MacBook Pro 15 2016 vs. Dell XPS 15 2017 – Best Specs and improvements Comparison
Even if neither of the two devices can be considered a gaming laptop per se, we checked out some reviews.
In the press release about the new MacBook Pro from 2016, Apple says that it features the powerful Radeon Pro graphics and it delivers up to 2.3 times more performance than the previous generation – the AMD R9 M370X. We want to see if it’s enough to compete against Dell’s XPS 15 with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 10150.
The founder and editor in chief of MobileTechReview, Lisa Gade, thinks that the XPS 15’s Nvidia 10 series is an important leap. The AMD 450 Pro is closer to the old GTX 950M to 960M. The GTX 1050 is much faster than the AMD 450, meaning 30-50% faster. Even if the AMD 460 is an important leap in performance over the 450, it’s still slower than the GTX 1050.
MacBook Pro’s Radeon Pro fits its design, and the Radeon 450, 455 and 460 GPUs are low power dedicated, generating less heat and consuming less power than some higher performance cards such as Nvidia GTX 1060. The AMD cards support 5K monitors and considering the fact that PCs typically stop at 4K this is an essential marketing point. The 15-inch MacBook Pro is able to drive 2 5K monitors. The Radeon 450 is almost as good as Nvidia GTX 960M used for the Dell XPS 15. Even if the AMD 460 is a bit behind the old GTX 970M, the higher end AMD cards are great.
The Executive Director from PC World, Gordon Ung, said that the MacBook Pro 15 probably frustrates the users because it’s slightly performance-comprised. It’s pretty hard to pack a quad-core Intel processor (2.6 GHz Intel Core i7-6700HQ 6th gen “Skylake”) and AMD graphics into a 4-pound laptop. On the other hand the device’s battery life is rated as awesome for a 15-inch laptop.
Dell has done a great job packing the Core i7-7700HQ 7th gen Kaby Lake processor, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 with 4GB GDDR5, 512 GB SSD and a huge battery of 97WHr into a 4.5 pound laptop.
We’ll let you be the judge of who wins this battle.