Monthly Archives: May 2021

Dell XPS 15 9500 laptop: Portable computing power

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When Dell’s XPS 15 9500 landed at GamejunkieNZ Towers three weeks ago, I set myself the goal of using it instead of my desktop PC.

Fast forward three weeks and I’m pleased to report that apart from a couple of times when I had to use programs that were only installed on my desktop PC, Dell’s XPS 9500 was my go-to at-home computing device. My desktop PC has been gathering dust!

Out of the box, Dell’s XPS 9500 has a stand-out white aluminium chassis with a woven carbon fibre pattern on the interior. The colour is called frost white and it looks superb and is a nice departure from the more traditional darks and bare metal commonly seen on laptops. The chassis has a real quality feel to it, too, with thin bezels around the panel, that maximises the screen real estate.

The 9500 has excellent build quality, too, tipping the scales at 1.8kg, so you’ll definitely notice it if you pick it up with one hand or lug it in your backpack.

Vital statistics: Intel i7 1075H CPU @2.60Ghz, 16Gb dual channel DDR4 memory (at 1600Mhz), 4Gb nvidia Geforce GTX1650 TI GPU, 512Gb SSD, Windows 10

The model I reviewed is powered by Intel’s 10th generation i7 1075H CPU, a six core, 12-thread processor (base clock of 2.60Ghz, max turbo frequency of 5Ghz, TDP of 45W) that has long been the go-to for high-end gaming laptops. A couple of months ago, the review configuration would set you back $NZ4698.99. Customisation options include opting for a Intel integrated graphics rather than a discrete card, i5 or i9 Intel CPUs and up to 64Gb of memory and 2Tb of storage.

Connectivity wise, the left side houses two USB C ports while the right side is home to an SD card reader, another USB C port and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Two of the USB C ports have Thunderbolt 3 support.

The lack of a USB Type A port initially caused me concern – I still have a lot of thumb drives floating about – but my concern was short lived as I found Dell had cleverly included a USB A and HDMI adapter in the accessories pack.

The work surface has a neat carbon fibre weave pattern.

Gorgeous screen

Lifting up the lid you’re greeted with a 15.6-inch touch screen display that is, quite frankly, stunning in action, offering a native 4K resolution with a 16:10 aspect ratio.

Images are crisp and clear, as is video and video streaming, and it’s probably one of the best laptop screens I’ve used, if I’m being honest. You can tweak the colour settings using Dell’s in-built PremierColor app which let’s you select a variety of colour presets, including for watching movies, sport or using it at night time

Speakers are located either side of the keyboard, and again they offer excellent performance, highlighting that this is a high-end laptop that is designed to “Wow”. The speakers provided excellent sound reproduction, with deep bass and nice treble and mid tones.

Battery life is, of course, dependent on what you do but I think with general day to day usage you should get around 10-12 hours from a full charge of the 86W battery before requiring wall juice.

The big questions, though, is how does it perform, especially since I mainly used the XPS for gaming (sorry, I couldn’t help myself) because I was super keen to see how the GTX1650Ti handled some of my favourite games. (Of course, I didn’t just limit the laptop to gaming: I also streamed online content (Netflix, YouTube) and did general day to day not-so-exciting stuff. I mainly played games on it, though.)

Well, I’m glad you asked. The answer is, I’m happy to report, excellently. It performs excellently.

Now, you’re gaming with power …

I played Gears of War 5, Forza Horizon’s 4, Titanfall 2 and cyberpunk pixel game Cloudpunk, all with medium to high graphics settings, as well as spent some time with recently released Days Gone a PlayStation title that has now come to PC.

Before I get to the gaming performance, I want to talk about the cooling this thing has. It has a lot of ventilation: There’s a massive exhaust port across the back edge of the device and a sizeable air intake on the bottom that scoops cool air onto the innards. There is also a couple of air “slits” on each side of the underside of the chassis. This thing takes cooling to new heights.

I also tested the laptop with the in-built Gears of War 5 benchmark (recommended medium to high graphics settings). It returned an average of 60FPS (average GPU frame rate 73FPS) at 1080p; an average of 59.9 frames per second at 1440p (average GPU frame rate 63.3FPS); and at native 4K an average of 46FPS (average GPU frame rate 47.2FPS).

I also tested the Dell on PlayStation Studio’s Days Gone, which delivered around 65 frames per second with a mix of medium to high graphics settings at a maximum resolution of 1440 x 900 thanks to the 16:10 aspect ratio. This game, too, had the Dell’s cooling system working over time so it did get loud at times.

I also run 3D Mark’s Timespy DX12 benchmark, scoring a “great” 2898 (GPU score 2667, CPU score 5695) and the Firestrike DX11 benchmark, delivering a score of 6836 (GPU score 7358, physics score 15311, combined score 2895).

As I mentioned earlier, under load the Dell can get quite noisy – not so loud that you can’t speak to the person next to you but it’s noticeable – so you need to ensure that no part of the underside intake is blocked when you’re doing intensive tasks.

This isn’t a laptop that I’d recommend taking to bed and resting on your duvet or using while lying on the carpet: It needs room to breath and space for air to flow. If you plan on doing gaming or high-intensity applications, this is a “use on a desk” laptop.

Top, the Dell XPS 15 9500 running the Gears of War 5 benchmark. Below, running Forza 4 Horizons.

Final verdict

After about three week’s using the Dell XPS 15 9500, I’m happy to report that this is one of the best laptops I’ve ever used. Hell, it could even be the best laptop I’ve ever used.

The screen is utterly fantastic, the performance is excellent thanks to Intel’s i71075H CPU which ensured no system bottlenecks, and it offers great gaming performance thanks to the nVidia Geforce GTX1650Ti dedicated GPU.

I could also see this laptop replacing my ageing desktop PC which is starting to show its age with an eighth generation Intel i5 8400 and a few-years-old AMD RX580 graphics card.

Thanks to Botica Butler Raudon Partners & Passion PR for arranging the loan unit.

Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 review: Portability in a sleek package

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Microsoft’s Surface Laptop 4 ticks all the boxes for a nice laptop: It’s smart looking, it’s lightweight and it’s nicely spec’ed (available in both Intel and AMD CPU configurations and 13.5 and 15-inch variants). 

The review model I was provided was powered by a custom “Microsoft Surface edition” eight-core AMD Ryzen 7 [running at 2Ghz], 16Gb of DDR 4 memory, 512Gb SSD storage, and a 15-inch screen (2496 x 1664 with a 3:2 aspect ratio) and after using it for a bit, I reckon it’s perfect for creative types and productivity.  

So that’s what I used it for, mainly: I wrote this review on it, I tweaked Word documents on it, I browsed websites on it, and I could see it as the ideal replacement for a tired work laptop that needs replacing with something that looks classy and performs better than your current one.

The moment I took the Surface Laptop 4 out of its box I could see this was a premium product, with a smart black metal chassis punctuated by a silver Windows logo smack bang in the middle of the lid. It’ll set you back $NZ1749 for the13.5-inch model and $NZ2499 for the 15-inch model, that I reviewed.

The Surface Laptop 4 just looks classy, and tipping the scales at 1.3kg, it won’t add much weight to your backpack or satchel if you e-scoot or cycle to the office or university or wherever. You can hoist it with one hand without breaking a sweat.

It’s incredibly thin, too: amazingly thin, actually, with great build quality. It felt rigid and sturdy with no creaks or flexing. 

That thinness does come with a downside, though, depending on your view of how much connectivity a laptop should have. The Surface Laptop 4 doesn’t have a lot of ports, with the left-hand side housing USB Type A and USB Type C ports and a 3.5mm headphone jack while the right hand side has the proprietary charge portt – and that’s it. If you want ports to connect more things, you’ll need to get a dongle or something but for most people it should do the job.

It has a 10-point multi touch PixelSense screen that looks sharp, displaying text and documents clearly and crisply, although with a 3:2 aspect ratio, the bezels were a little thick for my liking .  

Talking of text and documents that brings me to the keyboard which is extremely comfortable to type on. As someone who’s been able to touch type for almost 30 years, I found the keyboard on the Surface Laptop 4 just a dream to use, with nice travel from the keys. It really does make for a pleasant typing experience.  

The nice sized touch pad is super sensitive, too, which means it’ll pick up the most minute of digit movements as you slide your fingers across its surface.   

Microsoft claims the Surface Laptop 4 has a battery life of up to 17.5 hours and while it has great battery life, I suggest it was more like 12 to 13 hours of standard use, which is still fantastic and means you won’t need to live near a power point when you’re working on that important document.

Performance-wise, I’ve never used a laptop with a Ryzen CPU but the Surface Laptop 4 seemed zippy enough, handling everything I threw at it: Word processoring, video streaming, web browsering and the like, and while it’s not a gaming machine, it did manage to run easy games like the excellent-but-old BladeRunner (off GOG.com). Have no illusions, though, this isn’t a gaming laptop so don’t load up Cyberpunk 2077 or Call of Duty and expect it to run like a PC with a discrete graphics card because it won’t. This isn’t a gaming machine.

In an attempt to make myself feel like a real tech reviewer, I benchmarked the Laptop 4 with Cinebench and Geekbench 5, returning scores of 4862, and 533 (single core) and 4138 (multi-core) respectively but if I’m being honest, I really don’t know what those numbers mean.  

After using the Surface Laptop 4 for a few weeks, I’m sold on its credentials as a solid, productivity device that would be just the ticket for the home office (or office, office) or a creative type who wants something light and portable to finish writing their first novella on.  

Many thanks to Acumen Republic PR in New Zealand for providing the review unit.

New Australian screen incentives will hit New Zealand’s fast-growing games industry, says NZGDA

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I’ve long been a supporter of the New Zealand video game development industry and when used to write about games as a journalist I loved it when I was able to talk to Kiwi developers about what they were working on. To that, I thought I’d share the media release from the New Zealand Game Developers Association about what it believes Australia’s recently announced tax incentives for video game development will mean for the $324m video game making scene in Aotearoa.

Australia’s introduction of a 30 to 40% tax incentive for video games will halt the growth of New Zealand’s video games sector, which has been the fastest growing part of our screen industry in recent years, says New Zealand Game Developers Association chairperson Chelsea Rapp.

“Our interactive industry can’t access New Zealand’s own screen incentives, which is bad enough, but now with this competition from Australia, we’ll see a clear brain drain with investment following,” says Rapp.

“While New Zealand has an incredibly talented and globally successful games industry, we can’t compete when you could get a 40% discount to relocate to Australia. Any chance we had of attracting overseas studios to set up shop in New Zealand ends in 2022, and some New Zealand studios are already looking at expanding into Australia instead of expanding locally.”

Over the last decade New Zealand’s video games industry has been our fastest growing creative industry and a major digital exporter. The sector earned $323.9 million in the year to 1 April 2020 and had been growing 42% annually, but this is now at risk. 

The new Australian scheme is similar to the New Zealand Screen Production Grant, which attracts major film and TV productions to shoot here, but which interactive media is banned from accessing. As part of its annual Budget the Australian Government announced a 30% refundable tax offset for video game productions from 2022. In addition, several Australian states top this up by a further 10%. Worth over $250 billion annually, video games is the largest entertainment industry in the world and many countries compete to attract studios. Similar incentives for video games exist in Canada and Europe.

The New Zealand Game Developers Association has already proposed to the Government that our visual effects grant could easily be adapted to include video games as the workers, qualifications and tools used are largely the same. Several large international studios have inquired about moving to New Zealand, including in the midst of covid-19 lockdowns, but have been rejected.

It is also likely that any video game incentives would benefit locally-owned businesses more than Hollywood productions. The Association has also proposed an Interactive Innovation Fund to develop locally-owned productions. “Film productions often leave town when they are finished, whereas a game studio is far more likely to remain in New Zealand, contributing to the local economy and helping to build lasting skills and communities,” continued Rapp. 

Major sporting tournaments will also be attracted to Australia instead of here according to the New Zealand Esports Federation. “This is not speculation, studios and investors are already huddling today about a shift to Australia, in order to be more competitive. Kiwi jobs have unfortunately been lost to inertia. Given the times our Government should be seeking to accelerate the industry not handicap it,” says John McRae, VP of the New Zealand Esports Federation. 

“I fear if this incentive is not met or better we will see a hollowing out of the gaming and esports industry in New Zealand. That will hamper innovation and job creation in related sectors including defence, medical tech, education technology and film.” 

Certainly something for the NZ government to think about, given how successful the New Zealand game development industry is. You can find out more about the Australian Digital Games Tax Offset here https://digitaleconomy.pmc.gov.au/fact-sheets/investment-incentives and find more data on New Zealand’s interactive media sector see: https://nzgda.com/news/survey2020/

A screen capture from Auckland game studio RocketWerkz’s upcoming game Icarus.