It so happened that I probably became one of the first users of the new Dell XPS 13 series laptop (model 9370-1726 of 2018) in Russia. This line is quite popular with developers and other people from IT parties. Therefore, I decided to write a small review of this laptop through the eyes of a Linux user and share the experience of a month and a half of operation.
Beautiful photos will not be only in the case.
Keyboard
Perhaps the most pleasant surprise. Before the notebook was released, there were suspicions that a model with a European layout would be delivered to Russia, in which the left shift was shortened and an additional key was added next to it. Fortunately, the suspicions did not come true and the model is equipped with a keyboard with a standard US layout.
The keyboard is nice, the key travel is standard for ultrabooks (about 1 mm), but you can’t call it quiet, you can click on it when you click. The downside, for me, was the strange arrangement of the PgUp, PgDn, Home, End keys. On the previous laptop, they were on the arrows through the Fn key. I did not succeed in reassigning the backlight control keys to PgUp / Down, since the presses come through ACPI.
The power key is far enough away from the keyboard and recessed; it is almost impossible to press it randomly while typing, but getting into the Delete instead of Delete is very easy, which is very annoying.
Until recently, there was a bug, due to which some characters were swallowed during fast printing, which of course is very unpleasant, but in the last BIOS update it was corrected and I never met this bug again.
The keyboard has 2 levels of backlighting, but the “half” level is not very useful - in the dark it is not enough, but by the light it is completely invisible.
The touchpad is sensitive, sometimes too. When scrolling with two fingers, the weakest touch with the third finger causes a click of the middle mouse button. The size of the touchpad is average, but it is enough for comfortable work.
Screen
My copy is equipped with a 4k screen. To work with text in the dark or with artificial light, the screen is gorgeous, the fonts are clear, the brightness is enough. Watching movies / photos is also not satisfactory (but I’m not a designer and I don’t know about the color screen).
With work in the sun, everything is naturally worse - the screen is glossy and there is no escape from the glare.
Yes, the touch screen, c Gnome works fine, you can poke your finger at the elements of the UI, although of course there is little practical use from this feature. It is possible to disable the touchscreen in UEFI, which was done.
BatteryWhen working in Linux in Chrome + IDE +, periodic compilation with maximum brightness lives for about 6 hours. Charges in about 2 hours. Charging is done through any of the 3 USB Type-C ports.
Interfaces
There is nothing special to say about the wired interfaces - 3 USB Type-C ports, 2 of them with Thunderbolt support, and the 3rd with DisplayPort. A standard USB is of course sometimes not enough, but an adapter is included, which alleviates the problem a little.
The laptop has a Killer 1435 wireless module installed on a Qualcomm Atheros QCA6174 chip and has problems with Linux. It manifests itself in low speed work. People on the forum also have disconnections, but I did not notice them myself. At 5 GHz, we managed to squeeze as much as possible about 56 Mbps, despite the fact that the Intel 8260 quietly survives weave (maybe more, but there are ports at 100 Mbps). With 2 GHz, the situation is better; we managed to get a stable 100 Mbit / s. The open issue hangs for about a year, but the bug has not yet been fixed, even in the 4.15 kernel.
SSD
In my copy of the installed NVME SSD from Toshiba. Unfortunately I can only do a reading test. We will measure with the help of fio.
Test configuration:
[readtest] blocksize=4k filename=/dev/nvme0n1 rw=randread direct=1 buffered=0 ioengine=libaio iodepth=32
Results:
readtest: (g=0): rw=randread, bs=(R) 4096B-4096B, (W) 4096B-4096B, (T) 4096B-4096B, ioengine=libaio, iodepth=32 fio-3.5 Starting 1 process Jobs: 1 (f=1): [r(1)][100.0%][r=1050MiB/s,w=0KiB/s][r=269k,w=0 IOPS][eta 00m:00s] readtest: (groupid=0, jobs=1): err= 0: pid=12328: Mon Apr 9 23:17:14 2018 read: IOPS=252k, BW=986MiB/s (1034MB/s)(477GiB/495407msec) slat (nsec): min=1272, max=1262.6k, avg=2548.60, stdev=1712.40 clat (usec): min=4, max=6809, avg=123.60, stdev=80.16 lat (usec): min=17, max=6811, avg=126.19, stdev=80.31 clat percentiles (usec): | 1.00th=[ 46], 5.00th=[ 57], 10.00th=[ 62], 20.00th=[ 71], | 30.00th=[ 77], 40.00th=[ 84], 50.00th=[ 94], 60.00th=[ 114], | 70.00th=[ 143], 80.00th=[ 172], 90.00th=[ 221], 95.00th=[ 265], | 99.00th=[ 375], 99.50th=[ 433], 99.90th=[ 725], 99.95th=[ 1139], | 99.99th=[ 1778] bw ( KiB/s): min=556656, max=1097392, per=99.99%, avg=1009419.57, stdev=91287.76, samples=990 iops : min=139164, max=274348, avg=252354.90, stdev=22821.96, samples=990 lat (usec) : 10=0.01%, 20=0.01%, 50=2.11%, 100=52.12%, 250=39.39% lat (usec) : 500=6.11%, 750=0.16%, 1000=0.03% lat (msec) : 2=0.06%, 4=0.01%, 10=0.01% cpu : usr=23.03%, sys=54.54%, ctx=3153999, majf=0, minf=42 IO depths : 1=0.1%, 2=0.1%, 4=0.1%, 8=0.1%, 16=0.1%, 32=100.0%, >=64=0.0% submit : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.0% complete : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.1%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.0% issued rwts: total=125026902,0,0,0 short=0,0,0,0 dropped=0,0,0,0 latency : target=0, window=0, percentile=100.00%, depth=32 Run status group 0 (all jobs): READ: bw=986MiB/s (1034MB/s), 986MiB/s-986MiB/s (1034MB/s-1034MB/s), io=477GiB (512GB), run=495407-495407msec
For those who are too lazy to read the sheet: 269k IOPS for reading with an average delay of 123 microseconds. The capacity of 1034 MB / s.
I do not know whether you need this speed on a laptop, but the results are encouraging;)
CPU
I have a Core i7-8550U (TDP 15W), this is Intel's first mobile quad core. We will compare with the Core i5-4200U (Haswell mobile dual-core, TDP 15W) in the Sony Vaio Pro 13 laptop and the desktop Core i7-4771 (TDP 84W).
| Test | Core i7-8550U | i5-4200U | Core i7-4771 |
|---|
| sysbench --test = cpu --cpu-max-prime = 100000 --time = 120 --threads = 1 run | 54 events / sec | 33 events / sec | 48 events / sec |
| sysbench --test = cpu --cpu-max-prime = 100000 --time = 120 --threads = 8 run | 226 events / sec | 97 events / sec | 272 events / sec |
| 7z b-mmt1 -md26 (Compression Rating) | 3087 MIPS | 2793 MIPS | 3623 MIPS |
| 7z b-mmt8 -md26 (Compression Rating) | 14371 MIPS | 6861 MIPS | 18639 MIPS |
It's nice to see that a new mobile processor can compete almost equally with the old, but desktop processor.
Speaking about the CPU, one can not forget about cooling. Under load, it is quite noisy, maybe even too much. The aluminum bottom during active work heats up noticeably and there are air vents at the bottom, it’s not comfortable to hold a laptop on your lap. When working with something light, such as a terminal, browser, or text editor, the processor frequency is reduced to 1400-800 MHz, and the cooler is turned off.
HiDPI in Linux
A bunch of Gnome 3.28 was tested with Wayland. The experimental function of the fractional scaling multiplier was also activated and set at 175%.
All software used: Chromium, IDE from JetBrains, Gnome Terminal, Atom, Firefox, Virt Manager, qbittorrent, Gimp works correctly, fonts and icons of the correct size.
After installing the HiDpi font for vconsole, the download log and virtual terminals also began to show the font of the desired size.
miscellanea
- The sound is of pretty good quality, the maximum volume is high.
- The webcam is of good quality, but it’s awful. What would the interviewee see your face have to climb under the table or open the lid almost to the maximum angle.
- There is a function that reduces the brightness of the image when the screen shows a dark picture when running on battery power. But this feature works very strange, since The screen may flash when you simply move the cursor in the editor with a dark background. Turned off this flaw in UEFI.
In general, the impressions of the laptop are pleasant, despite the small shoals, it is convenient to use, and the speed of work creates the feeling that you are working on the desktop, and not on the ultrabook.