I have to admit, I was initially disappointed after reviewing the Alienware M16 R2. The redesign felt underwhelming, lacking the innovative spark I’ve come to expect from Dell/Alienware. Hoping for redemption, I requested the new X16 R2, but a typo in our emails led to the arrival of the Dell XPS 16 instead. But from the moment I unboxed it, I was hooked. Dell’s design team have outdone themselves, and after nearly a month of use, I can confidently say this laptop is a game-changer.
The Dell XPS 16 strikes a perfect balance between sleek industrial design and powerful performance. With a starting price of $2400, the XPS 16 offers configurations with Intel Core Ultra processors, Nvidia RTX 40-series GPUs, and either a 16” 1080p IPS or a breathtaking 4K+ OLED display. You can tailor the specs to your liking, but be prepared for the price to climb quickly.
My review unit is packed with a Core Ultra 7 155H, RTX 4060 50W, 32GB of DDR5 memory, a 2TB NVMe SSD, and that gorgeous 4K+ OLED touch display boasting a 90Hz refresh rate. Priced around $4,500, this setup doesn’t come cheap, but the value is evident in every aspect of the laptop. It looks stunning, excels at productivity tasks, and even handles gaming impressively well, making it a versatile powerhouse.
Think of the XPS 16 as the closest a Windows laptop can get to Apples MacBook Pro 16 but that also caters to gamers. It’s a machine that demands attention and delivers on almost every front. Here’s why you might just fall in love with it—or find a few reasons to hate it.
Design and Build
The XPS 16 is simply stunning. Constructed from a combination of machined aluminum and Gorilla Glass 3, it offers a strong, lightweight, and premium look. It comes in two colorways: a darker Graphite and a lighter Platinum, which I have. The Platinum finish isn’t just a paint job; it resists dirt and smudges impressively well.
At just 18.7mm thick, it would typically fall into the ‘thin and light’ category, but it’s not exactly light. The premium materials contribute to its weight, with the OLED version tipping the scales at 2.2kg. The IPS FHD variant is slightly lighter at 2.13kg, but you’ll still feel the heft of this device.
The slim profile comes at the cost of ports, with the XPS featuring just three USB Type-C Thunderbolt 4 ports. This means embracing the dongle life if you want to connect external peripherals. All ports support 40Gbps transfer speeds, as well as video and power delivery. MacBook users might find this familiar, but Windows users may expect more ports.
Thankfully, Dell includes a dongle with an HDMI port and Ethernet in the box. There’s also a 3.5mm audio combo jack and a MicroSDXC v6.0 UHS-I/UHS-II card reader, which is great for content creators, though some might prefer a full-size SD card reader.
The exterior of the XPS 16 is all about fit and finish, with an extremely rigid chassis that has zero flex. The display hinge is solid with no wobble. One downside is the lack of a lip or groove, making opening the lid one-handed a bit challenging.
However, once you open the lid, you’re greeted by a gorgeous white keyboard deck. The keys match the laptop’s colorway, giving an elegant and clean look. The keys are wide, with minimal gaps between them, and sit flush with the chassis.
Despite this, they have enough travel to ensure typing feels natural and comfortable. The keys are backlit with white LEDs that can dim automatically thanks to the laptop’s presence awareness features. There’s no brightness adjustment, though—it’s either on or off.
The power key doubles as a fingerprint reader for Windows Hello. It’s very fast and responds to the lightest touch, reminiscent of my MacBook Pro. Oddly, the power key is even more recessed than the other keys, making it look almost like a defect. Additionally, it doesn’t have the power symbol on it, which I found unusual.
Above the keyboard are capacitive function buttons that light up, giving the XPS a really clean, uncluttered design. The keys light up whenever you tap around the area. If you use your function keys a lot, you might not like this approach, but for most people, it works surprisingly well. I do wish the buttons had some form of haptic feedback, as it feels like you are tapping nothing, which can be somewhat disconcerting.
If you prefer tactile feedback, this won’t be for you. There’s still a physical Fn key to switch between the two modes of the function keys, and it works well. I couldn’t help but wish Dell had found a way for me to customize the keys, move them around, and more, like on the MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar—that would be amazing.
Moving below the keyboard is where things get really interesting. At a glance, the XPS 16 appears to have no trackpad, giving the laptop a sort of mind-blowing appeal. Dell found a way to hide the touchpad under a sheet of Corning Gorilla Glass 3 that runs along the length of the keyboard deck. The glass is colored exactly like the chassis, giving the illusion of invisibility. It’s a very cool trick.
There’s still a fully functional, and quite large, trackpad midway on the chassis. It’s smooth, responsive, and mimics another MacBook Pro trick—haptic feedback. Instead of physically moving (because it literally can’t due to the glass cover), the XPS uses a haptic motor to give the sensation of clicking the touchpad. It’s pretty convincing, though the click is quite loud, almost breaking the illusion. That said, the touchpad is excellent and I enjoyed using it for everyday tasks.
Rounding out cool features on the deck is the 10W quad-speaker design, tuned by multi-Grammy Award-winning producer Jack Joseph Puig. These speakers pack quite a punch and are easily among the top three best-sounding laptop speakers I’ve ever heard. They get really loud with impressive sound staging and separation, providing excellent vocal clarity and punchy bass.
I’ve enjoyed watching streaming content with my wife on the XPS 16 for a rather immersive experience. This makes the XPS 16 one of the better Dolby Atmos-capable laptops, and with the addition of the MaxxAudio suite, you can really tune the sound.
OLED for the Win
Taking your eyes off the keyboard deck, you get a gorgeous 16.3-inch 4K+ OLED touch display. The 4K+ highlights this panel’s unique 16:10, 3840 x 2400 resolution, which is higher than the standard 16:9, 3840 x 2160. The Infinity Edge panel has the tiniest bezels, giving you a stunning canvas to work with.
The panel is also touch-sensitive, so you can navigate Windows with swipes and taps instead of using the touchpad. It’s protected by Gorilla Glass Victus, the same found on high-end smartphones, which does an excellent job repelling smudges and micro-scratches.
As an OLED, expect the darkest blacks, making surrounding colors pop and sizzle thanks to perfect contrast. Whether you are watching Netflix, editing videos, or playing some Diablo IV, everything looks stunning on this display.
With a peak brightness of 400 nits, it supports HDR and Dolby Vision, and unlike some of its desktop monitor siblings, this panel doesn’t have any weird text fringing issues. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed consuming and creating content on this display.
The OLED panel is capped at a 90Hz refresh rate, so gamers might find it a tad slow, but its near-instantaneous response time makes games run smoothly and responsively. I’m not a Valorant or CoD Warzone player, so high-speed gaming doesn’t matter to me.
Slower, story-driven games are more my speed, allowing me to marvel at the gorgeous worlds and detailed graphics. Senuas Saga: Hellblade II or Resident Evil 2 with ray tracing looks incredible on this display and plays surprisingly well, given the RTX 4060.
Performance, Gaming, and Battery Life
The XPS 16 comes with either an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H or 9 185H processor. These processors boast power and efficiency cores, supposedly better for battery life. They also have a Neural Processing Unit designed to handle AI functions separate from the main processor but more on that later. Combined with 32GB DDR5 memory and speedy NVMe SSDs, the XPS 16 performs very well.
CPU-intensive tasks with multithreading run smoothly, though the Ultra 7 155H is noticeably slower than its i7 14650HX cousin. Regardless, in my testing, the XPS 16 performed close to some more powerful gaming laptops we’ve reviewed.
In real-world usage, from document processing to editing a 16-minute YouTube video, the Dell machine never lagged or felt slow. Performance away from the wall socket is, of course, compromised, but it’s only in more intense applications where you’d notice it.
This is not a gaming laptop, but with a 50W RTX 4060, tweaked settings, and a healthy dose of Nvidia DLSS and Frame Generation, the XPS 16 is a very capable gaming machine. I could get games running at native 4K+ resolution at well over 30fps and even up to 70fps with the highest settings.
That’s the equivalent of an Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5. Lowering in-game resolution to 1440p helps even more with framerates hitting the high 80s. Dell’s thermal system is also impressive, as the laptop remains relatively cool and silent under load, with no perceivable thermal throttling and no noisy fans.
Thermal performance is also very good. I saw average temperatures of about 67C on the GPU during sustained gaming sessions which isn’t shabby for such a skinny laptop. The CPU can get toasty hitting high 70’s with intense CPU application but otherwise, thermal venting was also quite good as the chassis remained quite cool to the touch and very usable on the laps.
For the most part, fan noise is kept to a bare minimum and in everyday use, you’ll forget that this is a powerful windows laptop. In gaming and other intensive tasks, the fans will kick in but nothing as crazy as your average gaming laptop. I love how quite the XPS 16 is under normal operation.
There’s not too much to talk about AI performance on the XPS 16. At the moment, the most you can do is make use of some limited Windows Studio effects in your video calls that allows for things like blurry backgrounds, face and eye tracking and some audio effects. These aren’t really much to talk about though — most of the cool AI tricks seem to be reserved for the Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite powered Windows Copilot+ PC’s .
And while the laptop prominently features the Windows Copilot key, that feature still runs off the cloud, requiring an internet connection, therefore not making any use of the onboard NPU. There’s bound to be much more AI features coming to Windows in the coming months that will make more use of the XPS 16’s hardware but for now, there isn’t much.
Battery Life
Laptop manufacturers often boast impressive battery life claims, but the Dell XPS 16 lives up to the hype. I managed to squeeze almost 10 hours of video playback from this machine, which is plenty for a transatlantic flight. With mixed productivity workloads, the XPS 16 managed just over 8 -9 hours of use, which is enough for a full day of work without reaching for the charger.
All this was achieved without tweaking Windows power settings or adjusting the display brightness — Dell’s optimizer uses AI to handily manage power for best savings and it works. Gaming on battery isn’t recommended, as the XPS 16 only lasted just over 2 hours with moderate brightness.
At least you get a 130W USB Type-C charger in the box that can charge the battery from 0% to 80% in just over an hour. And that’s with all three Type-C ports on either side of the laptop. This makes the XPS 16 perfect for clean, minimal single-cable laptop/monitor setups. Monitors like the MSI MPG321URX can easily charge the XPS 16 while providing crisp 4K output and a USB hub for your keyboard and mouse.
Apart from my M2 MacBook Pro 14, this is the first laptop in a long time that gives me the confidence to leave the charger behind. Despite its large 16-inch display and Nvidia GPU, the XPS 16 efficiently manages power consumption while delivering smooth performance for all my tasks. It will be interesting to see how the new AMD AI 300 processors stack up in terms of efficiency, as AMD has traditionally excelled over Intel in battery life performance.
Verdict
I don’t often gush over products, but the Dell XPS 16 has won me over completely. This sleek, luxurious Windows productivity laptop offers impressive design, build quality, and performance, with the added bonus of decent gaming capabilities.
While it might not have the same raw power as its MacBook Pro counterparts, especially when on battery, it’s not far behind for a Windows laptop. I’m excited to see future iterations with Intel Core Ultra and AMD AI 300 processors, and perhaps even a Snapdragon Elite version, though that might lack a dedicated GPU.
There’s no denying the high price tag. My model costs $4,500, comparable to an M3 MacBook Pro 16, which offers superior performance and battery efficiency. However, not everyone prefers a Mac, and despite recent improvements, gaming remains a challenge on macOS. The XPS 16 is a phenomenal machine that will only improve with the new processors arriving later this year.
I do wish my configuration was closer to $3,500, but with Dell’s frequent online discounts, you can likely shave several hundred dollars off and get a bargain. I love this laptop and I really didn’t expect to. Dell will have a tough time getting this unit back from me.
Dell Australia kindly loaned the XPS 16 to PowerUp Gaming for the purpose of this review.
