Dell refreshes XPS laptops with Intel's 12th-gen Alder Lake CPUs

Dell has updated its XPS laptops with 12-generation chips from Intel, across both its 15in and 17in models.

At $1,499, the least expensive of the six new models is the XPS 15 with a 12-core i5-12500H chip and 8GB of DDR5 RAM. It also comes with 512GB of NVMe storage and a maximum expandable capacity of 2TB.

Customers can add in an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 graphics card or a higher-end RTX 3050 Ti.

At the high end, customers can stump up $2,899 for an XPS 15 with a 12-core i5-12500H. That offers 18MB of cache memory and clocks up to 4.5GHz. It comes with the RTX 3050 Ti preinstalled.

Like the lower-end model, the 8GB of base RAM is expandable to 64GB. It also features 1TB of base NVMe storage, which customers can double to 2TB.

There are two XPS 17 laptops available with the new processors. The $1,849 version features the i5-12500H processor with 8GB RAM and 512GB of SSD storage. The high-end 17-in version, costing $2,299, packs an i7-12700H CPU with 16GB RAM, 512GB of SSD storage, and a built-in RTX 3050 GPU.

Intel launched the H-series laptop chips, part of its Alder Lake series, in January. It unveiled eight of the processors at CES, ranging from the Core i5-12450H with eight cores and 12 threads, up to the i9-12900HK with 14 cores and 20 threads.

All of the chips consume 45 watts of power, along with support for DDR5 RAM. They also support Wi-Fi 6E, an enhanced standard that supports a new 6GHz wireless band.

Dell says that all of the units are available as early as March 31, aside from the 17-in models which will ship from April 13.