Whether you use your laptop for immersive gaming, high-res content creation, or high-powered data processing, it’s a safe bet that you’d welcome a boost in computing power to help tackle the ever-increasing hardware demands of your state-of-the-art applications. The right hardware upgrades can supercharge your experience on day one, but it can be difficult to cut through marketing noise and figure out which upgrades are worth the investment. In recent tests, we discovered that even with a high-performance system like the Dell XPS 15, an upgrade of just one model year—with a combination of updated Intel CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs—can result in big performance gains.

Our tech team compared three 2023 edition Dell XPS 15 (9530) laptops with Intel Core i7-13700H processors and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs to a 2022 edition XPS 15 (9520) model with a Core i7-12700H processor and GeForce RTX 3050 Ti GPU. We conducted 3DMark Time Spy and Time Spy Extreme benchmark tests that stressed the CPU and GPU capabilities of the four XPS 15 models. While it’s not surprising that the 2023 edition XPS 15 delivered higher CPU performance metrics than last year’s model, we found that the vastly greater graphics performance of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 Series graphics cards in this year’s XPS 15 went beyond typical gen-to-gen performance bumps. In the 2023 systems with new RTX 4060 and RTX 4070 GPUs, we saw graphics performance improvements of up to 47.9 percent and 61.9 percent, respectively.

Based on our findings, professionals who value cutting-edge performance should consider upgrading to a 2023 Dell XPS 15 (9530) equipped with new 13th Gen Intel Core i7 processors and NVIDIA RTX 40 Series graphics cards. Creators could expect improved content editing and rendering performance, data analysts could crunch larger datasets with fewer lags, and forecasters could collaborate more smoothly in resource-intensive workflows.

To read more about our gen-over-gen Dell XPS 15 and NVIDIA RTX graphics cards comparison tests, check out the report below.