPS 15 is for those of you who do light to moderate work. It you know sometimes you do some video editing you’re using some vms to do some software development everyday kind of stuff. It’s absolutely fine for that where you don’t need that superduper cooling. The stability when gaming on the Dell XPS 15 is however terrible. If you’re into gaming cheat razor is a gaming brand uh go with the razor obviously.
