Can I use the Dell XPS 17 for gaming? What do I need?
If youre looking for a laptop thats both stylish and powerful, the Dell XPS 17 should be on your radar. Its one of the best laptops you can get, and a fantastic laptop for creators. Despite its sleek design, the XPS 17 packs a lot of power to help with creative work. Heres what you need to know about using the Dell XPS 17 for gaming. While computers can be fast if they have a powerful CPU, more demanding games require a dedicated type of processor, the GPU. Short for graphics processing unit, the GPU is focused on performing visual tasks, like rendering polygons and textures that show up in your games. The power you need from a GPU depends on the games you want to play. Older or simpler games can run on an integrated GPU relatively well. Integrated GPUs are low-power graphics processors that are included as part of the CPU, and most laptops have them. But if you want to play more modern and demanding games, a discrete GPU is important. Powerful GPUs also play a big role in content creation. If youre working with multi-layered images and high-resolution video, having a powerful GPU can give you much better performance. On the other hand, discrete GPUs take up a lot of space, so laptops that have them tend to be big. More powerful GPUs also consume more power, so they affect battery life. Dell promotes the XPS 17 as a creator laptop, and as weve just mentioned, thats also good for gaming. The Dell XPS 17 is available in a few models, but the most recent ones now feature Nvidias new GeForce RTX 30 series GPUs. Theres a model with the RTX 3050 with 4GB of RAM and 60W of power, and one with an RTX 3060 with 6GB of GDDR6 RAM and 70W of power. Both of these support real-time ray tracing and theyre capable of running most, if not all, modern games at stable frame rates. You may need to tweak the settings for the most demanding titles, but these are very capable GPUs. If you want to take advantage of them, Thunderbolt docks can help you connect to high-performance displays, too. The two models also have different CPUs. The variant with the GeForce RTX 3050 comes with an Intel Core i7-11800H CPU, which has eight cores and 16 threads with speeds up to 4.6GHz. The model that comes with the RTX 3060 includes an Intel Core i9-11900H with a similar number of cores and threads, but with speeds of up to 4.9GHz. Both are very powerful processors, and theyre Intels latest 11th-generation models. That means theyre based on the enhanced 10nm processor, offering better thermals and efficiency. So in conclusion, yes the Dell XPS 17 is a powerful machine that can run most, if not all, modern games. If you want the most power possible, you can get the variant with the GeForce RTX 3060. If you dont need that much power, the model with the GeForce RTX 3050 should still be able to run most modern games at reasonable settings. Its worth noting that the 3050 Ti is available on some XPS 15 variants, but the RTX 3060 is only on the 17-inch model. Plus, the GPU in the XPS 15 only has 45W of power to work with.