Thinking about buying the Dell Latitude 15 9520 2-in-1? Its cycling GPU performance may give you second thoughts ^↺

The 2021 Latitude 9520 2-in-1 is visually identical to the 2020 Latitude 9510 2-in-1 as the only major upgrades are internal. Owners of the newer model are getting 11th gen Core options to replace the slower 10th gen options on the 2020 model. Jumping from the UHD Graphics 620 to Iris Xe in particular should improve GPU performance significantly year-over-year. However, the Iris Xe GPU in the Latitude 9520 2-in-1 does not appear to be running as smoothly as it should.

Our graph below shows frame rates over time when running Witcher 3 on our Core i7-1185G7 Latitude 9520 2-in-1. Frame rates would constantly bounce between 40 FPS and 90 FPS even when running on the High Performance power profile. In comparison, the Core i7-1165G7 ADATA XPG Xenia 14 would run at much more stable frame rates over time as shown by our graph when subjected to the same Witcher 3 conditions.

A closer look at GPU-Z and HWiNFO when running the above test shows GPU clock rates constantly fluctuating between 500 MHz and 1200 MHz due to fluctuating voltages. Power consumption would consequently fluctuate during this period as well. Such a behavior is not common on 99 percent of other laptops running on the same Tiger Lake-U platform.

Of course, the Latitude series is not designed for games and so we don't expect any users to be running games on a regular basis with this machine. Nonetheless, any rendering tasks that rely on consistent GPU performance will likely be negatively impacted.

Check out our review on the Latitude 9520 2-in-1 for more details and comparisons against the older Latitude 9510 2-in-1. We will update this page should any new information come to light.