Dell XPS 13 9380 + Intel Core i7 8565U Ubuntu Linux Performance Benchmarks

For the last of today's comparison are CPU thermal and battery power consumption numbers under different workloads on these tested laptops.

The downside of laptops/ultrabooks becoming incredibly thin is cooling the powerful chips is much larger. In the case of the multi-threaded x264 video encode benchmark, the Dell XPS 13 9380 had an average temperature under load of 76 degrees, which peaked at 93 Celsius. The Dell XPS 13 9370 meanwhile had an average temperature of 72 degrees and a peak of 87 degrees. These newest laptops were the warmest of the tested laptops. Going back to the days of the Lenovo ThinkPad W510 with its four cores and design now considered clunky and heavy, its average temperature in this benchmark was 58 degrees with a peak of 64 degrees.

The Dell XPS 9380 delivered the best performance while its power consumption was in the middle of the group. The 9380 had an average power consumption of 23.5 Watts, lower than the 25.9 Watts of the 9370 model.

Running the 7-Zip multi-threaded compression benchmark was enough to trigger thermal throttling on the Dell XPS 13 9380 while it still delivered the best performance of the tested hardware. Here the 9380 peaked at 97 degrees with an average temperature of 72 degrees.

The average battery power consumption under this test with the 9380 was 20.7 Watts while the 9370 came in at 21.7 Watts.

Running OpenSSL on the Dell XPS 13 9380 quickly warmed it up too, but at least it receded quickly.

The power efficiency has certainly improved a great deal from the days of the ThinkPad W510 with Clarksfield CPU and even Sandy Bridge in the HP EliteBook.