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If you're looking for a larger laptop with the same design, look also at the Dell Precision 5510 line, not just XPS 15. I've been waiting for an XPS15 with a go

If you're looking for a larger laptop with the same design, look also at the Dell Precision 5510 line, not just XPS 15. I've been waiting for an XPS15 with a good CPU and without discrete GPU, and gave up - they only do i3 version. Then I've noticed the new Precision 5510 uses the same XPS-like design, gives you i5-6640HQ with Intel GPU (not sure why they don't offer i7 without Nvidia too). Anyway, got mine a few days ago, seems working flawlessly (except the usual UEFI / Secure Boot stuff). Comes with Ubuntu out of the box, seems to work fine with Qubes so far.

johnchristopher 10y ago
I am in the same boat. I read that the 5510's fan is quite noisy so I am still thinking of the xps (it's really important for me).
- pgaddict 10y ago
  I don't think it's particularly noisy. Sure, you can hear it when doing CPU-intensive stuff (say, doing "make -j4" on a large project), but well - the heat needs to go somewhere, otherwise the laptop would get quite hot (like the MBP, for example). The fan opening is on the bottom, not on the side/back as on other laptops, so perhaps this also dampens the noise. I've heard there were issues with proper power management on skylake when it was new, so perhaps they fixed it in the kernel - no idea. Or maybe the noise is worse on the models with Nvidia, which is one of the reasons why I wanted a model without it. It's also possible that the fan will get more noisy over time, so let's see. Update: The one thing I'm only 95% happy with is the keyboard - it's way better than on all the other 15.6" laptops I've tried (in particular no numpad stupidity), but I'd still prefer the keyboard from my old t420s. The enter is way too narrow on the "EN international" keyboard, should get the US keyboard instead, for example.
- brudgers 10y ago
  Fan operation is pretty much dictated by physics. Higher wattage CPU's will generate more heat as a tradeoff for less throttling. The two ways standard ways to deal with heat are more aggressive cooling profiles or a bigger heat sink (i.e. a larger and heavier laptop overall). The 5510's are packaged to be relatively smaller and lighter. The Precision 7500 models are heavier and larger. The additional volume also allows more expansion (and accommodate significantly more powerful hardware at initial build). In terms of fan noise, choice of CPU and workload is probably going to make more difference than anything else.

johnchristopher 10y ago

I am in the same boat. I read that the 5510's fan is quite noisy so I am still thinking of the xps (it's really important for me).

pgaddict 10y ago
I don't think it's particularly noisy. Sure, you can hear it when doing CPU-intensive stuff (say, doing "make -j4" on a large project), but well - the heat needs to go somewhere, otherwise the laptop would get quite hot (like the MBP, for example). The fan opening is on the bottom, not on the side/back as on other laptops, so perhaps this also dampens the noise. I've heard there were issues with proper power management on skylake when it was new, so perhaps they fixed it in the kernel - no idea. Or maybe the noise is worse on the models with Nvidia, which is one of the reasons why I wanted a model without it. It's also possible that the fan will get more noisy over time, so let's see. Update: The one thing I'm only 95% happy with is the keyboard - it's way better than on all the other 15.6" laptops I've tried (in particular no numpad stupidity), but I'd still prefer the keyboard from my old t420s. The enter is way too narrow on the "EN international" keyboard, should get the US keyboard instead, for example.
brudgers 10y ago
Fan operation is pretty much dictated by physics. Higher wattage CPU's will generate more heat as a tradeoff for less throttling. The two ways standard ways to deal with heat are more aggressive cooling profiles or a bigger heat sink (i.e. a larger and heavier laptop overall). The 5510's are packaged to be relatively smaller and lighter. The Precision 7500 models are heavier and larger. The additional volume also allows more expansion (and accommodate significantly more powerful hardware at initial build). In terms of fan noise, choice of CPU and workload is probably going to make more difference than anything else.