Dell refreshes its XPS 13 Plus. The laptop gets new Intel Core processors on board but still looks very recognizable from the outside.

Dell refreshes the XPS 13 Plus. The beautiful exterior remains the same, but the manufacturer takes care of the inside. That’s good news: our review of the first iteration of the XPS 13 Plus over the past year has shown that there’s a lot going wrong under the hood and causing some frustration. Dell is now hoping to remedy this by installing thirteenth-generation Intel Core processors in the device.

The manufacturer deliberately uses the Intel Core i7-1360P: the direct successor of the Core i7-1260P. This chip comes from the same Intel 7-band, has the same number of cores (twelve, of which four are P cores and eight are E cores), but is clocked slightly higher (5 GHz turbo vs. 4.7 GHz turbo). P chips are slightly less efficient than U chips and therefore have a higher TDP. The minimum is 20 watts for both the Raptor Lake processor and the Alder Lake chip.

donkey or not?

That raises questions. The slim Dell XPS 13 Plus was a real screamer, with cooling that dominated the office at times. The cooling wasn’t really enough to keep the P-chip in the chassis pleasantly fresh. The fact that Intel is now opting for a P processor again hopefully implies that the cooling has also been revised. Intel makes 15-watt U chips for Ultrabooks for a reason. We wonder if Dell will hit the same rock twice.

The rest of the interior is not surprising. You can configure the laptop with 16 GB or 32 GB of RAM, SSDs have a capacity of 512 GB or 1 TB and the screen has FHD or 4K resolution. The 4K display uses OLED technology. The laptops are available immediately at a starting price of EUR 1,610.83 excluding VAT.