'God-tier battery life': Dell XPS 14 lasts 43 hours in longevity test that shows the laptop leaves Apple's Mac Book Air M5 in the dust | Tech Radar
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'God-tier battery life': Dell XPS 14 lasts 43 hours in longevity test that shows the laptop leaves Apple's Mac Book Air M5 in the dust
The power of LG Display's VRR trickery in its 1 Hz form
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Dell's XPS 14 has proved to have over 40 hours of battery life
This was in a web browsing test where the laptop's LG Display could flex its VRR muscles
That screen has the ability to automatically drop to 1 Hz with static on-screen content, which provides some huge power savings as evidenced here
Dell's new XPS laptops have again been in the spotlight due to their impressive battery life, and this time, it's due to a truly eye-opening result.
The XPS 14 was tested by Hardware Canucks as seen on You Tube (as Notebookcheck.net noticed – see the video below), and was found to have just a smidge over 43 hours of battery life.
Yes – 43 hours, you read that correctly, in a test involving web browsing (in Chrome) with the brightness set at 150 nits. And this is for a Windows 11 laptop, whereas huge battery life tends to be the domain of Arm-based notebooks. Indeed, Hardware Canucks compared the XPS 14 to Apple's Mac Book Air M5 (15-inch) which recorded 14.5 hours in the same test, effectively being routed by the Dell laptop.
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Why is there such a difference here? Well, it's due to the type of test – the gap between the Apple and Dell devices isn't nearly as large in video playback and gaming tests (but the XPS 14 still wins by a good margin) – and a critical piece of tech Dell has used, namely a panel with a new implementation of VRR (variable refresh rate). Let's dig into why this matters next.
Analysis: VRR situational advantage with the XPS 14
As I've pointed out before – when the XPS 16 made waves due to its battery stamina, though not quite to the same extent as its smaller sibling does here – Dell's trump card is the LG panel which uses a new take on VRR.
This innovation means that VRR can adjust the screen's refresh rate down to a paltry 1 Hz automatically when there's static content on the display. (Note: this is the LCD version, whereas the OLED on the XPS 14 and 16 can drop low, but only to 20 Hz – although a 1 Hz-capable OLED panel is coming from LG Display next year).
Why this is important is because web pages are static content (well, mostly), and so the XPS 14 is clearly managing to notch down to run at that 1 Hz level a lot in Hardware Canucks' browsing tests, saving a good deal of power. There's not such a great effect seen with content in motion (videos, games), of course, as higher refresh rates are needed there (the LG panel is a 120 Hz affair, 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 its full 120 Hz constantly, and saw close to 17 hours of battery life – underlining the major difference that 1 Hz VRR makes.
As ever, battery life will be variable – even given the same type of testing, based on exactly what you might be doing, and laptop configuration aspects as noted – but to get over 40 hours of longevity on any test is a truly jaw-dropping result, frankly, especially for a non-Arm Windows laptop.
➡️ Read our full guide to the best laptops
- Best overall: Apple Mac Book Air 13-inch M4
- Best budget: Asus Chromebook CM14
- Best Windows 11 laptop Microsoft Surface Laptop 13-inch
- Best gaming: Razer Blade 16
- Best for pros Mac Book Pro 16-inch (M4 Pro)
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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for Tech Radar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).
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'God-tier battery life': Dell XPS 14 lasts 43 hours in longevity test that shows the laptop leaves Apple's Mac Book Air M5 in the dust
