Snapdragon seems to be giving everyone some of its razzle-dazzle these days, while simultaneously helping to push the era of AI PCs forward. The latest inductee to the club is the Dell XPS 13. It’s been a mainstay on many a best laptop and best 13-inch laptop list throughout the years. And with good reason, as the XPS 13 has always lived at the intersection of portability and performance. The XPS 13 9345 is no different.

Armed with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor, this AI-first PC brings everything we love about the XPS 13, such as its waifish, elegant looks, pretty display, and comfy keyboard. Throw in some take-you-by-surprise performance and over 14 hours of battery life, I'd call it another win for Dell. A meager port offering and lack of discrete graphics keeps the XPS from being perfect, but for many consumers in the market for a powerful ultraportable, it’s as close as you can get.

About this review: Dell sent us an XPS 13 9345 for the purposes of this review. The company had no input in this article, and did not see its contents before publishing.

Pricing and availability

Dell sent over the base model of the Snapdragon XPS 13 9345. It costs $1,300 and has a 3.42-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite - X1E-80-100 Oryon processor with 16GB of LPDDR5X, 8448MT/s of RAM, a 512GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD, an integrated Qualcomm Adreno GPU, and a 13.4-inch 1920 x 1200, 30-120Hz, non-touch, anti-glare display.

Unfortunately, Dell doesn’t allow you to upgrade CPUs. You can quadruple the RAM and storage, as well as upgrade the display to a 2880 x 1800 OLED panel, to the tune of $2,560.

Design and ports

It’s been a while since a dark-colored XPS has landed on my lap. I needed to remedy that. The XPS 13 in its Graphite CNC-aluminum chassis is absolutely lovely. Similar to other Dell laptops, the lid is blank except for the shiny Dell logo in the center. You’ll find two long, dark raised rubber feet along the XPS 13’s undercarriage, along with six side vents and screws.

If you’re not a fan of the interior design of the XPS Plus, this 13’s might not be for you either. The haptic touchpad sits flush for seamless integration. The keyboard sits above with its large, flat backlit keys. Finally, you have an LED-lit Fn key that can be swapped out for a media key row by hitting the Fn and Esc keys simultaneously.

The XPS 13 only has two USB-C ports to its name. As such, you’ll definitely want to grab a USB-C dock to connect your other peripherals.

The 11.6 x 7.8 x 0.6-inch XPS 13 9345 weighs 2.6 pounds, just like its Intel counterpart. The Asus Zenbook 14 OLED (2024) (12.3 x 8.7 x 0.59 inches) is a little heavier at 2.8 pounds. The HP Spectre x360 14 (12.4 x 8.7 x 0.7 inches) jumps on the scale at 3.2 pounds, while the Acer Swift X 14 (12.7 x 9.0 x 0.74 ~0.8 inches) is the heaviest at 3.4 pounds.

Display, webcam, and audio

Matte and bright. It seems like an oxymoron, but that’s exactly what you’re getting with the 13.4-inch, 1920 x 1200 anti-glare, non-touch panel. My light meter gave me an average reading of 532 nits, making it ideal for indoor or outdoor use. It’s okay on the accuracy front, with 99% on the sRGB color gamut. Meanwhile, the display reached 78% on Adobe sRGB and DCI-P3 and 73% on NTSC.

In real life, it translates to pretty vivid color though, which was needed as I watched the trailer for “The Inspection.” You could see the clear angst on actor Jeremy Pope’s face as he was verbally dressed down in his bright red hoodie by fellow actor Bokeem Woodbine. Pope’s hazel eyes sparkled with unshed tears against the onslaught. Those tears gently traced their way down his face in a later scene. The screen did a great job of reproducing Pope’s caramel tone as well as Woodbine’s deep mahogany skin.

The 1080p webcam does a great job capturing stills and video. My skin looks radiant in my test shot, and it caught the exact shade of yellow of my shirt and my locs with their myriad of colors. The details weren’t as sharp as I would have liked, but you can still see the white stitching on my Scorpio bunny and the gold accents on my Libra bunny.

I’m always impressed at how Dell manages to squeeze so much from such a tiny space. You’ve got barely-there bezels thanks to Dell’s InfinityEdge design. Below and to the side, much to my chagrin, are a set of 2W quad speakers (tweeters and speakers). For the XPS 13’s size, the speakers do pack a sizable punch.

That stated, if you’re looking for real bass, this ain’t the notebook for you, unless you’re willing to grab a pair of wireless headphones or earbuds. However, the highs and mids are strong with plenty of separation. I had no problem separating the percussion, synthy keyboard, and bottles clinking on Childish Gambino’s “In The Night” (featuring Jorja Smith and Amaarae). The vocals were light and airy, without distorting the audio.

Keyboard and touchpad

My favorite thing about the XPS 13’s keyboard is the large keycaps. Seriously, they’re all like little launch pads. I’m not a fan of the smaller backspace key against the shrimpy power button/fingerprint reader. Also, like most PCs this year, you have the Microsoft Copilot button prominently displayed in the bottom right row in case you want to compose a poem, learn some random trivia, or have it do some coding. Keep in mind, all of that computing is being done in the cloud, leaving your NPU waiting to do some work (more on that later).

The actual typing experience on the XPS 13 is good. My fingers never bottomed out, and I managed to achieve 72 words per minute on the Monkeytype typing test with 98% accuracy. The wpm is slightly higher than my usual 70 wpm.

Performance

The XPS 13 is the latest to join the Snapdragon club with its Qualcomm X Elite - X1E-80-100 Oryon processor. It’s on the lower rung of the Elite ladder, which puts it on the level of an Intel Core i5 U-series CPU or an AMD Ryzen 7 5800 U-series chip. Essentially, that meant the laptop held up against my 70 Google Chrome tab onslaught with its mixture of G-Suite apps, videos, social media, news and entertainment sites.

Imagine my surprise as I ran the synthetic benchmarks and the XPS 13 started kicking major ass. It didn’t win every battle, but it triumphed enough that it made me take notice. Starting with Geekbench 6, the Dell handily defeated all of its competition by a wide margin. Both the single and multi-thread Cinebench 2024 tests produced similar results. However, the XPS 13 stumbled on the Crossmark benchmark, where each of the competitors with their Intel Core Ultra 7 155H CPUs left the Dell behind.

So far, the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Edge is the only Qualcomm-powered laptop that I could play taxing AAA titles on. As for the XPS 13 and its integrated Qualcomm Adreno GPU, I spent an hour or two playing my beloved Hades II, but anything else more demanding was a chugging mess. And while the 13-inch laptop did admirably on the 3DMark tests, it was no match for any of the rival systems which have discrete graphics.

So about that AI. Just like most systems these days, the Dell XPS 13 has an NPU onboard to handle AI tasks. And just what are those tasks? So far, those include blurring backgrounds and noise suppression during video chats, generative AI tricks in photo and video editing apps, coding and website creation.

While I appreciate that neither my CPU nor GPU are expending that much energy on these tasks, I just think Qualcomm should have gone with the fact that they’ve finally caught up to AMD and Intel in terms of performance, instead of being the AI PC du jour. Because as hard as Microsoft, Google, Samsung, and many other tech companies want to make it happen, artificial intelligence is still very young and doesn’t warrant a line of notebooks – at least not yet. Or I could just be a hater. Time will tell.

I squeezed 14 hours and 11 minutes out of the XPS 13’s 3-cell 55Wh battery. I probably could have gotten more if I hadn’t started playing Hades II for two hours.

Should you buy the Dell XPS 13 9345?

You should buy the Dell XPS 13 9345 if:

• You want a sleek, compact laptop
• You want a laptop with a bright, vivid display
• You want a laptop with great overall performance
• You want a laptop with excellent battery life

You shouldn’t buy the Dell XPS 13 9345 if:

• You want a thin-and-light laptop that also has discrete graphics
• You want a laptop with more ports