Today I want to review the Dell XPS 15 9570 and tell you whether it’s a good choice if you want to buy a laptop for editing video.

I’ve been using this one for about seven months to edit whenever I travel, and I really wanted to write this up, because I think it’s a great choice for video editing if you don’t work from home or an office, or if you travel often and don’t want to build a desktop.

First thing you’ll notice is that it’s pretty thin and light, and it’s definitely giving off some MacBook Pro vibes, which I am not upset about. I’d say the XPS 15 is one of the closest laptops you can get to a MacBook Pro in build quality while still buying a PC.

For context on where I’m coming from, I owned two laptops before this. The first is a big honking Asus gaming laptop I bought in 2013 that is nowhere near thin or light. Very chunky. It’s from the era of desktop replacements, where the pitch was you get all the power of a desktop and it’s still portable, kind of. Lots of power. Portability and battery life, not so good, with a one to two hour battery on a good day. I wasn’t busting that thing out in a coach seat, because it’s bigger than the tray table. I’d have to wait until I got to a hotel room or a coffee shop where I could plug it in.

I also got married in 2013, and my wife brought along a 14 inch Asus ultrabook. Much better battery, very slow CPU, so editing was virtually impossible even in 1080p and definitely not in 4K. It was really only good for dumping footage off a camera, and even that was a pain, because it has one USB 3.0 port.

So whenever I travelled I had this choice: bring the massive laptop I can barely fit in a carry on but that can actually edit, or bring the tiny light one that’s great for copying footage and can’t edit anything until I get home. Enter the XPS 15. I get the power of the bulky one at the size of the small one. Are you beginning to see why I love this thing?

Build Quality

Definitely premium and professional. There’s no gamer on it, no RGB anywhere, it’s subdued, and I like that when I’m travelling.

The keyboard feels great to me with good travel, and it isn’t at all clicky like the newer MacBook butterfly keyboards. The carbon fiber palm rest is comfortable and doesn’t get too hot or cold the way aluminum does, though it will absolutely show smudges from your hand oils, so I wouldn’t eat Doritos while typing on it.

The trackpad is a massive upgrade over every other laptop I’ve used, second only to the MacBook Pro. PC laptop trackpads are notorious for being a mixed bag, and this is a good one. I still prefer a mouse for editing, but I’ve edited whole videos on this without one and it worked fine.

One of my other favorite features is the power button that doubles as a fingerprint reader. I do wish it had a Windows Hello camera that recognizes you the moment you open the lid, but a fast, accurate fingerprint reader makes signing in a breeze.

There’s a decent amount of I/O too. Three USB-A and one USB-C that supports Thunderbolt, so if you edit off an external Thunderbolt drive or RAID, or you want to hang an external GPU off it, you’re covered. There’s also an SD card slot I use all the time whenever I’m copying footage after a wedding. I love not reaching for a dongle, and I’ve still got the USB-C if I need it.

One of my least favorite features is the speakers. They’re adequate, they make sound and they get decently loud, but they fire downward, so editing on a desk gives your audio a slightly weird echo and it isn’t nearly as clear as an upward firing speaker. I’m going to warn you now that the fans on this thing can get loud enough to interfere with them anyway, so I always recommend headphones for editing on this laptop.

The other thing people dislike is the webcam, specifically its placement, which is at the bottom of the screen. So on a video call everybody ends up looking up your nose, or up my beard in my case.

My recommendation: if you just want video calls, the webcam is fine. If you want to do any kind of live streaming, like the monthly wedding film review livestreams I do, I’d invest in either a better external webcam you can actually position properly, or an adapter that lets you use a real mirrorless or DSLR as your webcam.

Back to positives, because we need to talk about the screen. If you’re planning to edit video on this, and this whole review is aimed at video editors, I highly recommend the 4K panel option.

This screen is gorgeous, and it is a thing of beauty to watch wedding films back on it in native 4K. It’s quite bright too. Not quite MacBook Pro levels, but dang, I often find myself turning it down to about halfway because I don’t want to burn my eyeballs out sitting in my editing cave.

More important than being pretty is the color accuracy. With my older laptops, whenever I’d bust out my calibration tool it was always a massive swing before and after, and I mean a swing from icy blue to bright orange. With this one, the colors barely looked different after calibrating, which tells you it’s already quite accurate from the factory. If you do any color grading or image editing you know how much that matters. I cannot say enough good things about this monitor.

Battery Life

Remember that my old gaming laptop’s battery only lasted one to two hours. The XPS 15 makes massive improvements there.

I feel like every electronics manufacturer is talking about all day battery life these days. Go all day without plugging in your phone. Leave your charger at home. Unfortunately, all day battery is basically impossible on any laptop I know of once you’re talking about 4K video editing.

Browsing the web with the brightness down, answering emails, watching YouTube, I get six to eight hours. Editing 4K while my wife drives us on a road trip across Texas, it’s closer to four to five. That’s still better than any laptop I owned before it. But if you remember one thing: do not leave your charger at home whenever you’re planning to edit.

CPU Performance

Now the meat and potatoes. How fast is it for editing and rendering 4K?

My older Asus has an Intel Core i7-3630QM, four cores and eight threads at 2.4GHz. That’s an old CPU, but here’s the thing: up until 2017, the most powerful chips going into laptops still only had four cores and eight threads. In my experience four and eight is plenty for 1080p. Throw 4K into the mix and everything slows down.

I wanted to upgrade out of my Frankenstein two laptop system back in mid 2017, but around then I started hearing rumors that Intel was going from four cores and eight threads to six and twelve, and that seemed worth waiting for. Intel shipped them in early 2018, Dell released the 9570 shortly after, and I bought one. I cannot understate how important those chips are to video editors, because Premiere and Resolve both love more cores, especially in 4K.

I bought mine with the Intel Core i9-8950HK, six cores and twelve threads at 2.9GHz, an NVIDIA 1050 Ti and 32GB of RAM, which in my experience is plenty for 4K.

With that, in Premiere, I can export a five minute 4K wedding film with warp stabilizer and a lot of effects applied across the timeline in six minutes and 49 seconds. For comparison, my older Asus exports that same film in, and I wrote this down, one hour, 33 minutes and 55 seconds. What? That’s insane.

To be fair, that Asus is running a third generation i7. If you’re coming from an Intel sixth or seventh generation chip, expect a big improvement but not one that large. I wish I had a more current laptop to run that test against, but I don’t.

All that said about how fast this thing is, if I could go back and change my order, I would. I bought the i9-8950HK. I’d probably buy the i7-8750H instead. You still get six cores and twelve threads, and you save yourself $350. From the testing other reviewers have done, I don’t believe the i7 generates nearly as much heat as the i9 does. In my own rendering I haven’t seen the i9 overheat or thermal throttle, but in a laptop this thin, putting an i9 in it is pushing right up against its thermal limits, and I honestly think the i7 is the better buy.

Staying on heat: the fans have a tendency to ramp up and get pretty loud even if you’re only editing rather than rendering. Which is the other reason I keep saying wear headphones.

Warranty

Here’s the feature I haven’t seen many other reviewers talk about, and it’s one of the main reasons I bought the XPS 15 over a Razer Blade or a MacBook Pro. The warranty. Hear me out, because it’s surprisingly good.

Compare it to one of the better warranties out there, AppleCare. Buy AppleCare for $379 and if your MacBook breaks you take it to an Apple store, if you happen to live near one, or you send it off. Depending on how bad it is you’ll have your computer back within a week or two once they’ve replaced parts.

Buy Dell’s Premium Support Plus, which covers anything breaking, whether it’s a manufacturing issue or you dropping the thing or spilling something on it, and instead of you shipping it anywhere, Dell sends a technician to you within one to two business days to repair it on site. Yes, you do not need to leave your house or even put on pants to have your laptop repaired. It might get awkward.

That’s one of the best warranties I’ve ever seen in the computer industry, and as a working professional I feel like Dell is respecting my time with it. To be clear, I haven’t used it and I hope I don’t have to, but I bought the four year plan, so there’s plenty of time left if something goes wrong.

Price

With the warranty, I spent $3,830 on this laptop, and I pretty much maxed out every spec. As I said, I think the CPU is overkill, so if I were you I’d save the $350 and take the 8750H.

There are other ways to save. If you’re comfortable undoing some screws on the bottom, the RAM and the SSD are both user upgradable, so you could buy the lowest RAM and smallest SSD configuration and upgrade them yourself with cheaper parts. Mine came with a 2TB Toshiba drive, and swapping that for a Samsung NVMe would actually be faster.

Also keep in mind this laptop has been out about half a year now, and Dell is very aggressive with discounts and coupons, especially around holidays. You should be able to do considerably better than I did buying it the week it came out.

Conclusion

I really like the XPS 15 9570. If you’re a video editor who isn’t working from home or an office where building your own desktop is feasible, I’d highly recommend it. It isn’t big, and Dell has crammed a 4K screen, a very comfortable keyboard and trackpad, and some genuinely impressive CPU options into it. In my opinion it’s the best mix of power and portability out there.

Speaking of power, and I know I already harped on this, but if you’re currently editing on a four core, eight thread laptop, which is basically anything before mid 2018, and you find it chugging trying to keep up with 4K, I’d highly recommend investing in something like this.

Quick Update From The Future

This is Matt from the future. I recorded this in mid February, and then my wife unexpectedly went into labor with our new baby, she’s doing great by the way, so I was a little delayed getting it edited.

Of course, the day after I finished recording, news broke about Intel’s new laptop CPUs going to eight cores and sixteen threads. So if you’re thinking about buying an XPS 15, you may want to hold off until quarter two whenever those land. I’m fairly sure we’ll see a new XPS 15 with them shortly after, and it will be even faster than this one.

Second, I somehow missed the news in January that Dell announced an updated XPS 15 with a 4K OLED screen in March 2019. And I’m sure you’re thinking, Matt, you’re publishing this in March. They haven’t done it yet, but sometime this month we should see it. It’ll probably cost more than the current model, but as much as I’ve said about how beautiful this screen is, an OLED version would be even more beautifuler.

Keep both of those in mind if you’re shopping for an editing laptop. If you need one right now, the current XPS 15 is a fantastic choice. If you can wait until later in the year, there are some significant updates coming, and those updates could push the current model’s price down, which would make it a lot easier on your wallet.

And if a laptop isn’t your speed but a desktop is, I’ve also built a budget 4K video editing PC for $700 that you should look at instead. If you want to go deeper on the editing itself, that’s what I teach inside Wedding Film Framework, and if you’re a wedding filmmaker looking to book more couples, there’s a free guide for that too.