Dell XPS 15 9500 i5 ridiculously short battery life

Just about all published tests are done with very limited wifi use, and with screens as dim as bearable, and CPUs cut back as slow as possible.

There's a major difference between an i5 in an XPS 9310 that draws 12W, and an i5 in an XPS 9500/10 that draws 35W.  And if you add the power draw of a discrete GPU and then toss in a 3-cell battery, you're in for short battery runtimes.

As for the rest, you can return a system purchased from Dell within 30 days of shipment;  do that and re-order with the larger battery and you should see about the runtime you did with the XPS 13.

Thanks XPS_Man, No 4K on this one, no discrete GPU and I am familiar with the power options/settings, all set to reasonable levels. Too bad, 6 hrs would've been nice and I had no reason to believe Dell would be selling 4 hr laptops. I will have to spring for the 86Wh battery, obviously.

Even for 56Wh 4 hours is not Ideal

No question that 13 inch models have better battery life, considering they do not come with Discrete GPUs and have a smaller display. 

Which model did you go for 4k or FHD ; I am under assumption that 56Wh do not come with Discrete GPU. 

What are your power settings > Performance 

I would recommend this to every one : Do not Cut Short for Lower battery size option when you are paying this much for a Laptop 

Thanks. I would return it but this one took exactly 8 weeks from the time I ordered and I cannot go another 2 months without a computer. I have to upgrade the battery on this one.

Yep, thanks but did all that. Clean install without bloat, that's the very first thing I did with the computer.

Generate a Battery report 

in CMD as admin type this command. 

powercfg /batteryreport.

You can find generated battery report in C:\Windows\System32 as battery-report.

Contact Tech Support with the report and ask for a battery replacement 

Thanks but did that already. Everything checks out good. I'm not looking for a solution, there isn't any. I am merely letting the world know not to expect a great battery life out of the XPS 15.

Well XPS_Man, I thought I knew it all and had done it all. Guess what, Turbo Boost is a HUGE power drain and I thank you for mentioning it. I bow to you because you gave me the hint I was looking for. I am now 3 hours into a full battery, without Turbo Boost, and I still have 60% and over 3 hours remaining. Disabling Turbo Boost had helped a lot. Thanks again.

Glad I could help. 

Disabling Turbo boost is not a solution as it's a feature of Processor. 
However I assume since you opted for non discrete GPU Model, you don't need that kind of power anyways

I'm lucky to get 2-3 hours out of a full charge  

Though I'm late to the party, I would like to add disabling the use of HDR is also a huge savings. If HDR is enabled, regardless of whether you have it set to "optimization for batter" or quality, simply having it enabled is a batter killer.