For about $200 less, you can get a fast machine, but with a cheap case and little battery life.

We’d mentioned that Dell’s previous attempts at premium systems failed price, power and battery life tests. With the XPS 15z, well… two out of three ain’t bad. Despite the fact that the NVIDIA Optimus GPU turns off when not fully taxed (powering the laptop’s display with integrated Intel HD 3000 Graphics instead), we weren’t able to get much more than three and a half hours of regular use out of our review unit. Turning to our standard battery drain test (where we loop a standard-definition video with the screen at roughly 65 percent brightness, and with WiFi on), we saw much the same thing — 3 hours, 41 minutes of use from the sealed 8-cell, 2.6Ah battery. It occurred to us that perhaps Optimus wasn’t actually switching off the discrete GPU at the most appropriate intervals, and sure enough, we were able to eke out a little more runtime by completely disabling it, but you’re still looking at 4 hours, 26 minutes of use. That’s not bad, all things considered, but it’s a good sight worse than the 8 hours of life that Dell’s advertising here, and if the company wants to make a dent in the MacBook Pro’s armor, it’ll have to do better than that.

Read the full review at Dell XPS 15z — Engadget.