Dell XPS 17 (9700) vs LG Gram 17: Which One Is Better for You?

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This is the comparison of Dell XPS 9700 and LG Gram 17 latest model. Both are good performing laptop but there is a big price difference. So, here we’ll see, is that price difference worth it or not?

BUY NOW	BUY NOW
DELL XPS 17 9700	LG GRAM 17
PROS	PROS
Bright, immersive, 16:10 display. Impressive CPU and graphics power. Slim bezels and attractive design.	Astonishingly lightweight. Long battery life. Port selection. Improved keyboard.
CONS	CONS
Average quality webcam. Not for everyone.	Less-than-par CPU performance. No touchscreen.

SPECIFICATIONS

INTRODUCTION:

Dell XPS 17 9700

This is the latest-gen XPS 17 laptop from Dell. The design, build quality, and importantly the performance of this laptop is just great. The high-end model is really powerful in every work which is so expensive.

LG Gram 17

In this model, most of the changes are on the inside. This time, the LG Gram 17 2020 model has most of the changes comparing with the previous models. 

DESIGN & CONSTRUCTION:

Dell XPS 17 9700

The Dell XPS 17 weighs around 5.5 lbs with a bigger battery and maybe it doesn’t fit for traveling for all. This is a proper desktop replacement for you and it’s just gonna set in your desk at home or the office all day long. As you would expect though, the XPS 17 and the XPS 15 have a lot in common, the keyboard and the touchpad are exactly the same. The massive precision touchpad is incredibly smooth and responsive.

LG Gram 17

It’s super lightweight for having such a large screen. Now, the way they’ve been able to achieve this lightweight is through builds, in particular, the material they’re using is the magnesium alloy. They’ve used it in all of their previous LG grams as well. It’s not a particularly rigid material, it has the flexibility to it but it’s very durable. I actually think this material holds up well over time but it’s not a super stiff laptop.

Now, the keyboard is something they’ve also improved a little bit. Their old one like the 17-inch model from last year used the same keyboard layout as their 15-inch laptop like they didn’t take advantage of the larger chassis and they just stuck the 15-inch keyboard into the 17-inch chassis. They’ve tweaked it this year to actually take advantage of the wider space. So, the layout is a little more spacious, the backspace and Shift key are full-size keys, and there’s also a bigger number pad and there’s also a fingerprint sensor in the top right corner of the keyboard. The keys themselves are a little soft, I don’t feel like they are much responsive but I think most people can get used to this keyboard and actually enjoy it pretty readily. There’s a good trackpad. It’s got a glass surface, nice texture. If you’re coming from a MacBook and somehow you’re interested in this big-screen device but this isn’t as good as a MacBook trackpad.

DISPLAY:

Dell XPS 17 9700

When you open up the XPS 17, there’s a real wow moment with that edge to edge screen and paired with a 4K Plus touch screen. Interestingly, they actually have the exact same resolution despite a size difference with the XPS 17 and XPS 15, it’s 3840 by 2400. There is the same high color accuracy which makes them great for editing as well as 500 nits brightness display HDR500 and Dolby Vision HDR support.

LG Gram 17

This screen is a 16 by 10 aspect ratio instead of your standard 16 by 9. So, you get a little bit more vertical room and it’s a huge screen at 17 inches. It’s a solid screen. It’s 1440p, good brightness, and good color accuracy. This resolution and aspect ratio combo is relatively unique to this device. It’s an LG panel on the LG laptop but it’s just a nice screen for people that are into any kind of creative work or productivity-focused workflows. Now, this large 17-inch screen is really its most unique feature like it’s a big screen in a three-pound laptop. For example, this weighs less than the 13-inch MacBook Pro.

FEATURES:

Dell XPS 17 9700

It starts from just 1400 dollars although that is with the full HD plus screen, integrated UHD graphics, and a smaller 56-watt hour battery. Then for 1900, you get the i7, a much bigger 97-watt hour battery, and the GTX 1650 Ti graphics card. However, if you really want to get the most out of the XPS 17 then you’re gonna need to pay a thousand dollars more to get a model with the RTX 2060 Max-Q graphics, the 4K Plus touchscreen alongside 16 GB of Ram, and one terabyte of storage. 16 GB does seem pretty stingy for that kind of money although you can spec it with 32 GB or even 64 GB Ram. Both the RAM and the two m.2 SSD slots are upgradable. So, if you want to go for a lower spec and then upgrade it later that’s always an option.

The XPS 17 looks pretty much like the bigger brother of the XPS 15. I think, Dell’s refresh of the XPS 17 this year is pretty much one of the biggest I’ve seen since XPS introduced. I mean the edge to edge screen, they’ve got rid of the bottom bezel, the tall 16 by 10 aspect ratio, the bigger trackpad, richer sounding speakers, the fact that we get both the fingerprint reader and face unlocking as well as the shift to USB-C only. It also has upgrades on the inside with Intel 10th gen processors, and faster 1650 Ti or 2060 Max-Q graphics cards. So, the 2020 XPS laptops are genuinely a big upgrade.

The only difference between the XPS 17 and XPS 15 really is we get the widest speaker grille flanking the keyboard. There are big improvements over the last year but still not quite up to the standard of the MacBook Pro 16. When you turn the volume above 80%, it does start to distort, so speed quality is good but not great. As for the webcam, we get 720p video from the camera on the top bezels. The quality isn’t fantastic, it’s noisy, it’s not the sharpest. Also, like the Macbook, Dell’s got full USB-C here. We get four Thunderbolt 3 and an SD card reader.

On the inside running the 3D mark times by benchmark, the XPS 17 with the 2060 Max-Q gets 73 degrees which’s pretty significant and shows just how good this vapor chamber cooling system is. As for the processor with Cinebench, this peaked 100 degrees Celsius although, in the benchmark, the XPS 17-inch dropped to a low of 2.92 gigahertz. So, relative to their advertised clock speed and along with the two extra cores, the XPS 17 is just faster and also cooler. The XPS 17 with the vapor chamber cooling system makes a big difference over the XPS 15. If you are gaming or doing regular high intensive workloads, then the XPS 17 does make more sense.

LG Gram 17

Inside, there are a couple of things that haven’t changed. They still have a single RAM slot, so you get eight GB that’s onboard as well as a single slot that you can upgrade if you want. There’s also the Wi-Fi card, this is running the latest Intel card that supports Wi-Fi 6 but there are some big changes on the inside. The first one is the drives, this system is now running finally PCIe NVMe which means that they’re super fast. The old LG gram basically every previous laptop has run these slower SATA drives which were really weird to put into such a premium device. These are now running super-fast PCIe drives.

Another big change in this is the thermal system. So, two years ago and the model last year didn’t have great thermals on the 15-inch model because it’s just a super-thin device but you’re limited, they have changed the fan to the point where I would now call it a good performance. It’s not an amazing performer in thermal controlling, it’s still an LG Gram but in the realm of ultrabooks, it’s average maybe even slightly below average because the Gram uses a 15 watt CPU instead of the more common 25 watts but this year, it can finally maintain a slight turbo clock unlike before.

This one has a very quiet fan noise. It’s an inaudible fan on idle, and even on load, it’s a tranquil system. The speakers are located at the bottom. They don’t sound great.

There is a Thunderbolt 3 port that supports charging again but they still have a regular barrel plugged AC adapter. It’s got three USB-A which is nice and a micro SD slot, this is good for some people but I think a full-size SD card slot would be better but I think the overall port selection on this device is fair.

PERFORMANCE:

Dell XPS 17 9700

In Cinebench R20, the XPS 17 9700 scores 3696 which is 32% higher than XPS 15. In Geekbench 5, single-core performance is 1300 and in multi-core, the XPS 17 gets 7852 which is 28% than XPS 15. In the Geekbench graphics test, the XPS 17 gets 67500 which is 51% faster in OpenCL and 50% faster in CUDA, and then in the 3D mark time spy benchmark, the XPS 17 gets 5476 overall score which is 44% faster than the 15. This all means, the internal upgrades of XPS 17 are powerful than the XPS 15.

In all the gaming tests, the XPS 17 is significantly faster. On average, it’s 40% faster than the XPS 15. Once you drop the rest to 1080p, the XPS 17 is a lot quicker. Also, as 2060 is an RTX card we also get access to ray tracing, DSS, and the faster encoder which helps with video streaming. For video editing, it can comfortably handle 4K video and export times with 10-minute 4K project took about 11 minutes. The XPS 17 is significantly faster in benchmarks and gaming and a little bit faster in video editing although 32 GB of Ram would really unlock the full performance of this laptop.

LG Gram 17

These are running the 10th Gen Intel CPU, so they have pretty good CPU performance and significantly better GPU performance than their previous generation. So, they’re good for photo editing and usable for video editing but because the lower CPU wattage is not as powerful as some other ultrabooks but the overall takeaway, this is a way better performer than any other LG gram previously. In gaming performance, if you’re interested is okay. It is playable for games that aren’t super demanding but it’s not a gaming laptop.

BATTERY:

Dell XPS 17 9700

We get about six hours of use from the XPS 17 with the 97 watt-hour battery. This battery life assumption is for the model, so if you use the 1080p model then you may have longer battery life than this. In the smaller 56-watt hour battery, you get less battery life than his assumption.

LG Gram 17

The big change they’ve made is the battery. This is now an 80 watt-hour battery, last year it was 72 watt-hour, so that’s like a 10% increase but it is noticeable. So, the battery life on this is a nine and a half hour system which is very impressive for a 17-inch screen.

WHICH TO BUY?

If you’re a gamer or a streamer and portability isn’t the number one factor for you, then the XPS 17 is absolutely the way to go. It gives a really great performance and offers a cooling system. Compared to previous generations of LG grams, you’re getting something that feels appropriate. If you’re interested in something that’s super thin and super light, it’s literally the lightest 17-inch device and has good performance considering what you’re getting.

In my opinion, the Dell XPS 17 9700 will be better in terms of performance, thermal system, and everything but it’s really expensive comparatively. Even though the LG Gram is priced low, there are so many disadvantages if we compare this one with Dell XPS 9700 and the only great thing is, it is super lightweight. Considering all LG Gram’s previous models, this LG Gram 17 2020 model is really better. If you want a laptop with less budget and decent performance, the LG Gram is also a better one.

Expert reviews of Dell XPS 17 9700:

By Expertreviews
A magnificent laptop with a wonderful display – the perfect laptop for professional photo editors.

By Cnet
It’s one of the smallest 17-inch laptops for creative use I’ve seen — barely larger than its middle sibling, the XPS 15 9500 and only a bit more substantial than a MacBook Pro 16. And in many ways, it’s one of my favorite big boys to date.

By Theverge
This isn’t the best laptop for anyone who’s mostly working in Chrome around the house or in libraries or coffee shops. It’s really for power users who might need to occasionally work on the go and who have found that smaller screens and lower-powered systems fall short of their needs. For that person, this is the best laptop to buy.

Expert reviews of LG Gram 17:

By Tom’sguide
The LG Gram 17 is lighter than most 17-inch laptops, but its middling performance gives us pause.

By Pocket-lint
This is the only 17-inch laptop made for those after a big-screen portable rather than a huge, powerful workstation. It’s ultra-light for the size, which makes it mighty impressive.

By Pcmag
A few design improvements to the LG Gram 17 make the world’s lightest 17-inch laptop an excellent choice for frequent travelers who need all the screen real estate they can get.

Arya

Hello! I'm Surendar Arya, a passionate tech writer from Uttar Pradesh, India. I'm a freelance contributor to the tech blog - The World's Best And Worst. My enthusiasm for technology drives me to explore the latest trends and innovations in the field. I take immense pleasure in guiding individuals on how to leverage technology for their benefit, making their lives easier and more efficient.