It’s no hidden knowledge retained by a privileged few that Intel’s push (and rather creation) for “Ultrabooks” comes after increasing pressure from tablets and Apple’s MacBook Airs. The fact that no company could do what Apple did – pack in almost top notch hardware in an impressively small frame with incredible battery life to boot – Intel had to step in with $300M to make OEMs do something about the falling sales of Intel notebook processors.

And since last year we have seen a ton of ultrabooks hit the market. Many have made an impression on us, and despite mimicking some of the aesthetics of the MacBook Air, nothing has really come close to providing that quintessential ‘Apple experience’.  That is until now; the Dell XPS 13 promises to be what we secretly always wanted ultrabooks to be, a MacBook Air with Windows without the high cost.

The Design

So let’s have a look at the XPS 13 and see what it brings to the table. The first thing you’ll notice is that if it weren’t for the Dell logo on the lid, the XPS 13 looks almost exactly like a MacBook Air. The dimensions and the cuts and the sweeping angles look very like an MBA. The other major distinguishing factor comes from the carbon fiber on the back that gracefully wraps the rear end of the XPS 13. Better yet is the small metal flap that hides your Windows 7 serial key behind the XPS logo.

The XPS 13 is designed to look extremely simple, and as such there are hardly any nooks and crannies. The number of ports is minimal, with the power, USB 2.0 and 3.5mm jack on the left, and on the right we have one mini-DisplayPort and one USB 3.0 port. There’s nothing on the back or front side.

Well, there is one cool small strip of white LED light on the front to indicate the power state of the XPS 13. Also, there’s a battery level indicator on the right side, very similar to MacBook Pros (although there it’s shown in green light).

Keyboard & Monitor

Opening up the XPS 13 we’re greeted with a pleasant looking chiclet keyboard with large indented keys. The keyboard is, of course, backlit with white LEDs. The palmrest area is magnesium alloy with a soft felt paint finish that easy on the hands, while the glass touchpad is nice and large, although I’m not a fan of the squishy mouse buttons at the bottom.

The Corning Gorilla glass display feels very sturdy, and is actually easy on the eyes with a rich contrast, but the glossy finish takes away from the appeal during brightly lit conditions. One of the best things about the display was the 1cm black edges, making the 13.3-inch screen look larger than it is. Viewing angles are typical in this class of laptops, with anything over 120° from the sides bringing in the “negative” effect, and if the screen isn’t tilted directly towards your eyes you’ll start seeing dark shades on the top.

Usage

With the Core i5-2467M @ 1.60GHz (Turbo boosting up to 2.30GHz), 4GB of dual-channel DDR3 memory and 128GB SSD the XPS 13 has all the right components to make it good enough for general daily usage. Of the 128GB, only 98.9GB is available after formatting. And after the Windows install and all the bloatware from Dell, just over 73GB is available. Using this with one or two games and a couple of hundred MP3s is fine, but forget storing anything huge as the drive space will be sucked up quicker than you’ll realize.

Overall using the 1.3kg XPS 13 was a pleasure. It’s fairly fast thanks to the Core i5 processor, and the 4GB of RAM is adequate for watching HD movies, doing office work and browsing the net. Heck, weak as the integrated Intel HD 3000 graphics are, I still managed to play DOTA 2 on it, albeit with lowest settings.

That said, the XPS 13 gets fairly hot when under full stress, which I experienced while running benchmarks and playing gamers. The carbon fiber bottom keeps the XPS 13 comfortably warm; however, the center metal plate is too hot to touch directly. HW Monitor showed the chassis maxing out at 85°C while CPU itself touched 85°C. And just when the heavy duty stuff kicks in, the puny fan inside kicks into high gear, which may or may not be irritating depending on your tolerance levels (and whether you’re wearing headphones!).

Benchmarks

Since performance on most ultrabooks remains the same, what I decided to do this time around was to test the performance depending on the power modes. So first I ran PCMark 7 with the XPS 13 set to ‘High Power’ and plugged in. Then with ‘High Performance’, but unplugged. Finally I ran PCMark 7 with the XPS 13 on ‘Balanced’ and unplugged. Running it on ‘Power Saver’ mode results in a performance hit that’s felt even when browsing the internet, so no point in benchmarking in that mode.

Not bad, but we a performance drop of 5.4% when the XPS 13 is unplugged, and a further 7.5% when running in ‘Balanced’ mode. Not too bad, because the battery life I clocked in with ‘Balanced’, browsing the net and watching YouTube HD was just over 6 hours.

Conclusion

The Dell XPS 13 brings nothing new to the ultrabook market, as the basic performance shows. But what it does do, and with a lot of class, is an ultrabook form factor that’s desirable by many. You’re not stuck with different aspects of a design you may or may not appreciate. The XPS 13 is a class act from Dell, and if you ignore the rather liberal inspiration from the MacBook Air, then the aluminum chassis with carbon fiber composite base presents an aesthetically pleasing design. The light weight and 18mm – 6mm thickness is something that makes for an ideal ultrabook. Also, starting at $300 cheaper than a similarly specced MacBook Air, you can’t go wrong with the XPS 13 at all.

Cooler Master heatsinks have been mighty impressive in the past, and the new X6 CPU cooler promises to be just as good as its predecessors. Designed as a high-end cooling solution for your CPU, the X6 is moderately big, but with a dynamic design through which cooling is much more improved.

Design

So first of all the let’s take a look at the outside design, and what you’ll notice immediately is the angled direction of the heatsink. The fan will be sucking in air diagonal to the bottom of the chassis, which essentially means easier intake of cool air. It’s a bit difficult to explain in words, so just have a look at this picture by Cooler Master that explains the direction of airflow.

Coming back to the design, the other thing of note is the unique honeycomb architecture of the aluminum fins which, according to Cooler Master, provide 20% more surface area compared to flat fin design to increase cooling.

The copper base is polished to a nearly mirror finish, with six 6mm heatpipes coming out from either side, extending into the fins above.  The 120mm fan up front with PWM support (600 to 1,900 RPM) ensures that ample airflow through the heatsink.

Installation

Installation was a matter of just 4 minutes once I figured out that I had to essentially turn the motherboard upside to screw in the nuts on the backplate from behind. Thankfully the supplied mini spanner made this an easy job, otherwise tightening it would’ve been extremely (read: IKEA level) frustrating.

In any case, once I was up and running it was time to put the engineering effort behind the X6 to test. The following testbed was used:

Benchmarks

And now it’s time to see the benchmarks. But before I go ahead, let me just mention that apart from testing the Core i7-2600K at default speeds of 3.4GHz, it was also tested at overclocked speeds of 4.7GHz @ 1.45v which is considerably high voltage generating a fairly higher amount of heat than stock settings. The regular suite of Cinebench R11.5 and 7-Zip (ran four times) and Prime95 (running for 30 minutes) was used.

While idle performance remains the same on both heatsinks, the Cooler Master X6 really flexes its muscles under load, performing exceptionally well under overclocked conditions. Stock speeds show that the X6 has a 10% lead over the Intel XTS 100H, but under load we see almost 18% increase.

Conclusion

Now the fan noise on the X6 was very low, barely audible during idle state, and making a gentle purr when under load when the CPU was overclocked. Temperatures were exceptionally low under such a high overclock; of course, let’s not forget that Sandy Bridge also has some part to play in this with a rather cool architecture at 32nm. Still, the performance of the Cooler Master X6 is undeniable.

Ivy Bridge

Welcome to the 22nm era as Intel swings in the “Tock” phase of their yearly CPU upgrades. Today marks the introduction of the long awaited Ivy Bridge platform which is basically running the Sandy Bridge architecture on a 22nm process.

While basic operations on Ivy Bridge remain similar to Sandy Bridge, let’s look at some of the features that differentiate the new processors from last year’s models. Well, first thing’s first, the 22nm process, shrunken down from Sandy Bridge’s 32nm, provides a cooler processor that requires lesser power.

We see this factor shine during the overclocking process as our Sandy Bridge i7-2600K processor would run stable at an overclock of 4.7GHz @ 1.45v, whereas on some of the motherboards tested, the i7-3770K ran perfectly fine on as low as 1.3v with a 4.7GHz overclock.

Next up is the much touted Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics processor which promises performance increase from the HD 3000 by up to 50% in some cases. Of course, HD 4000 also brings DX11 support which helps with faster QuickSync performance in addition.

Lastly there are some core level changes that improve upon the Sandy Bridge architecture by allowing (overclocked) memory speeds of up to 2800MHz.

Intel Z77

The Ivy Bridge processors are launched in conjunction with Intel’s new Z77 chipset; also an improvement over last year’s Z68 chipset. I have discussed about the Z77 chipset in our review of the MSI Z77A-GD55 motherboard. However, let’s have a quick look at some of the new features.

Not only can you overclock the CPU and memory, but the GPU as well. 2x SATA 3 ports are supported natively, as is Intel’s Smart Response Technology; certain motherboards have mSATA slots for micro-SSD expansion. Up to 4xUSB 3.0 ports are supports in addition to 10xUSB 2.0 ports. Lastly we have native PCIe 3.0 slots, ranging from 2 to 3 depending on the motherboard manufacturer.

So without further ado, let’s look at the contestants in today’s Ivy Bridge motherboard roundup.