Dell XPS 13 9345 review (Snapdragon X-Elite, 2024) review: Qualcomm makes the best of a bad design

Back in 2012, I reviewed the very first Dell XPS 13 – an ambitious, game-changing sliver of carbon fibre and metal that raised the standard for Windows ultraportables. Now, some 12 years later, I’m faced with another equally noteworthy first: the debut of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors in Dell’s premium laptop.

But for the giveaway sticker on its wristrest, you wouldn’t be able to spot the difference between this Snapdragon-powered Dell XPS 13 9345 and its Intel-powered siblings, the Meteor Lake XPS 13 9340 and Lunar Lake XPS 13 9350.

All three share the same elegant yet rugged-feeling metal chassis, and all three, on paper at least, tout that familiar combination of portability, power and premium charm. It’s safe to say that it looks like a match made in silicon heaven.

Check price at Amazon

Dell XPS 13 9345 (Snapdragon X-Elite, 2024) review: What you need to know

With this version of the XPS 13, it’s all change on the inside. Various Snapdragon-powered laptops have passed through Expert Reviews’ doors in recent months, and here Qualcomm’s chip gladly reprises its role, serving up great performance and the kind of all-day battery life Intel laptops have previously only been able to dream of – although that, admittedly, is set to change with the advent of the 200V series chips, first introduced at IFA 2024.

Graphics performance remains behind the pack, but it’s not unworkably awful. As long as you temper your expectations, the integrated Adreno GPU still has enough oomph to tackle older games at lower resolutions and detail settings.

Gaming aside, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform has proven that it’s well suited to Windows laptops. And when that laptop is a 1.19kg Dell XPS 13, hewn from CNC aluminium and glass, the marriage of all-day battery life and competitive performance is a perfect fit. Or so it would seem.

Dell’s decision to adopt the not-universally-loved XPS 13 Plus from 2023 as the official design document for the revamped XPS family is where the trouble starts. That blueprint dictated that a backlit touchbar was essential (spoiler: it’s anything but), a zero lattice keyboard was a huge step forward (spoiler: it isn’t) and an invisible touchpad was a must-have (spoiler: bah, humbug). That all of these elements improve aesthetics without meaningfully improving on usability probably comes as little surprise to anyone, but here we are.

If all this suggests that you should stop reading this review right now and buy something else, wait. Going by some of the glowing user reviews scattered around the internet, many owners are perfectly happy with the all-new XPS. What’s more, not even all of Expert Reviews’ other esteemed laptop reviewers agree with me: Alun Taylor highly praised the XPS 13 Plus’ radical redesign, and most specifically the elements reprised here – keyboard, touchbar and touchpad – which it trialled for the 2024 XPS family. Personally speaking, though, I feel like the balance here has tipped too far towards novelty over usability – and I’ll explain in detail why.

Dell XPS 13 9345 (Snapdragon X-Elite, 2024) review: Price and competition

Configuration tested: Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100 CPU, Adreno X1-85 GPU, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 13.4in, 30-120Hz, 1,920 x 1,200 display. Price when reviewed: £1,249 inc VAT

First, the details. Unlike Dell’s Intel-powered XPS models you’re not forced to dither between choosing a mid-range or high-end processor. It’s Qualcomm’s fastest Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100 processor or nothing. This seems fitting.

Similarly, there are no wireless connectivity upgrades to choose from, not that they’re needed. Qualcomm’s FastConnect 7800 chip delivers the latest Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 radios as standard.

What you can upgrade, however, is the memory, storage and display. For starters, you can choose between 16GB, 32GB and 64GB of LPDDR5X RAM, with each adding around £150 to the total price. The move from a 512GB to a 1TB SSD adds £75 and doubling it again to 2TB adds a further £160.

The display options allow you to choose from a standard non-touch 1,920 x 1,200 display, or you can upgrade to one of two touchscreen options: a 2,880 x 1,800 OLED display for £300, or a brighter LED-backlit 2,560 x 1,600 display for £450.

However, by far the hardest question you’ll face when considering the XPS 13 9345 is whether you should buy one of the many brilliant alternatives instead:

• The Huawei Matebook 14 opts for an older Intel Meteor Lake processor, not because they’re behind the times, but because Intel won’t supply them with any more chips due to wider national security concerns. Yet, it makes amends with a gleaming 14in OLED display and a stylish, resilient aluminium chassis. With a 1TB SSD and, at the time of writing, a sub £1,000 price, it’s the undisputed value pick

• The Apple MacBook Air 13.6-inch needs no introduction – regardless of the presence of MacOS, it’s the yardstick by which all ultraportables are judged. Superb build, a sterling display and excellent ergonomics squeeze into a gorgeously slender metal book. With a starting price of £1,099, it looks like a bargain, but it’s a trap: double the SSD to 512GB and the price jumps to £1,299 and soars temptingly upwards from there. Beware

• Asus’ Zenbook S 14 is probably the pick of the bunch – for Windows die-hards, at least. Intel’s Lunar Lake silicon is a competent and long overdue riposte to its ARM-based rivals: CPU performance is merely adequate, but battery life is back in competitive territory; boosted NPU performance earns a CoPilot+ certification, and GPU performance is way out in front. The 120hz OLED screen, fine design and generous specification easily justify a lofty £1,749 price tag

Check price at Amazon

Dell XPS 13 9345 (Snapdragon X-Elite, 2024) review: Design and key features

• Compact 13.4in chassis
• Lightweight yet sturdy
• Only two USB-C ports

Leave the laptop closed, and you might not spot too many differences between this and last year’s Dell XPS 13, and that’s no bad thing. It’s about as handsome as screwed-together panels of CNC-machined aluminium get: crisp lines and chamfered edges soften into tight curves and the chassis tapers gently from a sliver over 15mm at the rear to just shy of 13mm at the front.

You can pick between two colour options: Graphite or Platinum and both look rather handsome. My review sample came in the Platinum finish, and its pale silver exterior and off-white interior looked great, even if the keyboard and touchpad did tend to look a bit grubby after a few weeks of use. If I was buying, I’d lean towards the Graphite model. The darker metal exterior looks a tad more classy and, more practically, the grey interior shouldn’t show up grubby fingerprints as readily.

At 1.19kg, the Dell XPS 13 is hardly a heavyweight, but build quality subjectively feels great. Grasp the base with both hands and twist violently and you’re likely to hurt your fingers before you get more than a millimetre or two of twist. The lid feels taut and sturdy, although it could perhaps be more so – after several weeks of regular use I noticed a slight line forming on the display from where the display was regularly pressing on the keyboard’s raised edge.

Scout around the XPS 13’s edges and you might reasonably wonder if someone at the factory forgot something. At first glance, it appears as if there are only two USB-C ports, one on each flank. Unfortunately, though, that’s not an oversight. There is no hidden bounty of ports secreted behind a flap; two USB-C ports is all you get.

Looking on the bright side, both USB-C ports are of the USB 4 variety so you get power delivery, DisplayPort 2.1 and 40Gbits/sec of bandwidth to play with. However, you’ll need to share them between external devices and the supplied 65W power supply. Granted, the visual symmetry is nice, but it’s restrictive – unlike the XPS 13 Plus, there’s not even a USB-A adapter in the box, for heaven’s sake. I took to carrying about a little USB-C dock for the duration of testing, and prospective buyers will need to do the same.

Dell XPS 13 9345 (Snapdragon X-Elite, 2024) review: Keyboard, touchpad and webcam

• Middling keyboard
• Average touchpad
• Mediocre webcam

I’ll start with the bad news and work back towards the middling. The touchbar is by far the most egregious example of form over function here, and – let’s not beat around the bush here – I hate it. For some reason, Dell has decided to replace the top row of function keys with a backlit touch-sensitive strip. It’s not a fancy OLED display or anything groundbreaking, it’s just some LEDs behind a plastic panel. Hold the Fn key and press escape and you can toggle between defaulting to function keys or the volume and transport buttons.

There’s no haptic feedback and there’s no way of finding any of the ‘keys’ by touch alone. It’s ill-thought-out at best – not least as there’s no way to adjust the timeout of the backlight. With no backlight, you can’t see the buttons. But when you don’t want the buttons glaring at you, when watching a movie in a dark room for instance, you just have to sit there and wait for them to turn off. Touch anything and they’re back on again for a few minutes. Brilliant design this is not.

The keyboard itself is okay – it’s backlit, too, although here you do at least have the option to turn it off. Again, I appreciate the aesthetic appeal of zero lattice keyboards, not to mention appreciate the logic that big keys should improve accuracy, but I found myself making more typos during my time with the XPS. The lack of a lattice separating the keys means that it’s just that bit harder to find your way around by touch alone. There’s nothing wrong with the key action, there’s no unwelcome squish and most of the keys are a decent size – except the silly shrunken up and down cursor keys; which, it has to be said, are annoyingly commonplace on laptops these days.

Another annoying aspect of the keyboard, however, is that Dell has squeezed a combined power button and fingerprint reader alongside the backspace key. If you’re one of those people who are prone to unthinkingly bashing the top right of your keyboard while editing text, then you can look forward to accidentally turning off your laptop every time you miss your target. My advice is to toggle the power button to Do Nothing and save yourself the inevitable interactions between face and palm.

If you’re looking at the photos and wondering whether I forgot to mention that a touchpad is an optional extra, then fear not: it has disappeared behind the panel of silky-feeling Gorilla Glass which stretches all the way across the wristrest. Before you get too excited, though: no, the touchpad doesn’t stretch the full width of the laptop. The touch area spans from the left-hand edge of the space bar to the right-hand edge of the Alt Gr key and there’s about 8mm of dead zone between the space bar and the touchpad and, again, about 8mm of dead zone underneath. It’s a normally proportioned haptic touchpad, but invisible.

As it should be, the touchpad isn’t something you’ll think about too often: it (mostly) works. It’s responsive for everyday cursor pushing and multi-fingered gestures alike and you can adjust the strength of the haptic feedback within Windows, although I preferred it at its default settings.

However, it was less reliable in more relaxed settings. When I was sat on a sofa, or lying down with the laptop propped on my lap, I encountered more than a few accidental long clicks; so much so, that I occasionally found myself flinging random text selections up and down my Google Docs as I was trying to work out what was happening.

The touchpad also occasionally got stuck with a phantom touch when it resumed from sleep, so the touchpad behaved as if I was clicking and dragging with a second finger. A torrent of expletives and a flurry of finger swipes eventually seemed to unstick it, but it’s a disappointing flaw – and one that’s been noted by other tech reviewers, too. (Hi, Tim!)

If you find it hard to get excited about webcams, the XPS 13’s is not going to change anything. The resolution tops out at 1080P and the framerate at 30fps; the image quality is decidedly mediocre, however. Detail is smeared, it blows out highlights far too eagerly and colours are vibrant but noticeably oversaturated, with skintones in particular looking unhealthily rosy. There is a second infrared camera for Windows Hello sign-in, though, which is good to see.

Check price at Amazon

Dell XPS 13 9345 (Snapdragon X-Elite, 2024) review: Display and audio

• Adaptive 30-120Hz display
• Colour accurate and bright
• Limited to sRGB colour gamut

While you can pay the extra and take your pick of upgraded 3K panels or QHD+ touchscreens, our review sample came with the base 1,920 x 1,200 120Hz display. This is the only display of the three to offer a 120Hz refresh rate, and going by our time with it, you probably don’t need to upgrade. Text clarity on the small 13.4in display is crystal clear, and colour accuracy is pretty good. Whether you’re watching YouTube videos, staring at spreadsheets or editing photos or video, it’s good enough to do the job.

To put good enough in numbers, the panel has a peak brightness of 494cd/m², a contrast ratio of 2,133:1, which is very respectable by IPS standards, and colour accuracy is more than adequate for most purposes. Unlike the wide gamut panels in many of its rivals, the XPS 13’s display is limited to sRGB, but it does a good job: the sRGB coverage is a whisker away from 97% and the average Delta E of 1.14 and peak of 4.19 indicate it’s colour accurate across the board apart from a wobble in the most saturated blues.

The display supports variable refresh rates ranging from 30Hz to 120Hz, which allows the XPS 13 to conserve battery life by dropping refresh rates for static images. Switch to 120hz mode, and scrolling and menus feel just that bit smoother and more fluid, which feels nice in day-to-day use. It’s worth mentioning here that motion on the XPS 13 9345’s display looked more fluid at 120Hz than on the Intel-powered XPS 13 9340. Although it was listed as the same panel as the XPS 13 9345, and you’d expect it to be the same, the two displays looked slightly different side by side. It could be something of a panel lottery at play here.

Personally, I’m not a fan of the semi-gloss anti-glare coating. It does take the edge off the brightest reflections, but it’s nowhere near as effective as a full matte coating. You can still make out shapes and light sources fairly clearly on a dark background, so it’s not best suited for working under bright overhead lighting – or in a sun-drenched bay window, for that matter.

Audio is delivered courtesy of Qualcomm’s Aqstic technology, so you get two woofers and two tweeters powered with a couple of watts of amplification apiece. The combination is good enough for video calls or watching the odd YouTube video without desperately rooting around for a pair of headphones, but we’re not talking MacBook Air quality levels here. It is fairly loud, though: crank the volume up and it peaks at a fair 69dbA with pink noise measured from a metre away.

READ NEXT: Best mouse

Dell XPS 13 9345 (Snapdragon X-Elite, 2024) review: Performance and battery life

• Nippy CPU performance
• GPU performance remains modest
• Battery life is good but not class-leading

If you’ve read any other reviews of laptops with the Snapdragon X Elite at the helm, then you know exactly what to expect from this Dell XPS 13. In day-to-day use, it feels as snappy and responsive as you could want, and in CPU benchmarks it’s superlatively quick. In games, however, it drags a fair bit behind both its Intel- and Apple-branded rivals.

In Geekbench 6, the Qualcomm-powered Dell XPS 13 9345 is 22% faster than the XPS 13 9340’s Meteor Lake-generation Intel Core Ultra 7 155H in both the single- and multi-core tests. It even fares well when compared to the newer Lunar Lake generation Core Ultra 9 288V in the Asus Zenbook S 14 (UX5406), with the Snapdragon pushing 0.3% ahead for single core performance while extending a huge 38% lead in the multi-core tests. Apple’s M3 puts up a tougher fight, but even here they trade blows: the Apple chip pushes 12% ahead in single-core performance only to drop 11% behind in multi-core testing.

Shift focus to Geekbench 6’s GPU OpenCL compute tests, however, and Snapdragon’s graphical limitations slide to the fore. The Dell XPS 13 9345 scores 20,814 here – a creditable 4% faster than the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 with the same chip – but it’s way off the pace of the Intel and Apple competition, all of which push upwards of 40% ahead with scores of 30,000 and up. It’s Qualcomm’s Achilles’ Heel, and while casual gaming is on the cards as long as you can make do with older titles and lower resolution and detail settings, it’s the one area where rival architectures steal a significant march.

Fan noise is generally non-existent for day-to-day web browsing, but thrash the CPU and it ramps up to a noticeable whoosh. It’s not excessive – it’s only around 30dBA average from a metre away – but there’s an irritating high-pitched whine to the fan noise centered around 10kHz, so depending on your high-frequency hearing, you may find it more or less annoying.

The cooling works well enough to keep the Snapdragon performing well, and I saw a peak temperature of 96°C during the Cinebench 2024 multi-core benchmarks. At this temperature, the all-core CPU boost suddenly drops from 3.4GHz down to around 2.2GHz and temperatures stabilise around 70°C for the remainder of the test.

Battery life isn’t as good as the best Snapdragon laptops we’ve seen, but then the XPS 13 9345 has a relatively modest 55Wh battery. Take that into account, and its 17hrs 25mins runtime in our video rundown test is perfectly acceptable.

In day-to-day usage, the Snapdragon chipset’s efficiency comes to the fore, and I suspect the variable refresh rate plays its part, here. With Wi-Fi on and working mostly in the browser, and with a couple of hours of YouTube thrown in, I only had to charge the laptop once every two days which is a refreshing change.

Check price at Amazon

Dell XPS 13 9345 (Snapdragon X-Elite, 2024) review: Verdict

If you can look past the usability quirks, you’d be forgiven for developing something of a soft spot for the latest incarnation of the Dell XPS 13. It isn’t particularly thin by today’s standards – especially not when compared to the likes of Apple’s Macbook Air – but it’s light and portable enough for that not to matter.

It’s the Snapdragon X Elite that tips the balance here, however, narrowly justifying a fourth star. Qualcomm’s chip provides power enough for most day-to-day use, and despite the relatively small 55wh battery, it allows the XPS 13’s battery life to keep pace with the latest Intel Lunar Lake laptops in our tests. And, back in the real world, it tends to last more than a day anyway. Gaming performance is behind the pack, but for playing the odd game at low detail settings and below native resolution, it’s acceptable.

What the Dell XPS 13 fumbles, however, it fumbles expertly. Regardless of the engine underneath the bonnet, usability has gone backwards with this generation. The connectivity is restrictive, the keyboard merely okay and the touchbar benefits no one at all – Dell needs to get rid of it, and fast. The touchpad could be refined, too, going by my experience.

If you’re head over heels for the design, then the XPS 13 9345 remains a decent laptop. But with rival laptops serving up a better balance of power, stamina and all-important usability, the Dell XPS 13 needs a serious makeover if it wants to regain its podium-worthy form.