Why this saw matters
For years, the circular saw was the one tool where going cordless meant accepting a compromise — a smaller blade, a shallower cut, and a battery that gave out somewhere in the middle of a sheet of ply. The standard advice, the advice I gave myself when Joel and I were framing the house, was to keep a corded saw plugged in for anything that mattered and treat the cordless one as a convenience. The DCS570N is one of the saws that quietly retired that advice: a full 184mm blade, 65mm of cut depth, and a motor that doesn’t go weak at the knees when the timber gets hard.
The depth-of-cut number is the one to fix on, because everything else on a circular saw is secondary to it. The blade diameter sets how deep the thing can reach, and 65mm gets you cleanly through 45mm framing pine with room to spare, even with the blade tilted right over for an angled cut. That’s exactly the reach the smaller cordless saws don’t have — and exactly where they leave you finishing the cut by hand.
How well does it cut?
The motor is the difference you’d feel the moment you stepped across from a cheaper cordless saw. It’s brushless — no carbon brushes dragging away inside it — which means more of the battery’s charge ends up at the blade instead of being thrown off as heat, and, just as importantly, it keeps delivering that power when the cut gets hard. Where a budget saw bogs down and starts to bind a third of the way through a hardwood decking board, this one holds its revs and holds its line. DeWalt has built it on a stable, flat base that keeps the vibration down, and that’s something both your pencil line and your wrists will thank you for by the end of a long afternoon. It rips, cross-cuts and bevels — that’s cutting along the grain, across it, and on an angle — and the depth scale is accurate enough that when you set it to 32mm, you get 32mm.
What’s it like to use?
It’s heavy, and there’s no point pretending otherwise: hang a big battery off a saw carrying a real 184mm blade and you’re swinging a fair bit of weight around. That’s not a design flaw, it’s just physics — the corded saws pay the same toll in a trailing lead — but it does make this a two-handed, plant-your-feet-first kind of tool, especially when you’re cutting up over your head. The flip side of all that mass is that it’s stable: the weight sits low and the saw tracks dead straight instead of wandering off your line, which is more than I can say for some of the lighter ones I’ve used.
The catch: which platform are you on?
This is the single strongest argument against buying the saw, so I’ll put it right out in the open rather than bury it. DeWalt’s 18V XR is proper trade-grade gear with a deep range behind it, backed by a warranty you extend by registering the tool — but here in Australia, it’s a fourth-platform conversation that comes along after the three platforms most DIYers are choosing between. Starting a whole new battery collection for the sake of one saw is exactly the expensive mistake that comparison spends its whole length warning you off. So: if you’re already on XR, this is an easy yes. If you’re on Makita like me, the DHS series is the like-for-like saw and your existing batteries already fit it, so buy that instead. And if you haven’t picked a platform at all yet, go and read the platform guide before this review talks you into a saw you’ll regret feeding.
Should you buy it?
If you’re already an XR owner with framing, decking or sheet work in front of you, this is about as close to an obvious pick as the category gets — and the 8.4 reflects a saw judged on its own platform, not docked for a battery decision you’ve already made. For everyone else, treat it as the benchmark for what a cordless circular saw can now do, then go and buy the equivalent on whichever platform you’ve committed your money to.
Specifications
- Voltage
- 18V (XR platform)
- Blade
- 184mm
- Depth of cut
- 65mm (adjustable, scaled)
- Motor
- Brushless
- Cuts
- Ripping, cross-cutting, bevelling
- Sold as
- Skin only — battery and charger extra
