- Dell’s XPS 14 proved to have more than 40 hours of battery life
- This was a web browsing test where the laptop’s LG Display could flex its VRR muscles
- That screen has the ability to automatically drop down to 1Hz with static on-screen content, providing significant power savings as evidenced here.
Dell’s new XPS laptops have once again been recognized for their impressive battery life, and this time, it’s for a truly eye-opening result.
The XPS 14 was tested by Hardware Canucks as seen on YouTube (as noted by Notebookcheck.net – see video below), and found to have a smidge over 43 hours of battery life.
Yes – 43 hours, to read that correctly, in a test involving web browsing (in Chrome) with brightness set to 150 nits. And this is for a Windows 11 laptop, and great battery life is usually the focus of Arm-based notebooks. Indeed, Hardware Canucks compared the XPS 14 with Apple’s MacBook Air M5 (15-inch) which recorded 14.5 hours in the same test, successfully outpaced by the Dell laptop.
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Why is there such a difference here? Well, it’s because of the type of test – the gap between Apple and Dell devices is not nearly as big in video playback and game tests (but the XPS 14 still wins by a good margin) – and an important piece of technology that Dell has used, which is a panel with a new implementation of VRR (variable refresh rate). Let’s dig into why this is important next.
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Analysis: VRR mode gain with XPS 14
As I’ve noted before – while the XPS 16 is making waves due to battery durability, although not to the same extent as its smaller siblings do here – Dell’s trump card is an LG panel that uses a new take on VRR.
This innovation means that VRR can adjust the screen refresh rate to as low as 1Hz automatically when there is static content on the display. (Note: this is the LCD version, while the OLED on the XPS 14 and 16 can go down, but only to 20Hz – although a 1Hz OLED panel is coming from LG Display next year).
Why this is important is because web pages have static content (well, mostly), so the XPS 14 can obviously drop down to run at that 1Hz rate too in the Hardware Canucks browsing test, saving a lot of power. Not such a good effect is seen with moving content (videos, games), of course, since higher refresh rates are needed there (the LG panel is a 120Hz issue, in case you were wondering).
Notebookcheck.net itself tested the XPS 14 in web browsing (on Wi-Fi), but without VRR kicking in, so the screen was at 120Hz all the time, and we saw around 17 hours of battery life – underscoring the huge difference that 1Hz VRR makes.
As always, battery life will vary – even given the same type of test, based on what you’re likely to do, and the laptop’s configuration characteristics as noted – but getting a long 40 hours in any test is a truly jaw-dropping result, frankly, especially for a non-Arm Windows laptop.
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