Dell XPS 13 Kabylake Makes For A Great Linux Laptop

Over the course of the graphics, single-threaded, and multi-threaded benchmarks run, the Dell XPS 13 under load had an average CPU core temp for the i7-8550U of 63 Celsius with a peak of 87 Celsius.

The average power draw was about 18.5 Watts on battery with Fedora Workstation 28 compared to about 4 Watts at idle. The peak power draw came in at 44.9 Watts in extreme cases.

Particularly if upgrading from a Haswell era laptop or older, the Dell XPS 13 9370 with Kabylake-R can offer a significant performance upgrade. The better performance is largely with the Core i7 Kabylake-R CPUs now being quad-core plus Hyper Threading, but the UHD Graphics 620 did also boast better performance compared to the older generations of Intel HD Graphics. The UHD Graphics 620 are enough to externally drive dual 4K UHD displays if using an X.Org-based session, but I'll save more information about that for the upcoming review of the Dell TB16 Thunderbolt Dock. That Dell Thunderbolt Dock has been largely working out well with Fedora Workstation 28 on that laptop.

Long story short, I am quite happy with the Dell XPS 13 9370. This Dell XPS 13 laptop has been running well with Fedora Workstation 28 and the other Linux distributions benchmarked in the earlier aforelinked articles like Antergos and Ubuntu. The power consumption is largely on-par with Windows 10 as shown by those earlier tests, the build quality is quite good, and I haven't run into any major Linux compatibility issues or mechanical problems in testing out this laptop over the past month, including being on the road with it for the past week.

The Dell XPS 9370 and other models can be found at NewEgg.com and other major Internet retailers.