Dell XPS 13 Disassembly

This one's on the house!

Sporting a Intel Core i7-8550U QUAD CORE processor and 8 GB of RAM (optional 16 GB) and blazing fast SSD in a chassis smaller than ever before.

Edit: the original Toshiba drives are said to have impaired performance. Switch to another slip for 500MB read / write!

This is crazy. How much heat does it produce, though?

With a TDP of 15W, there is actually room for compromises. Especially when Dell decided to give it a better fan.

Under the newly revamped XPS sticker cover, I am supposed to find a Philips screw ...

Ah yes, it's here. Say hello to my PH 0 screwdriver!

Oof, these T5 screws put up a tough fight! My bit started to show gentle signs of wear already ...

I am expected to encounter heavy clippage ...

And I did. Apparently these clips all extend outwards, and none of them give me any apparent sign for hinges.

So … you need to use some brute force here. The chassis and the back cover are both strong, but the side with the card reader is slightly weaker. Start there ...

And, please, don't use metal tools. Don't make the mistake of scratching the beautiful sids of aluminum sides.

These are good stuff!

What should we work on next?

Let's focus on removing the display first. Eases things up for a bit.

To do that, you will need to remove the display connector secured under motherboard bracket, and the antenna secured under the WLAN bracket.

You WILL need to disassemble that "screw-in-tape" stuff...

and the camera? Where … probably the one labeled M/B.

But why M/B?

Then we will remote the battery.

These are 2*M2 screws, or so they are labeled ...

USE PH 1 SCREWDRIVER

Sometimes, it appears that the screws are overtightened, but when the case screws on your laptop started to fall out all over again, it's really not the same argument.

But for the case of battery and speaker, it's really not that necessary. You can loosen them for a bit.

Allright, so what do we get here?

Motherboard, think it's I2C touchpad, the keyboard and light and motherboard interconnect board with a few chips

You can say why they give a interconnect board, but the motherboard is not pretty crammed with stuff.

Especially when compared to the 2012 model, as they added a USB-C and a card reader. Plus some unnamed ports.

But hey, remember that this chassis is also used for the precision mobile workstations. That might be explaining all the unsoldered ports (and the SATA settings in BIOS)

These black screws, when being driven with PH 1, feels really good.

The white ones use PH 0.

Perhaps this is the push of Dell's reparability program? PH 1 is easier to find than PH 00 and PH 0s...

Or they carry more torque. Either case, these screws are … tough.