Dell XPS 13 (9345) review: Is the Copilot+ variant a winner?

The XPS 13 9345 starts at $1,300 for a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100 chipset, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and a 13.4-inch FHD+ IPS display. The laptop can be configured with up to 64GB of RAM, with a jump to 32GB being an additional $200 and a bump up to 64GB costing $600. It’s $100 to upgrade to a 1TB SSD, and $300 to upgrade to 2TB of storage. A QHD+ IPS panel costs $300, while upgrading to a 3K OLED display costs $500. The most expensive XPS 13 will run you $2,500.

I could copy a good portion of the text from our last two XPS 13 reviews into this one and save myself a bunch of time. I won’t do that, but the fact is this: Nothing has changed in the XPS 13’s design since the XPS 13 Plus introduced Dell’s new ultramodern XPS design paradigm. Dell doesn’t really change the underlying XPS design much from generation to generation until major overhauls, and in the case of the XPS 13, the company has doubled down on that approach.

However, while the XPS 13’s design is certainly forward-looking, does it actually succeed in being better? In my opinion, it does not. Let’s start with the worst culprit, the row of LED touch function keys. On the 13-inch model (and not so much the 14- and 16-inch models that share the same virtual keys), Dell has the excuse that a physical row of function keys would have taken up too much space. I guess that makes some sense. But, almost nobody is going to actually like the choice, because there’s no haptic feedback to let you know that you’ve actually activated a key. And you have to physically look at the keyboard when you need to choose a function. It’s not a good solution.

The XPS 13 (9345) uses Qualcomm’s third-fastest Snapdragon X Elite chipset, the X1E-80-100, with 12 cores (eight performance and four efficient) running at 3.4GHz and a dual-core boost to 4.0GHz. Those specifications are lower than those of the Snapdragon X1E-84-100 in the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge 16, which runs at 3.8GHz and has a 4.2GHz dual-core boost.

At this point, we’re limited in the benchmarks we can run given limited Windows on Arm compatibility. In the benchmarks we can run natively, the XPS 13 9345 was surprisingly quick. It’s a lot faster than the Surface Laptop 7 with the same chipset, and even faster than the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge 16 in Cinebench 2024. It was a lot faster than the Intel model — 26% faster in Cinebench 2024 in single-core and 44% faster in multi-core. It was also faster than the MacBook Air M3 in multi-core (57%), but slower in single-core (17%), with the MacBook held back in sustained performance by its lack of active cooling and very thin chassis.

The XPS 13 9345’s Adreno GPU performance was in line with the chipset, and the M3 GPU cores in the MacBook Air M3 were the fastest in the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme benchmark among our comparison group. None of these laptops are bona fide gaming machines. Note that the Apple M3 chipset has CPU optimizations for various creativity processes like video encoding and decoding, which along with the faster GPU makes the MacBook Air M3 a considerably faster laptop for creators.

But for demanding productivity users, the XPS 13 9345 is a very fast laptop — to be fair, that’s true for all the laptops in this comparison group. Given the Qualcomm chipset’s extra efficiency, the XPS 13 9345 should run cooler than the Intel model, which can get quite hot even with lighter workloads. That’s an added bonus.

Since the introduction of the Snapdragon X Elite, Microsoft and its partners have published some impressive battery life promises for the new chipset. Interestingly, the results I’ve seen in marketing materials have all been based on looping video, which is the least demanding of common battery tests. It’s also the test likely most impacted by the display’s power draw relative to other components.

We also run a web-browsing test, which is slightly more demanding and more indicative of typical real-world usage. The tests we usually run that best duplicate productivity workloads, such as the PCMark 10 Complete battery benchmark, don’t run yet on Windows on Arm. In order to test each laptop’s efficiency when running demanding workflows, we use the Cinebench 2024 multi-core benchmark. Each of the laptops in our comparison group runs at roughly 100% performance in this benchmark when unplugged.

I reviewed the XPS 13 9345 with a 13.4-inch 16:10 Full HD+ (1920 x 1200) IPS display. There are also QHD+ (2560 x 1600) IPS and 3K (2880 x 1800) OLED options. I found the display to be good enough for productivity work, with more than enough brightness and colors, but with less text sharpness than I like. The advantage of the display is better battery life, at least within the constraints discussed above.

My colorimeter liked this display quite a bit. Brightness was excellent at 536 nits and contrast was among the best I’ve seen for a laptop IPS display at 1,940:1. Our baselines for good displays have been 300 nits and 1,000:1, and we need to adjust both because most IPS displays today exceed those measurements. Colors were closer to the IPS average, though, at 99% of sRGB, 77% of AdobeRGB, and 77% of DCI-P3, while accuracy was very good at a DeltaE of 1.08 (less than 1.0 is considered excellent).

Certainly, this is a great display for productivity workflows. Creators and media consumers won’t be too impressed with the colors, though.

Dell built a nice little sound system into the XPS 13 9345, with four speakers, including two tweeters and two woofers. Things get plenty loud and there’s only a little distortion at maximum volume. Turn things down to around 85% and you’ll enjoy clear mids and highs. It’s hard to get a small laptop like this to produce a lot of bass, so you’ll want some headphones for music and action movies.

The switch to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite was supposed to provide a serious uptick in performance and efficiency over Intel’s Meteor Lake chipset. Surprisingly, while the performance is certainly there, battery life remained closer than I would have imagined. It’s fair to say that you won’t get better battery life than the Intel version of the XPS 13, and the MacBook Air M3 remains pretty far ahead.

At the same time, the XPS 13 9345 ran a lot cooler, which is a major benefit. That alone is enough to warrant serious consideration. Then again, there will always be some degree of some uncertainty over compatibility with Windows on Arm, and it does cost an extra $150. I think that’s worth the upgrade, but it may not be a straightforward choice.

Either way, I can say that if you want a small, light, and fast laptop, the XPS 13 (9345) is a solid choice.