Officially announced at the CES 2018 show, Dell's new XPS 15 2-in-1 convertible laptop will be available with two Intel's 8th Generation Core with Radeon RX Vega M Graphics APUs, the Core i5-8305G or the Core i7-8705G, both packing Radeon RX Vega M GL graphics with 20 CUs (1280 stream processors).

The new Dell XPS 15 2-in-1 can also be configured with up to 16GB of RAM, up to 1TB of PCIe storage, and either the 15.6-inch Ultrasharp 4K UHD (3840x2160) InfinityEdge touch screen or the 15.6-inch FHD (1920x1080) InfinityEdge touch screen. It also comes with a 75WHr battery which should keep it running for about 15 hours, at least according to Dell. All of this is packed in a premium looking CNC-machined aluminum chassis with Gore Thermal Insulation, special maglev keyboard, and support for its new Dell Premium Active Pen.

Tomshardware.com did not waste time to get inside the new XPS 15 2-in-1 to check out the cooling of the Intel's Core i5-8305G CPU which packs the CPU, the GPU and the HBM2 on the same package by using the new EMIB (Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge) technology.

Since the new XPS 15 2-in-1 is a much thinner laptop/convertible (with 9-16mm thickness), Dell had to somewhat reinvent the cooling. Since the actual package takes less board space, Dell has equipped it with two dedicated 86x86mm fans which have a higher number of metal-infused blades and three copper heatpipes to cool the 65W Kaby Lake-G CPU.

On the other hand, Hothardware.com focused on testing that same Kaby Lake-G CPU. Bear in mind that this is the slower Core i5-8305G CPU, paired up with 16GB of RAM and a fast NVMe PCIe SSD and that we are still looking at early drivers, so results could be higher once both Dell, Intel, and AMD further tune the performance.

According to tests, the XPS 15 2-in-1 managed to get an average frame rate of 34.87 frames per second in Rise of the Tomb Raider on high image quality settings (it could also be very high settings as it still needs to be confirmed) and at 1920x1080 resolution.

The Dell XPS 15 2-in-1 can outperform the Acer Swift 3 with Intel's 8th gen CPU and Geforce MX 150, which got an average of 23.56fps. Just for laughs, Hothardware.com threw in an average score of Intel's 8th gen CPU with HD 620 IGP, which managed to get measly 8.23fps on medium settings.

While this performance is far from great and will get you playable framerates in just some of the games at lower quality settings, it is still quite impressive for such a thin and light laptop and Dell is aiming to get the performance somewhere between the GTX 1050 and the GTX 1060 Max-Q.

As announced earlier by Dell, the new XPS 15 2-in-1 will be launching in spring 2018, starting at US $1299.99.