Dell XPS 13 (Lunar Lake) vs. Dell XPS 13 (Snapdragon X Elite): Which laptop should you buy?

[admin]

This year's Dell XPS 13 comes with your choice of a Lunar Lake or Snapdragon X Elite chip, the question is, which one is right for you? We break down the differences in this Dell XPS 13 (Lunar Lake) vs. Dell XPS 13 (Snapdragon X Elite) face-off to help you decide.

Dell XPS 13 (Lunar Lake) vs. Dell XPS 13 (Snapdragon X Elite): Which laptop should you buy? : Read more

 

[jheithaus]

It is just really suspicious that this review talks nothing about GPU. Did Qualcomm pay Toms? The reality is lunar lake would be far better than snapdragon for the majority of XPS buyers. It will always work with your apps — the majority of written windows software will not boot on arm. It has a far better GPU for apps which can harness it (games, productivity). The Lunar Lake GPU will actually run most games at playable frame rates. Lunar lake lasts longer on battery too when playing movies — your long flight scenario. Qualcomm only really wins on multithreaded tasks that do not take advantage of the GPU but run on arm natively — a very tiny sliver of tasks. I understand Qualcomm has a decent on paper GPU but there is ZERO driver support to utilize it.

 

[dCasualGamer]

App compatibility should have been be the highlight of the article, IMO. Most people who walks into the store to get a laptop will expect the laptop to just work. I, for one, would not want to even wonder if my laptop is going to run the new SW that I'm buying or the current one that I am going to migrate from my old PC. Any AMD or LNL laptop wins in this regard.

I do agree that the Meteor Lake battery life of 10 hours is terrible; I can't get pass a day of work without having to charge it. However, both Lunar Lake and Snapdragon have battery life of over 17 hours, which is more than enough for a day's work. How many people actually in their daily lives will actually complain that they need 18 hours of laptop ?

 

[chiller2U]

One thing that I haven't seen anyone mention about Snapdragon laptops like the XPS 9345 is that they do NOT support Thunderbolt. I ended up returning an XPS 9345 recently because of incompatibility issues with my Thunderbolt dock (among other compatibility issues), and a coworker discovered that his XPS 9345 would not work with three external monitors coupled to his dock. My specific problem was that Windows couldn't access the dock's Ethernet port, which required the use of a separate USB ethernet port. Otherwise, I thought it was a fantastic PC, and I was disappointed that it didn't work out for my particular setup. Hopefully all these compatibility issues will go away as they gain a bigger foothold in the market.