Upgrading my 2023 Dell XPS 15 9530! And How YOU Can Too! 

People in America / Canada / Europe are so lucky. You can just easily return the RAM sticks if you bought the wrong ones or you don't like them. Here in Nigeria, you would never find those sticks and if you import them from America, and realise you bought the wrong one. Lol that's it. Money wasted. If you buy a phone and you don't like it, you are stuck with it. No such thing as return policy here lol. You don't like it?! Deal with it lol. Anyways! Great video.

I could be wrong, but you should always disconnect the battery regardless, as most laptops (unless you shutdown with a key-combo) have a form of soft-powerdown (especially since using soft-power buttons), so I imagine there is still power to the board.

I'm a bench tech for PCs and laptops...so I may go a bit beyond what the average person might...but really it is not all that complex. In addition to upgrading the RAM, and replacing any spinning rust drives with SSDs, if it is an older laptop, first clean the exhaust fans. Next, I will remove the heat sink, clean all the old thermal compound off the chips and heatsink with isopropyl alcohol, then carefully apply new thermal compound. This will ensure that your laptop will last a good long time.

I just received my XPS15 today. It came with 32gb ram and a 1TB hard drive. I may leave it be and not upgrade. It runs fine for me.

I upgraded an old 2011 Toshiba L755 by HDD to SDD and the laptop revived and is working perfectly as my desktop and smart TV, now the bottleneck is CPU (Core i5-2450M) under very heavy web browsing.

Great video. So you were able to add the new SSD at the provided slot. Did you remove the existing SSD? I cannot see that you pointed where the existing SSD is? And if it has just 1 slot for SSD then how did you get Windows OS after you powered on the laptop?

You are the best. A perfect and patient teacher.

Thank you soo much for this vid, this vid helped me out alot. I bought the xps 17 and bought a tool kit. added 84GB crucial ram to the laptop like you did. man your right the dell was hard to get the lid off. i thought I was never gonna get it off. Oh I also went the xps 17 because of your video on the vaper chamber. what do you think is about re thermo paste the laptop? ive watch other channels adding paste to the dell, but they never tell what brand or kind of paste they are using. Thank you and keep moving forward. Jason North Carolina

this is greaat. my current laptop has two ssds, the main one where I have my OS. and the one I installed in place of the optical drive where I store my files. I was looking for a new laptop with similar layout. Thanks, video helped me a lot.

One thing that is unfortunately not covered very well on the "upgrade" videos for this unit is where exactly the seam is to separate it at and how to get into what is a very tight fit. Yours is the first one that showed opening it from the front rather than the back first. The key that still isn't called out well enough is finding the small notch in the center front that allows you to between the bottom cover and the keyboard level trim. Once I finally saw that notch, which had totally blended in for me such that I missed it, I was on a much faster road to getting that bottom cover to actually separate. Once that's done, it's easy schmisy to make the swap and get back to putting it all back together.

Can't wait for the review

Any chance you could do a review on the thermals? Recording the fan decibels would be useful. Thanks

Your reviews are always great! I'm hoping you can help me with a decision. Should I get the RTX 4050 (6 cores) or pay up a few hundred more for the RTX 4060 graphics card (8 cores) when I purchase my new Dell XPS 17 9730 with the gen 13 i7 chip, 16GB RAM, 512 GB SSD, Windows 11 home, and the 4k UHD+ display? Is there much of a difference in performance for my use cases below, will the 4050 perhaps run cooler and maybe extend battery life a bit more, other? Thanks so much! My use cases: I do not do gaming or video/audio editing or huge spread sheets. I do normal every day home office type stuff, sometimes mobile, mostly plugged in but when I do go mobile it can be many hours or a good portion of the day at a time, pretty much all online, lots of streaming quotes, watch lists and charts, many chrome tabs open at once, a few downloaded programs like Fidelity Active Trader Pro, doing youtube research or watching youtube movies, often alt/tabbing between different open or streaming things I'm doing, some chat, email, basic stuff but lots of it for long hours days and evenings seven days a week. My laptop can easily be up and running 6, 8, 10 or more hours at a time, turned off for a few then back on for a few, then repeated the next day, and so on.

Love the T-Shirt! :) Often, I will go ahead and repaste the CPU/GPU's as Dell's stock thermal paste is only good for about a year of heavy use and then it's just chalk and the fans run all the time.... At least that's my experience. Never messed with a vapor chamber setup before, but since this isn't, I would definitely repaste.

How many ssd drive slots does this have I have last years XPS are they similar? As I have a 2TB currently and its pretty much completely full. Cheers

I completely forgot about you because of the algorithm. I cleared my cookies and cache and you showed up on top of my algorithm after a refresh. Good video

What microphone do you use? Sound quality is always great!

Thanks. So I might as well buy one with little ram and a small ssd, and upgrade in a few years?

I have the 9510 and one of the things in an upgrade I go is upgrading the OS, from boring old windows to Linux and I LOVE IT! Could you in the future by a laptop from someone like system76 who makes high quality computers and puts Linux on them?

I'm actually looking forward for some benchmarks on the new i9 and RTX 4070 low powered compared to 3050 Ti, before any upgrade! 😉

I decided to upgrade my 9520 to 32 GB RAM while ordering because it was cheaper than buying third-party chips. However, I added 980 PRO by myself later

IDK who is looking for this, but I use Ubuntu as my primary OS. This laptop runs 22.04 perfect. I have the UHD+ screen and battery lasts ~10hrs (GPU disabled). No additional drivers were needed, but make sure to install 3rd party software when installing Ubuntu. Also, I use TLP for better battery performance.

How’s the battery life on the xps with the 4070?

Hello ! Great video ! I was wondering if you know where I could find a replacement bottom case for my Dell XPS 15 9530 (2023), this is the model i think you used in you're video. I've found hinges, wifi adapters, screws but no back panel yet. If you got a lead, that would be great !

I like that Dell and many other manufacturers sell laptops that can be upgraded.

Wait, you said about BIOS update after the upgrade. What is caused by a new hardware? Do I need to do anything with BIOS or windows if I update RAM on that laptop?

I have a small question. Is the compartments on the inside the same as the XPS 15 9520? I want to upgrade mine and was wondering if I can buy the same SSD.

I upgraded my Acer Nitro 5 (Ryzen 5 4600+Geforce 1650, 8gb RAM, 512GB M.2-SSD) to 32 GB DDR4-RAM, and an additional 4TB SSD-Harddrive and am able to play with rather good FPS and Stability. And i have the option to add another m.2-Drive :)

Great video! Do you know if this XPS supports the 5200MHz RAM sticks or just the 4800? Or anyone else, thanks! The i9 supports up to 5200 but not sure this XPS does

So I have to look out for DDR5 and 4800Mhz, what about RAM Timings?

Why is it that there are no unboxings/reviews yet of the Dell XPS 17 9730?

why we dont have an xps 17 vid this year? i already got mine but i still enjoy this vids

Hi there! Does your battery drain quick with both ssds installed??

I haven't updated a computer since my HP desktop 6th Gen i5, from 12 GB ram to 32 GB ram. 😃

Have you been able to test the thermal performance yet? I’m looking at getting the 13th gen i9 with the 4070 and didn’t know how the cooler would handle it. I haven’t seen any reviews on this newer model yet so I’m curious of mild to moderate gaming performance too.

Can the Dell XPS 15 take more than one M.2 NVMe drive as I am watching the video and he's already in the OS to format it, so it looks secondary to me.

Can DDR5-5600 be used in lieu of 4800? I know I won't get 5600 performance but I am thinking in terms of 'future-proofing' my equipment and still be compatible with the current machine limitations.

I used to think Samsung drives were great! However afhr years of using them, I discovered WD_Black SSD last longer and come in higher capacity meaning I can install 2x 4Tb units into my laptop doubling it's storage space over the Samsung 980 Pro. I wish Dell provided a heat-spreader for the secondary SSD, like they did with the older 17" as some SSD can get super warm. Just thought I'd share my experience. BTW, it's always better to disconnect the power from the motherboard when upgrading, this can prevent damage to other components, that's why they provide a connector for the battery. Other than this, thanks for the video.

Are you sure that screw on the back plate is for SSD? In my 9520 (2022 model) Those screws fixed central clips)

I actually did the same thing on the same laptop (I did buy the correct RAM). I would however advise to leave the little protection sheets on the ram slots. They have a reason to be there. I still do not like windows, but that is just me.

Will a fast SSD like SAMSUNG 990 PRO 1 TB get my computer overheated?

Would you recommend this model for after effects?

My parents bought a Toshiba laptop back in 2010 and it has little panels that you take off with a single Philips screw to access the hard drive and the ram. No need to take off the whole back cover.

My 17" 2013 HP laptop came with a 500GB HDD and I upgraded it to a 500GB SSD. Big difference in speed and performance!

I notice you disnt purchase a second heatsink for the SSD2 slot. Is that not needed?

I'm still shocked they dont use a vapor chamber on the 15" - I mean, its a good laptop but it'll throttle so hard even with liquid metal, and thermal pads to transfer some of the heat to the casing.

I always do a fresh clean windows install

Do you experience overheating on the XPS 15 2023?

Does your keyboard resonates at 350 Hz ? Mine is driving me nuts.

FYI, even last year’s line came with DDR5. I think he must have still been thinking of two years ago when he last purchased an XPS laptop. Those were still DDR4

How'd the everyday dad get this?! He's still the only on RU-vid reviewing this iteration.

funny about the RAM, but the RAM speed shoudl have alerted you. DDR5 is like 4500Mhz and you bought DDR4 3400Mhz. even if it worked, would you have wanted that much slower RAM?

Can you review the (2023) Zephyrus G16 with rtx 4060?

Can you please compare the XPS to the SAMSUNG GALAXY BOOK 3 ULTRA WITH i9?????!!!!

So. You added an nvme but didn’t install windows on it. Windows is still booting up on that slow sata

It is weird to see that you ordered wrong type memory even the previous model uses ddr5, that means you are not following carefully. But thanks for reviewing 2023 model xps 15.

Better use pcie4 nvme for a proper upgrade. Small price difference, dont leave half the performance on the table

Shouldn’t you use thermal pad on the second ssd?

So good that you realize bythe wrong way that DDR's are differents :)

Does the dell xps 15 9530 supports 5600mhz ram? or only 4800mhz?

I thought you were the Mac guy? Surprised when this came across my notifications.

Don't you need a heat sink for your 980 SSd?

Why do we need upgrading video as it the sane as 9520. What we really need is a performance comparison between 9520 vs 9530 cpu and videocard

How difficult would you say upgrading the ram would be for a beginner at this kinda stuff?

When xps 17 rtx4080 ?

Aw memories of when you could update RAM and drives in Mac's. With Apple SoC I understand why RAM isn't upgradable, but let us upgrade our drives at least Apple!!!!

Been there, done that! Lost the t-shirt!

That RAM mistake was actually a better lesson that just installing the right RAM. Now we will be more careful before making a purchase like this.

I think it support PCIe Gen4 drive...so better option will be Samsung 980 Pro rather than Samsung 980.....

I just keep my xps15 stock...I feel like this laptop is somewhat sensitive to the modifications (wouldn't say vulnerable tho). The only reason I upgrade to this from xps13 is the screen. The stock 16gb and 512gb is very sufficient for daily use/work or even light gaming.

price

The idea that a 64bit processor that can utilize 16 tera bytes ram..and the current crab 32gb rams in the market annoyes me a lot..

What's the point of reviewing a product if you are just going to replace the internals?

with Dell XPS 9530 you have to make sure you buy non-ecc memmory. :)

Classic dad! Lmao. Thanks for the informative video though

Research. The one thing I do before upgrading is research...

do we get some benchmark and review as well? would be nice. I know people don't like Passmark tests because it's hard to understand the results without knowledge but can you do a Passmark PerformanceTest if you do benchmarks on it?

the moment u said ddr4 i knew u fucked up and u made it sure lol

Ssd n ram

REALLY useful?

How long does the battery last in standby when starting with a full battery

Third

Bro, seriously? You bought ddr4? lol

Like my comment fr

The best thing about Dell are the bastards at their customer support. They love to waste everyone's time!

Windows....nope! Frankly, I am a dyed-in-the-wool Mac User. I would rather use a base M1 MacBook Air than ANY Flagship Windows machine....but hey, that's me.

Is this display 120 hz?