- Dell’s XPS 14 has proven to have over 40 hours of battery life
- This was in a web browsing test where the laptop’s LG Display was able to flex its VRR muscles
- This monitor has the ability to automatically drop to 1Hz with static content on screen, providing some huge power savings as seen here
Dell’s new XPS laptops have once again been in the spotlight for 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 YouTube (as Notebookcheck.net noted – see the video below), and was found to have just a little over 43 hours of battery life.
Yes – 43 hours, you read that right, in a test involving web browsing (in Chrome) with the brightness set to 150 nits. And this is for a Windows 11 laptop, whereas huge battery life tends to be the domain of arm-based notebooks. In fact, Hardware Canucks compared the XPS 14 to Apple’s MacBook Air M5 (15-inch), which logged 14.5 hours in the same test and was actually routed by Dell’s laptop.
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Why is there such a difference here? Well, that’s due to the type of testing – the gap between the Apple and Dell devices isn’t nearly as big in video playback and gaming tests (but the XPS 14 still wins by a good margin) – and a critical piece of technology Dell has used, a panel with a new implementation of VRR (variable refresh rate). Let’s dig into why this matters next.
Look at
Analysis: VRR situational advantage with the XPS 14
As I’ve pointed out before – when the XPS 16 made waves for its battery life, though not quite to the same extent as its smaller siblings do here – Dell’s trump card is the LG panel, which uses a new take on VRR.
This innovation means that VRR can automatically adjust the screen’s refresh rate down to a mere 1Hz when there is static content on the screen. (Note: this is the LCD version, whereas the OLED on the XPS 14 and 16 can go down low, but only to 20Hz – although a 1Hz-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 able to drop down to run at that 1Hz level a lot in Hardware Canucks’ browsing tests, saving quite a bit of power. There’s not as much of an effect seen with content in motion (videos, games), of course, as higher refresh rates are needed there (the LG panel is a 120Hz 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 120Hz constantly, and saw close to 17 hours of battery life – which underlines the big difference that 1Hz VRR makes.
As always, battery life will be variable – even given the same type of test, based on exactly what you might be doing and laptop configuration aspects as mentioned – but getting over 40 hours of life on any test is a truly astonishing result, frankly, especially for a non-Arm Windows laptop.
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