Initial Hands-On & Benchmarking With The Dell XPS 9380 Pre-Loaded With Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

Dell recently announced the XPS 9380 Developer Edition laptop as a minor refinement over the 9370: there's now Intel Whiskey Lake processors with minor performance boosts and the web camera is better positioned, while for the "Developer Edition" Sputnik models it means Ubuntu 18.04 LTS rather than Ubuntu 16.04 on the former model or Microsoft Windows 10. The testing so far of the Dell XPS 9380 Developer Edition has been going well and I will have my full benchmark review out soon, but for this weekend are some preliminary data points.

In the next week or two will be the full Dell XPS 9380 Linux review on Phoronix primarily looking at its performance compared to the previous Dell XPS 9370 and an assortment of older laptops going back to the Sandy Bridge days, including performance-per-Watt and other metrics. There will also be a Linux distribution comparison with the Dell XPS 9380 if Ubuntu isn't your thing.

The Dell XPS 9380 is indeed just like the Dell XPS 9370 but with Intel Whiskey Lake processors and the web camera moving back above the LCD panel. The keyboard and build quality are great just like with the older models.

While waiting on the full review and comparison to other hardware, if interested in individual data points on this laptop/ultrabook there is this OpenBenchmarking.org result file with the initial data. Or with the Phoronix Test Suite installed you can see how your own Linux system(s) compare by simply running phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1902022-SP-DELLXPS9328.

With an Intel Core i7 8565U processor that is quad-core plus Hyper Threading and can top out at 4.6GHz, the performance is quite competent especially with the 16GB version for offering plenty of RAM.

Under various loads, the average power consumption on battery was about 15 Watts with a peak under full load at 27 Watts.

Gaming was consuming about 20 Watts on this Dell XPS Linux laptop.

Code compiling about 14 Watts.

This laptop could build the mainline Linux kernel in under five minutes.

More power data can be found in this OpenBenchmarking.org result file while waiting on the full review.