JULY 2020 PCWorld 17A rendering of the Dell
XPS 17 9700’s interior
indicates how much space
there is to work with in a
17-inch laptop.laptop even if it’s not for gaming.
Battery: Dell offers two different battery
configurations: 56 Watt-hour and 97 Watt-
hour. On previous XPS laptops, Dell has
offered two battery sizes, but that was
typically done to accommodate hardware
such as a hard drive. This time it’s to provide a
choice between weight and battery life. Ditch
the big battery, 4K touchscreen, and discrete
graphics, and you can get the XPS 17 down to
4.65 pounds. With full kit, it’s a beefy 5.
pounds.
SSD: For storage Dell offers 256GB,
512GB, 1TB and 2TB SSDs in one of the
laptop’s two M.2 slots. All of the options are
PCIe-based, which is good because some
laptop makers still use SATA-based M.2 cards
in low-capacity builds to keep the price low.
Dell said it’s also looking at possibly
populating both M.2 slots down the road.
Networking: For networking, there’s noGPU: Graphics options range from using
the CPU’s UHD graphics to a GeForce GTX
1650 Ti or a GeForce RTX 2060. While neither
of the GeForce cards is designated as Max-Q,
typically that’s implied due to the thinness of
the laptop. Both are good GPUs, but the RTX
2060 offers hardware ray-tracing support and
tensor cores for machine learning loads. It’s a
big step up from the GTX 1650 Ti in gaming. If
you’re choosing between the discrete GPUs
for video editing, both are based on Nvidia’s
Turing chip and offer the same NVDEC
performance, but the RTX 2060 has a slightly
more advanced NVENC engine (go.pcworld.
com/nvne).
You might be wondering why anyone
would buy a big-screen laptop like the XPS 17
and skip the more powerful graphics chips?
Dell likely wants to have a model to hit lower
prices and make it more appealing—and
there is a crowd that just wants a big-screen