- May 19, 2011
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I bought a laptop from one of my customers, a Dell XPS 13 9343. I bought it mainly as a replacement for my Dell Latitude E4300 which has served me well but the screen backlight was dying and buying a new one was similar to buying another E4300 off ebay so I decided not to.
My use for my laptop is pretty minimal as I'm pretty entrenched in my desktop usage, so the laptop doesn't get used much and travelling weight was an important factor, and the XPS 13 9343 is pretty sleek.
It dates back to 2013. Intel i7-5500U (so dual core plus HT), Intel HD graphics. However, 1080p YouTube gives it a fair run for its money which surprises me given that my dad's 2007-era C2D with AMD GPU is also similarly taxed (either laptop in suboptimal conditions will struggle maintaining the video stream). It seems to me that the XPS struggles if Windows Update kicks in, or if the wifi isn't perfect then I think the CPU gets hit harder. The integrated graphics are definitely in use on the XPS.
However, I'm puzzled by the XPS. It has a 4k screen, yet given the 1080p YouTube hardware usage I'd be very surprised if it could keep up with 4k YouTube. I'm guessing that YouTube 1080p either wasn't a thing back in 2013 or was cutting edge? I would have thought any laptop should be able to handle video streaming for the laptop's native resolution (provided that graphics hardware acceleration is occurring). As this laptop came with Win8x I'm considering putting it back on Win8x in order to reduce background activity.
PS: I said 'high-end' in the thread title because while there were higher-end Broadwell mobile processors, I bet that this laptop cost a pretty penny in its time given the 4k 13" screen and its 512GB NVMe SSD. I bought it pretty cheaply so I'm not worried about that, I'm just wondering if I bought a bit of a performance lemon like when a PC maker sells a Celeron-N with an absurd amount of RAM and storage in order to make it look better to the untrained eye.
My use for my laptop is pretty minimal as I'm pretty entrenched in my desktop usage, so the laptop doesn't get used much and travelling weight was an important factor, and the XPS 13 9343 is pretty sleek.
It dates back to 2013. Intel i7-5500U (so dual core plus HT), Intel HD graphics. However, 1080p YouTube gives it a fair run for its money which surprises me given that my dad's 2007-era C2D with AMD GPU is also similarly taxed (either laptop in suboptimal conditions will struggle maintaining the video stream). It seems to me that the XPS struggles if Windows Update kicks in, or if the wifi isn't perfect then I think the CPU gets hit harder. The integrated graphics are definitely in use on the XPS.
However, I'm puzzled by the XPS. It has a 4k screen, yet given the 1080p YouTube hardware usage I'd be very surprised if it could keep up with 4k YouTube. I'm guessing that YouTube 1080p either wasn't a thing back in 2013 or was cutting edge? I would have thought any laptop should be able to handle video streaming for the laptop's native resolution (provided that graphics hardware acceleration is occurring). As this laptop came with Win8x I'm considering putting it back on Win8x in order to reduce background activity.
PS: I said 'high-end' in the thread title because while there were higher-end Broadwell mobile processors, I bet that this laptop cost a pretty penny in its time given the 4k 13" screen and its 512GB NVMe SSD. I bought it pretty cheaply so I'm not worried about that, I'm just wondering if I bought a bit of a performance lemon like when a PC maker sells a Celeron-N with an absurd amount of RAM and storage in order to make it look better to the untrained eye.