By Brady Betzel

High-powered and color-accurate mobile computers are exploding in the market as we try to find the balance between hybrid workflows in the office, at home or even at the beach. It seems that even though these new systems are incredibly powerful, there are two questions to ask when you are looking to purchase:

1) Do you want macOS or Windows?
2) What’s your budget?

Apple’s latest MacBook Pro with M1 Max chips is great if you like the macOS ecosystem and have between $4,000 and $5,000 to spend. The Windows-based personal computer market is a little more jam-packed with options thanks to Windows being available to so many manufacturers.

Typically, enterprise clients look for officially labeled “workstations” due to their commitment to 24/7 uptime, top-notch security features and support. But what if you are looking to build your own social media community, Twitch stream, YouTube channel or professional mobile video-editing infrastructure and don’t need an official “workstation”? Well, Dell has an affordable and highly efficient option with its XPS 17 Creator Edition laptop, which offers you the flexibility of working wherever you like.

The Dell XPS 17 Creator Edition laptop falls into Nvidia’s Studio Laptop category. To me it’s Nvidia’s way of labeling a high-end mobile computer as being almost workstation-class without the official title. It’s for users who don’t need an Nvidia Quadro GPU but still want the high-end features found in the RTX line of GPUs. To be honest, that’s probably 80% of their users.

Digging In
I was sent the Dell XPS 17 Creator Edition laptop, technically labeled the 9710, packed with the following components:

• 11th Generation Intel Core i7-11800H (24MB cache, up to 4.6 GHz, 8 cores)
• Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 6GB GDDR6 (70W)
• 16GB, 2x8GB, DDR4, 3200MHz RAM
• 1TB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD
• 17-inch 3840×2400, InfinityEdge Touch Anti-Reflective 500-nit display
• 4-Thunderbolt 4 ports, 1-Universal audio jack
• 1 SD-card slot
• 720p 30fps webcam
• Killer Wi-Fi 6 AX1650 (2×2) and Bluetooth 5.1
• 6-Cell battery, 97WHr (integrated)

The Dell XPS 17 Creator Edition I am reviewing retails for $2,499.

The Dell XPS 17 Creator Edition is a workhorse. It hits all the major points I would want if I was looking to purchase an affordable mobile computer. The processor feels fast enough when working in apps like Maxon Cinema 4D and Adobe Premiere Pro, the GPU and memory can crunch through color correction and OFX plugins like Neat Video noise reduction inside of Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve 17.4.3, and the display is beautiful. Apparently, I am a sucker for Dell’s displays; every time I get one to review, I love it. They are sharp and color-accurate, and the bezel is super-thin — and it can still keep the webcam in the bezel without adding a notch in the middle of the screen (sorry, I had to do it).

Testing
When testing, I ran a bunch of benchmarks and exported my favorite one-minute sequence of CPU/GPU-intensive clips — with and without Neat Video noise reduction — from within Resolve.

Here are my benchmark results:

• Cinebench R23
  • CPU (multi-core): 11358
  • CPU (single-core): 1509
    • MP Ratio 7.53x
  • Corona 1.3 benchmark
    • Render Time: 02:04
    • Rays/sec: 3,909,260
  • Blender 3.0, Gooseberry Render Test
    • Time: 20:27.57
  • LuxMark v3.0
    • Hotel Scene – OpenCL CPU + GPU: 7320
    • LuxBall Scene – OpenCL CPU + GPU: 33,761
    • Mic Scene – OpenCL CPU + GPU: 22,680
  • NeatBench 5
    • 1080p Best Combination: CPU (8 cores) & GPU (RTX 3060): 32.3 fps
  • Octane Bench 2020.2.3
    • Score: 281.37
  • PugetBench
    • PugetBench After Effects 0.95.1: 643
    • PugetBench Photoshop 0.93.3: 770
    • PugetBench Premiere Pro 0.95.4:
      • Standard: 588
      • Extended: 536
    • PugetBench DaVinci Resolve 0.92.3: 953
  • RealBench 2.56
    • Image Editing: 210,864
      • Time: 25.2675
    • Encoding: 167,759
      • Time: 31.7598
    • OpenCL: 184,951
      • KSamples/sec: 34046
    • Heavy Multitasking: 115,514
      • Time: 66.0695
    • System Score: 169,772
  • Superposition Benchmark
    • 1080p Extreme: 4247
      • FPS: Min 24.62, Avg 31.77, Max 37.97
      • GPU °C: Min 46.0, Max 70.0
      • GPU Utilization: Max 100%
    • 4K Optimized
      • FPS: Min 35.27, Avg 41.74, Max 50.55
      • GPU °C: Min 42.0, Max 72.0
      • GPU Utilization: Max 99%
    • V-Ray 5.0.20
      • V-Ray: 8,589 vsamples
      • V-Ray GPU CUDA: 670 vpaths
      • V-Ray GPU RTX: 1,069 vrays

In some real-world testing, I used the following clips in a 3840×2160 UHD sequence to run export tests in both Premiere 2022 (22.1.2) and Resolve 17.4.3:

• ARRI RAW: 3840×2160 24fps – 7 seconds, 12 frames
• ARRI RAW: 4448×1856 24fps – 7 seconds, 12 frames
• BMD RAW: 6144×3456 24fps – 15 seconds
• Red RAW: 6144×3072 23.976fps – 7 seconds, 12 frames
• Red RAW: 6144×3160 23.976fps – 7 seconds, 12 frames
• Sony a7siii: 3840×2160 23.976fps – 15 seconds

Adobe Premiere 2022 (22.1.2)

I exported 3840×2160 UHD files in a few different flavors: DNxHR HQX 10-bit, H.264 and a DPX image sequencer via Adobe Media Encoder. These exports came from two versions of the sequence: 1) basic color correction and 2) 110% scale, basic color correction and Gaussian Blur set to 20. I didn’t run the Neat Video noise reduction because I don’t own the Premiere version; the trial only works on a 1280×720 section, and even with the trial, I was getting four-plus hours of export time, which is unusable.

Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve 17.4.3
I used the same clips as I used in Premiere but added the Neat Video noise reduction export. Noise reduction is one of the most taxing processes you can perform on a CPU/GPU when working with multimedia, so it lends itself to really pushing a system to its limits. Inside of Resolve, I ran the Neat Video benchmarking process and in 1080p, Neat’s Best Combination: GPU only (Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU): 27.1fps in 3840p the Best Combination: CPU (7 cores) and GPU (Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 laptop GPU) – 6.03fps.

Physical Details
Physically, the Dell XPS 17 Creator Edition weighs around 5.3 pounds and has a modern matte silver finish. It measures 0.77 inches by 14.74 inches by 9.76 inches — about the same footprint as most other 17-inch laptops — but it’s very thin.

The touch-screen monitor can reach a brightness level up to 500 nits, which isn’t the brightest it can be, but it is still very bright for everyday use. The aspect ratio is 16:10 but feels natural and not out of place. The Dell XPS 17 Creator Edition monitor comes pre-color-calibrated from the factory — reaching 100% of the Adobe RGB color gamut and 94% of the DCI-P3 color gamut.

Around the outside are four Thunderbolt 4 ports, an SD card slot and a headphone/microphone jack. The Dell XPS 17 comes with a Thunderbolt 4 mini-dock that has a USB-A port and an HDMI output port. The mini-dock is a little annoying; it would be nice to have a USB-A port right in the laptop for my Resolve dongle or iLok. But the mini-dock is helpful, and it really isn’t that big.

Room for Improvement?
Some things that I would like to see improved are the hard edge under the touchpad mouse and the smaller/tighter keyboard. The edge along the bottom of the laptop can dig into your wrist a little bit if you use it for an extended period of time. It isn’t terrible because it is a soft/matte plastic, but still, it can dig in a little.

The keyboard takes getting used to (at least for me). The keys feel a little closer together than what I’m used to, so I found myself hitting the wrong keys or caps lock instead of the letter “A” a lot. But fear not; eventually, I got used to it.

Summing Up
Overall, the Dell XPS 17 Creators Edition is a great middle-of-the-road laptop. It isn’t going to beat out some 32-core Threadripper or even the MacBook Pro with M1 Max, but at $2,500, you wouldn’t expect it to. I would suggest spending the extra $200 to upgrade the 16GB of RAM to 32GB. But other than that, it is a great machine, complete with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060.

And if you don’t care about a 3840×2400 resolution touch screen, then save yourself another $400. You’ll still get 500 nits 1920×1200 of brightness. Find out more about the Nvidia Studio series of notebooks, including using the Nvidia Studio Omniverse, Broadcast and Canvas apps.

Brady Betzel is an Emmy-nominated online editor at Margarita Mix in Hollywood, working on shows like Life Below Zero and Uninterrupted: The Shop . He is also a member of the Producers Guild of America. You can email Brady at bradybetzel@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @allbetzroff.