74 TECH ADVISOR • OCTOBER 2019BUYING GUIDE
Just how boring has the performance curve of Intel’s
integrated graphics been? You can see that one UHD
620 laptop is essentially the same as all the othersgame on with the XPS 13 9380, we recommend picking
up an external Thunderbolt 3 graphics box.Battery life
Our final cross-vendor platform test looks at one of
the most important categories for laptops: Battery life.
Wesetthescreenata relativelybright250-to 260
nitsandthen loop a 4K video on airplane mode until
it dies. For audio, we use a pair of analogue earbuds
tominimizedifferencesfromthespeakers.It basically
mimicswhatyou’d get trying to watch a movie in a
well-lit office building.
Among all of the tests we ran, this is the only one
where the XPS 13 9380 loses, but you shouldn’t be
surprised. There’s a battery penalty to be paid for