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We have the Dell XPS 15 9500 with us – and I’ve been using it for like about 3-4 years now? Yeah, time really does fly. The design of this laptop is iconic – but Dell has some more fancy design up their sleeves – and this is the XPS 16 9640. This laptop is… divisive – especially when I compare it with the XPS 15 9500 that I have.

The first thing that immediately stood out to me is the design of the XPS 16. With the lid closed, it looks pretty much identical to the XPS 15. It’s still CNC milled out of aluminium and it is a very solid laptop. However, I’m not sure what aluminium they used for this laptop – and it’s very, very heavy – 2.2kg to be exact.

Dell XPS 16 9640 review

Once we open up the lid though, this is where most of the changes are found.

Dell XPS 16 9640 review

We’ll talk about the keyboard first. The power button is now found beside the backspace button. This also doubles as the fingerprint scanner.

Dell XPS 16 9640 review

One problem I found out is the instability of the keycap on the XPS 15. If I typed faster and hit the corners of the keycaps – especially the “i” and “n” keys, then it’ll probably not register. Dell addressed this issue and this new keyboard is much more solid and responsive than before.

Dell XPS 16 9640 review

The travel distance isn’t something that I prefer, but it’s okay. It still feels good to type on.

Dell XPS 16 9640 review

The speakers flank the keyboard. Surprisingly, the speakers are wider but shorter than before – but how does it sound? To hear the sample, do watch our video at the top of this review.

Dell XPS 16 9640 review

 

The function row is now replaced by this touch-sensitive panel. It’s not customizable since everything is hardcoded, and we can hit the function key to toggle the other set of functions. Pretty standard, honestly.

Dell XPS 16 9640 review

The next big change is the trackpad. Even though we can’t see it, the trackpad is definitely there – just blended with the wrist rest and looks like a single piece. The trackpad is located somewhere around here and here, and if we draw a border on top of it, then we can see how large that trackpad is.

Now, this trackpad works surprisingly well. The palm rejection is one of the best that I’ve tested. If we want to click on it though, then it has some sort of haptic feedback via vibration to tell us that it is clicked. The trackpad doesn’t actually move downwards – because remember, it can’t flex because it’s one big piece.

Dell XPS 16 9640 review

Then I encountered one rather funky issue. While the palm rejection is great, the click rejection is not. It kept vibrating and clicking on the screen while I was typing, and I eventually just disabled the trackpad and used an external mouse.

Also, I don’t know if this is a problem that’s specific to our unit – this piece here isn’t exactly flat. Whenever I swipe my hand across the entire piece, I can feel like it’s a little sunken around the middle part. If we visualize it using color gradients, this is what I feel with my fingers.

Dell XPS 16 9640 review

The screen though, is upgraded as well. As the name suggests – a massive 16.3-inch OLED screen with 3840×2400 in resolution – 16:10 aspect ratio – with touch capability, 90Hz refresh rate, both anti-smudge and anti-reflective coatings, and also a supremely thin bezel.

Dell XPS 16 9640 review

Honestly, this is the best-looking screen on a laptop that I’ve seen, period. The color reproduction is also excellent, as it can achieve 100% of sRGB and 99.95% of DCI-P3 color gamuts, while maintaining a very low ΔE number of around 1.6. The maximum brightness is only at around 400 nits, which isn’t the highest but damn, the colors of this screen is incredible.

Dell XPS 16 9640 review

Even with such thin bezels, the webcam and Windows Hello sensors are located at the top of the screen. It even has something called Presence Detection and we can configure how it should behave in the utility too.

For me, I just set it to lower the brightness if I’m not looking at the screen. This feature works every single time, so good job there.

The performance though, is adequate enough for day-to-day usage and even some photo and video editing. However, if we want to game on this laptop, then it’ll definitely struggle. Our unit here comes with the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H with 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM at 6400MT/s – we’ll talk more about the RAM later – an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop GPU that can only go up to 60W of power – which is actually 10W higher than what’s listed on the website, and also 1TB of NVMe SSD.

Dell XPS 16 9640 review

Now, if we just look at these specs, I think it’ll have a hard time even at 1080p resolution for certain more demanding AAA games – and now we have a 4K screen? Bruh, we’re going to be playing games with slideshow frame rates.

Dell XPS 16 9640 review

I think we have to leverage technologies like DLSS to make the experience smoother.

Dell XPS 16 9640 review

Lighter titles like Genshin Impact is okay at that resolution, but again if we want 60fps – we’ll have to either lower the resolution or lower the graphical settings.

Dell XPS 16 9640 review

The temperature on this laptop is definitely going to be high because the cooling solution inside isn’t exactly made for power-hungry components – hence the super low wattage on the GPU. The back panel has also changed as it doesn’t have slits for air intake anymore. This is great if you want to use the laptop on a bed or the couch, but the temperatures are going to be affected.

I guess the fans take in air through the keyboard? If that’s the case, then if I ever want to use this laptop closed and connected to an external monitor, it’ll be impossible for this laptop to take in air.

Dell XPS 16 9640 review

Now, let’s talk about upgradability. Technically… there’s nothing much to be upgraded here. The aforementioned 16GB LPDDR5X RAM at 6400MT/s is soldered onto the motherboard, which is actually insufficient if we want to do video editing work nowadays, and even the WiFi chip is soldered as well. The only thing that we can do here is to upgrade the SSD.

Dell XPS 16 9640 review

If we compare it with the XPS 15 9500, this is a clear downgrade. On this older XPS 15, we have two SO-DIMM slots that we can upgrade the RAM however we choose, and it even had a second M.2 SSD slot. Now, all of them are gone.

It is also here that we can see the cooling solution is a big vapor chamber covering the WiFi chip, the RAM, and both CPU and GPU – then connected to two heatpipes to two fans on opposite sides. The fan blows air through those two fin stacks.

Dell XPS 16 9640 review

As for the battery of this laptop, we have a huge 99.5Wh battery here – but unfortunately, the battery life lasts for around 4-6 hours, depending on what I’m doing and what I’m viewing on the screen. Firstly, OLED screen brightness heavily affects the battery life. Secondly, if I’m viewing mostly dark stuff then the OLED screen will consume less power. But either way, even with my usage of browsing the internet while typing out a script while listening to music on YouTube Music – it’s not that good.

Dell XPS 16 9640 review

One good upgrade is the power brick. It’s still using the semi-proprietary 130W charger, but it’s smaller and thinner than before.

Dell XPS 16 9640 review

And even with such a big 16-inch laptop that isn’t exactly the thinnest, the ports selection is abysmal.

Dell XPS 16 9640 review

We only have one 3.5mm combo audio jack, a microSD card reader which is a downgrade over the XPS 15’s full-sized SD card reader – and triple USB-C ports. Depending on what GPU you’re getting, that also affects how many Thunderbolt 4 ports you’re getting.

Dell does include a dongle in the box, but I think they could’ve just included these ports on the laptop. I hate carrying dongles, honestly.

Should you buy the Dell XPS 16 9640?

We’ll have to look at the price first. It’s at a whopping RM12,098.99! It’s expensive! Since the RAM is not upgradable, we’ll have to fork out an extra RM600 for 32GB of RAM.

So at the end of the day, I think that the XPS 16 9640 is a weird laptop. Its 16.3-inch OLED 4K screen is gorgeous and it looks absolutely fantastic for whatever I want to do on it – but the specs are very limiting. Even if we did splurge and get the RTX 4070 version, it’s still only at 60W of power. Other gaming laptops run the RTX 4070 at 150W!

Dell XPS 16 9640 review

And since this laptop isn’t going to be a powerhouse, I expect it to be portable – but it’s not really fun to carry either. It’s heavy. And it’s also kinda thick, yet the ports are just insufficient – yet the price is sky high.

Overall, I think this laptop is kind of incoherent. It aims to be so many things but just didn’t achieve any of them.

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