I just got this laptop 2 weeks ago.  I had the RTS 4070 and everything is bare mininum, then I upgrade the memory to 64GB and two Samsung 990 Pro.  I like it that replace my XPS 2-in-1 that is 3 yrs old.  I didn't like the XPS 16 or 14.

Martin and Forest,

1- Forest - seems most brands do not allow for 3rd party chargers at wattages over 60 W. Tried an open box Asus X13 that didn't have the official Asus charger and it would not let me run Turbo mode at all despite using a certified 100W PD USC power brick.

2 - Martin - sorry to hear about your XPS 9730 experience. But screen rule is more pixels = more power = lower battery life. As for the modern standby vs hibernate, I settled on Hibernate and deal with the extra 3-4 seconds of resuming because of MS and Modern Standby. Don't really think it's Dell's fault. As for disabling the dGPU as much as possible, go into nVidia Control panel and tell it which programs get to use the dGPU. Pretty certain I have next to none selected. Shutting the dGPU will double your battery life as well as disabling MS Mail.

Lastly, as for undervolting and getting great battery lifetimes, Google for Reddit 'The XPS that Dell and Intel Should have put onto the market.' I get up to 20 hours idle, 13+ hours streaming Pandora using the notebook speakers (so extra 0.5-1.0 W of power consumption compared to using BlueTooth earbuds). And useful work times of 10-ish hours. At 40 W continuous, it's almost silent and cruises along at 70 C without a vapor chamber. I have what you wanted. If on Reddit, send me a message as there is no way to do it here.

I had this computer for about 8 months now and I am hugely disappointed. I have been using XPS Notebooks for about 8 years now starting with the XPS 15 9500 and I was a big fan so far. But the XPS 17 9730 is really a terrible machine and I am done with Dell. By the way, I have no commercial interest in this. The only reason for me to make this video is to call out a seriously problematic product that I want to warn others about. So, if you think about buying a XPS 17 9730, let me tell you why it is probably not a good idea.
1.   First of all, Windows and Intel broke any type of functional standby. With the XPS 17 you either have have "modern standby" which really never turns off anything except the screen and the Wifi, and therefore uses about 5-10 % of the battery per hour, while letting the computer get pretty hot in your backpack. Or you can use hibernate, which needs pretty long to wake up your computer or put it to sleep. Dell's reply to having broken a functioning Standby for the XPS is to tell people to please not transport their notebook in a backpack when in Standby. Well, thanks for a notebook that you effectively have to turn off before you can transport it anywhere Dell.
2.   What makes matters worse is that when I did put my XPS into hibernate, it frequently crashed until a Dell representative found a faulty Realtek driver after 2 hours of searching. However, rather than fixing this driver, Dell update eventually reinstalled it automatically, so the computer started crashing again about 2 months later. And the worst thing is: When the computer crashes in hibernation, then it force-restarts, gets stuck in Bios and gets seriously hot, which, if you do have it in your backpack is pretty dangerous.
3.   And (you can't make this up): the internal keyboard misses keystrokes when an external monitor or docking station is attached. Even replacing the physical motherboard, including the CPU and GPU plus a keyboard replacement did not change this. Month later Dell acknowledged that this is a problem on all XPS and promises to fix it. However, until then, you simply cannot type with this computer due to missing keystrokes.
4.   The i9 is also severely crippled due to wattage and heat limitations, and this problem is compounded because different from previous versions, you cannot undervolt the CPU anymore, so in benchmarks, this computer is slower than my XPS 9700 from two years ago.
5.   Similarly to the CPU, the RTX 4080 is severely limited by heat and wattage. Do not expect more than about 50 % of what a desktop RTX 4080 would be capable off. Dell thus used components that are great advertise, but do not deliver even close to the performance that they should. Also, Dell never managed to reliably turn off the dedicated GPU when on battery, so you manually have to disable the DGPU in the device manager, and then turn it on again, otherwise it keeps on getting pinged, which continually drains the battery, which brings me to my next point.
6.   The Battery runtime on the XPS 17 9730 is realistically 2-3 hours. If you manually deactivate and then manually reactivate the dedicated GPU, you can get 4-5 hours if you try very hard. But this is about as much as a notebook from almost 20 years ago could accomplish.
7.   The problem of the low battery runtime is compounded by the 4k Display, which is another feature that sounds cool, but you basically have to set windows scaling to 150 % percent to see anything. So, realistically, a 3 k 1440p display would have been a much better choice. But again, while this would have been much more usable, well, it just doesn't sound as cool in the advertised specs.
8.   When I connected this computer to my Dell docking stations, and I have tried this on three different ones, you get intermittent screen blackouts when connecting a 4k 144hz monitor. Believe me, I have tried all cables, HDMI, Displayport, three types of docking stations with three types of monitors, I have tried it with two XPS 9730 motherboards, it seems to be a systemic problem, particularly as it has never occurred with any other computer I have connected to exactly the same setup.
9.   To top it all off, I compared the speed of the XPS 9730 to my friend's Macbook Air M1 that is three years old by now. I use the statistical software Stata and the i9 is actually not faster than a Macbook that cost a fifth of its price, uses a quarter of its wattage, weights a third, and does not even have a cooler, while the i9 jumps to 100 degrees at the slightest occasion.
10.   Finally, there is the price. I paid close to 5000 for this computer for a machine that has an effective runtime of 2-3 hours on battery and gets outperformed by a three year old Mac without a cooler for a fifth of the price.
So bottom line: This is a terrible computer, whose components seem perfect, but they simply do not work. This is why I have been a huge XPS fan, but this is it for me. To be fair, Dell customer service was great whenever I had a problem, but they cannot change the sheer amount of problems that I did and most likely you will have with this machine. So, if you want a machine that you can actually work with rather than having to work on, do not get the Dell XPS 17 9730. I honestly wish I never would have bought this computer and much less paid almost 5000 Euro for it. It's frankly a disgrace for Dell. So, thank you and I hope that this review is helpful for everyone thinking about a buying a Dell XPS 17 9730.

Would XPS-17-9730 support PCie 5.0 for SSD M.2 slot?

It's wild how fast those fingerprints appear on it, and I've always thought how ThinkPads and Blades from Razer are fingerprints magnets:

notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/_processed_/2/a/csm_xps17_b66cfc5a56.jpg

Insane.

Edit: Oh yeah, btw, I "looooove" this sh*t:

QuoteDell says the super-narrow display bezel of the XPS design limits the quality of the webcam sensor.

Ha ha 😅 Phones are literally narrower and thinner yet they still pack 5 to 50 MP sensors!! But Dell can't do that. I mean keep the 720p, whatever, but don't give bs reasonings and explanations about it then. What a joke of a company...

Why it is not mentioned that this Laptop only works with chargers that have a minimum of 45w and only draws a maximum of 65w (except the proprietary dell chargers). In my opinion something like this is important to know. And I'd love to see Laptops just work with any PD USB-C chargers from 5w up to 140w (or even up to 240w). It can't be that hard.

Shame these performance laptops are still not using 240W USB-C PD for charging... any idea why?

Great review, thanks a lot. At the same time, I have the XPS 17 with the i9 and 4080 and I can confirm that it still discharges the battery under heavy simulatenous CPU / GPU load. It is not a lot, but noticeable. Maybe 5-10 % percent per hour. Looks like Dell did not fix this. Otherwise, I'm pretty satisfied so far.

The difference between 12gen and 13gen is minimal and Intel is still at 10nm vs AMD at 4nm.
Another of Intel's big problems is excessive heat and power consumption in ultrabooks, making it impossible to maintain constant productivity.
Intel has to change immediately otherwise AMD Zen 4 Phoenix is the choice of most Ultrabook users.

Thank you for the thorough review. I just bought the last year model 9720 with i7 and rtx3060 for a whopping £800 discount compared to the updated 9730. I'm glad to hear that the difference between them is minimal!

The biggest problem is not pointed in CONS: a low performing system for the hardware, basically these results could be made with a much less expensive system with appropriate hardware.

For example the 4070 results are inferior to some 4060 laptops.