Recently bought QHD model, 8 gb RAM, i7 5600 CPU. I am OK with everything except the slowish performance. Before this one I had a 2011 MBP 13 (i7 2620m CPU, 8 gb RAM, intel hd 3000, 1280*800 resolution) and that 4 year old laptop still performs better than my new XPS 13. There is no big difference, but I can still notice XPS is slower (or not as snappy) on any basic operation on desktop + chrome. I dont play games just web and MS office.
I checked any tweaks, TDP settings to max performance, clean win install, disabling speedstep, updating all drivers etc. Not helping. I installed PCMark and did the Home test, resulted 2170. I searched and found some websites and they get 2600-2700 with the same test. I also did the diagnose stuff at Dell which returned no hardware errors. I feel like there is no hardware - software issue, it is just the resolution difference making all the change, but not quite sure. The only conflict to my theory is the differing PCMark Home results. I am about to return the XPS as I am really annoyed that, whatever the screen resolutions are, MBP is obviously faster although 4 years older.
Any explanations or help for the above, I really like the design and want to keep it on the other hand.