XPS 15 9500 (i7-10875) VS Asus ROG Zephyrus G15 (4800hs)

Jun 5, 2020
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3
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Hello tom's hardware community,
I will need to switch my laptop within the next weeks and I can't choose between theses two laptop. I'm in Canada so consider that availability is a huge deal for me and that's why theses are the two laptop I am interested in is because they are available in Canada right now.

I am a developer and I am running a lot of things in parallel my current laptop have 32 gb of ram and usually sits around 16-17 GB of usage on a normal use. I need a fast processor to have good compile time (that's the bottleneck of my current PC which is an alienware 17 R3) it's start hitting my productivity. I also game casually and like to play new triple A title but I don't need top tier performances. I work mostly from home but I'm also on the go sometimes and would like to find something more portable.

The Asus ROG Zphyrus G15 seems to have the best CPU of both laptop and also is the cheapest option of both @ 1600$ CAD. My problem with this laptop is that we can't upgrade the ram or we can but I would lose dual channel memory and the 32GB version is not yet available in Canada. So either I try to live with 16gb of memory which I don't know if I can or I forget about dual channel (I would upgrade to 40GB) which kind of bugs me (am I right for not liking it or is this not noticable?). There is also no thunderbolt port on this one and I have a TB16 dock which I like and wouldn't be compatible with this laptop. I'm also considering to move to an eGPU setup in the future which is not an option with this laptop

The XPS 15 ram is upgradable but comes at a much premium price. I have it quote at 2150$ for the i7-10875h which is a good price since the laptops with this processor seem's to be pretty expensive. I am a bit concern about the 95W TDP which I guess means that to have a good battery life I need to sacrifice a lot of cpu power ? I don't work that often on battery but that is a little concern that I have. What I plan to do is to order the smallest version with 256GB ssd and 8gb of ram and upgrade it to 32 GB of my current ram in my laptop it is 2400mhz ddr4 (do you think that the difference in frequency can be noticeable ?) and put my samsung 970 pro in it. I like the fact that my dock is compatible and that I will be able to use an eGPU if I want to.

Let me know what you think and if my assumptions about dual channel and lower frequency memory are right.

If you have any other options for me to consider let me know

Thanks for your help