Last week Dell’s new XPS 15 L512x landed on our doorstep, and we’ve been hammering on it ever since. Combining many of the best elements of the previous generation XPS 15 (L502x) and XPS 15z (L511z), the new model may finally silence the critics. It’s reasonably thin but more importantly, the new chassis has a solidity that was sorely lacking in previous designs. It’s Dell’s take on Apple’s unibody aluminum construction, and it feels like the type of laptop you could use for several years without it going to pieces.
The Dell XPS 15 (2012) is also our first chance to look at Intel’s new 35W quad-core Ivy Bridge processor, the i7-3612QM. As a premium brand offering, Dell also pairs the XPS 15 with a standard 1080p display (there’s no more 768p option, thankfully) and NVIDIA’s GT 640M GPU with GDDR5 memory. The combination provides for a potentially potent set of hardware capable of serving just about any need, provided of course that everything works properly. Is the latest XPS 15 a Windows laptop we can finally recommend without any reservations? We may not be able to fully answer that question with this First Look, but we’ll try.
