XPS 15 9560 official: GTX 1050, Kaby Lake, fingerprint scanner, and Windows Hello

One of the most anticipated laptop updates of the year has just been made official. Dell has gone live with the XPS 15 9560 on their website, revealing specs and changes—but not price or availability. 

The CPUs are naturally upgraded to their next-generation counterparts. CPU options will likely include the i3-7100HQ, i5-7300HQ, and i7-7700HQ. These chips are clocked slightly faster than their older Skylake siblings, with the i7 running at a base clock of 2.8GHz and the i5 at 2.5GHz, according to leaked Kaby Lake benchmarks. Kaby Lake doesn't seem to perform much faster than Skylake, but it should provide better video playback and more power-efficiency.

The GPU is rather interesting, as the XPS 15 previously shipped with a Nvidia GTX 960m, but now is now equip with the GTX 1050 with 4GB, according to Dell. The desktop 1050 comes equip with 2GB ram, while the 1050 Ti has 4GB, but Dell makes no mention of whether this is indeed the more powerful 1050 Ti. Whether it is the vanilla 1050 or 1050 Ti, we can expect performance similar to a 970m and a TDP of 60W, scoring between 6200-6800 on the synthetic Fire Strike benchmark. In contrast, the 960m in the current XPS 15 scores around 3900 in the same test—meaning this is roughly a 50% upgrade in performance. Thus, the addition of this new Pascal card should make the world's smallest 15-inch notebook also much more adept at playing games.

Other notable additions and changes include a Windows Hello-compatible camera, fingerprint sensor, and the replacement of the previous Broadcom Wi-Fi with a Killer 1535 Wireless-AC adapter. We can expect more information on pricing and availability around CES 2017 in January.