There’s no parting lines, and I’m not complaining, since I found it easy to navigate the cursor and perform various gestures.

The look is definitely more clean and modern, starting with a seamless glass touchpad. The Dell XPS 13 Plus represents a fairly bold departure from the regular Dell XPS 13, which Dell is keeping in its lineup. Dell XPS 13 Plus review: Design and capacitive touch function row There are plenty of other XPS 13 Plus upgrade options, including 32GB of RAM, 1 or 2TB of storage, and a 4K display (non touch). Plus, there’s an OLED touch display on board, which is a $300 upgrade on its own. Our test model costs $1,949, which is around the same price as the $1,999 MacBook Pro 14-inch, and bumps up the CPU to a Core i7 and the RAM to 16GB. The starting configuration includes a 12th gen Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD. The Dell XPS 13 Plus starts at a fairly steep $1,299, which is the same price as the MacBook Pro M2 13-inch. Based on some quick tests, the CPU maintains a considerably higher clock through the physics test with the Liquid Ultra so I think I can up that score quite a bit previous runs had a pretty sharp fall-off after a few seconds in due to thermal throttling but it is pretty flat through the whole test now.Dell XPS 13 Plus review: Price and configuration options The weather for Sunday morning looks like it will be fairly cool so I can go for some benchmarks runs in similar conditions to the Time Spy personal record run of 7068.

After running some stress tests, it typically idles at 41° for quite a while because the bottom panel retains quite a bit of heat for a longer period than stock with the thermal pads I installed. Idle temps with the Liquid Ultra were 31° with ambient temps of 23°. Yesterday I decided to try some Cool Laboratories Liquid Ultra and that has produced results similar to the Noctua NT-H1 (I have to do some more testing under similar conditions to know for sure if real world performance is better but it seems likely). A few days later, I tried some Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut but it worked much like stock (not impressed for this application). After running it stock for about a week, I applied some Noctua NT-H1 and it worked really well I was able to maintain a much higher clock (above 3000mhz vs the stock compound that would clock down to approx 2500mhz) for a much longer period of time before the CPU would thermal throttle.

I've tried a few different thermal compounds in the XPS 13 now (left overs from desktop builds).

Dell xps 13 2012 fan loud