Dell and Intel conspired to make the Dell Pro 14 Premium a swing and a miss for me after tests

Dell Pro 14 Premium: 30-second review

For those not in the loop, Dell has rebranded its XPS, Latitude and Inspiron lines to Dell, Dell Pro and Dell Pro Max.

Therefore, the Dell Pro 14 Premium is previously would have been called a Latitude, and the ‘premium’ is Dell’s subtle way of building expectations that this won’t be cheap.

As a top-end ultra laptop design, it sports the latest Intel Core Ultra 200 series processor with vPro, 60Wh of battery capacity, a 14-inch 400nit display, and up to 32GB of LPDDR5x memory.

In terms of mobile platforms, this is the pinnacle of what Intel has to offer, and it delivers exceptional battery life accordingly.

That’s a feature you can bank on, but the performance of this machine is less impressive for other purposes, even if Dell heavily pushes its Copilot credentials.

This reviewer was also somewhat disappointed by the build quality, where the outside of this machine is wholly made of plastic. Thankfully, the inside is magnesium.

That brings in questions of durability for a front-line device, and what might happen to it when deployed into the office.

When you consider how much the review machine costs, having extended coverage on this machine might be worth the extra money.

Overall, the Dell Pro 14 Premium will last a long time without a charge. Its single-thread performance is good, but it’s not a great multi-threaded platform.

And, if the thought of spending $2600 on a laptop is overly shocking, then maybe something without a Core Ultra 7 processor might better suit you.

The lack of raw performance in the 200 series, overall build quality, and price makes it unlikely to be included in our round-up of the best business laptops.

Dell Pro 14 Premium: Price and availability

• How much does it cost? From $2030/£1,770
• When is it out? Available now
• Where can you get it? Direct from Dell

A Dell feature, the Pro 14 Premium comes in a range of SKUs, and those SKUs aren’t the same in every region.

The base model offers an Intel Core Ultra 5 236V vPro CPU, 16GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, non-touch FHD+ IPS 14-inch display for £1,769.4 in the UK and $2029 in the US. At the other end of the scale is a machine with the Intel Core Ultra 7 268V vPro, 32GB of RAM, 1TB of storage and the same screen for £2383.98 in the UK. For US customers, it comes with only 512GB of storage and costs $2,559. Elevating it to the 1TB storage capacity increases the price to $2661.50.

To put this into perspective, Acer has the Swift 14 AO Touch-screen SF14-61T built around the excellent AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 processor for only £1,499.99 with the same amount of RAM, memory and storage.

Lenovo has the ThinkPad X9 14 Aura Edition (review coming soon), which has the same CPU, memory and storage as the Pro 14 Premium, but with a dramatically better OLED display costs only £1,900 or $2,041.55.

I could list more alternatives, but the price of this laptop is far too high for the specifications it offers.

• Value: 3 / 5

Dell Pro 14 Premium: Specs

Dell Pro 14 Premium: Design

• Too much plastic
• Mini-LED keyboard
• Limited ports

I’d like to admit now that I own a 2012 Dell XPS that I bought, and the skin of that laptop is almost entirely metal. I mention that because, from what I can determine, the Dell Pro 14 Premium is 100% plastic, and this laptop feels much less durable.

During my investigation, I removed the underside, and that panel is so thin that it’s been painted with what looks like epoxy paint in an attempt to make it stronger.

As an excuse, I’d probably accept that the plastic construction makes this unit lighter—at just 1.141 kg or 2.5 lbs if you prefer that measuring system. That’s still not ultra-light, and I suspect much of that weight is from the internal 60 Wh battery.

Opening the machine, Dell used a keyboard with large key tops and zero gutters between them, and each key had a mini LED that illuminated the symbol.

Bracketing the keyboard are two speaker vents, although they’re not sufficiently spaced to create any credible spatial audio impact.

On the power button is a fingerprint sensor, although this button is so small, about 8mm square, that it can only sense a small section of a fingertip. That choice has more to do with the decent webcam that was put in the Pro 14 Premium, a Windows Hello-compliant design that is likely to be the means owners get access.

Many laptop makers have done well selling docking stations to corporate customers, and this laptop was designed to illicit more of those purchases.

The left side has an HDMI port, a single Thunderbolt and a 3.5mm audio jack, whereas the right side has another Thunderbolt port, a single USB 3.2 Type-A port, and a security slot.

My positive take on this arrangement is that you can add a second screen without a dock. However, as one of the Thunderbolt ports will be used for charging, you will still need one if you have multiple USB-C devices or want access to a wired network.

To be brutally honest, and I’m mostly paid to be that, the general feel of the Dell Pro 14 Premium is of a laptop that is in the region of $1000-1500, and not up to $1000 more than that price range.

But obviously, that doesn’t take into account some of the technology that’s inside what appears to be a low-cost exterior.

Overall, this design doesn’t give this reviewer a Premium vibe, or justify its cost.

• Design: 3 / 5

Dell Pro 14 Premium: Hardware

• Intel Core Ultra 200 series CPU
• Average screen
• Limited upgrades

The story of the Core Ultra series processors has been a problematic gestation for Intel, and how badly it has been received might well have convinced Pat Gelsinger to exit stage left into retirement.

The problems that new Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan inherited won’t be fixed overnight, as architecturally, the 300 and 400 series are already set in stone, or silicon, at this point.

The Intel Core Ultra 7 268V vPro in our review machine is almost at the pinnacle of the Core Ultra 200 series mobile parts, and according to Intel, it features “the latest generation of P-core, E-core, and low-power E-core architectures, advanced NPU AI Engines, and available with built-in Intel® Graphics or Intel® Arc™ GPUs1 driven by Xe2 architecture for discrete-level graphics performance.”

Except these mobile parts only have P-cores and low-power E-cores, and in this context, only four of each, giving up to eight threads in total, since Intel did away with hyperthreading.

When you realise that some of the last Core series mobile chips had twenty-thread processing, this seems a retrograde step and a big one at that.

As we’ll get into with the benchmarks, the single-thread performance of this silicon is decent, but the multi-threaded isn’t, and what Intel did was trade that for power efficiency. The problem is that the best laptop needs to have excellent battery life and performance when required, and at least one leg of this table has been cut short.

Therefore, unless you are looking for a machine that only delivers exceptional battery life and never needs raw power, this probably isn’t the system you would want.

Some of the cheaper SKUs in this product range use the lesser Luna Lake CPUs, and these have less AI processing power, can address only 16GB of RAM, have one less Xe GPU core, and lower clocks. The saving of around $200 for an Intel Core Ultra 5 236V isn’t probably worth it, especially because of the memory limits.

One of the minor disappointments with this machine is the display, which has a maximum resolution of 1920 x 1200. Its maximum brightness of 400 nits isn’t ideal for outdoor work, although Dell did at least put an anti-glare coating on it. There are no touch-screen options in this range, and there is no 1440p display either.

The panel is reasonably sharp and performed reasonably well in our calibration testing. Its strengths are its decent gamut and high contrast. But it suffers from a lack of luminescence uniformity, being excessively bright in the centre, and while having plenty of colours, they’re not always the most accurate. It achieved 98% of RBG, 75% of AdobeRGB and 75% of P3 colours. It only delivered 54% of the Rec2020 gamut.

This screen is fine for office work, but it isn’t anything that might attract a creative worker.

In the last part of this section, I want to talk about potential upgrades that this machine might get over its operational life.

Dell engineers made a good stab at making this laptop reasonably easy to get inside, with just seven retained screws and a small spudger between the owner and the internals.

However, once you get inside, things get decidedly less helpful.

As now seems commonplace, the memory on this unit is surface mounted, meaning that if you want 32GB of RAM, the most on offer, you will need to specify it at purchase. There are only two major components that you can swap, and those are the M.2 NVMe storage device and the battery. A refresh of the battery after a few years of use might well be worth the expense for those who recharge every working day.

The real annoyance is that the M.2 slot is only a 2232 scale slot, which limits the capacity and performance that can be placed inside the Pro 14 Premium. If this had been done to leave enough room for another drive, it might have been acceptable, but there are literally acres of unused space on parts of the mainboard that could have seen a 2280 slot or at least a 2242-sized one.

In most regions, Dell only offers a 1TB internal drive, which isn’t remotely enough for those who use lots of applications or AI features to work with local models.

The lack of drive space is a head-slapping moment for the Dell Pro 14 Premium.

Overall, with the exception of the battery life, this is a mediocre hardware offering, and Dell made it worse by choosing the smallest M.2 slot.

This CPU series supports four Gen 4 PCIe lanes and four Gen 5 lanes; on this machine, most lanes do practically nothing.

• Hardware: 3.5 / 5

Dell Pro 14 Premium: Performance

With the 200 series Ultra processors, Intel has jumped in with both feet on the power efficiency bandwagon, something that they started to do with the 100 series.

This was a response to the battery life that AMD Ryzen mobile processors offered, and with the 12th and 13th generation chips, it was something the chip maker had effectively ignored.

The Intel Core Ultra 7 268V vPro in the review machine is at the top of the Luna Lake Core Ultra 7 series, with only the Core Ultra 9 288V above it.

With a base clock of 2GHz and a turbo speed of up to 5GHz, it splits the performance and efficiency cores evenly with four of each.

The problem with this chip is that when you compare it to older Intel designs, this CPU hasn’t improved its multitasking substantially over the 100 series.

To reveal these improvements, I’ve placed the Dell Pro 14 against one of its same-brand predecessors, the Dell Latitude 9450 and its series 100 Core 7 Ultra 165U CPU.

The places where the Core Ultra 7 268V is advantageous are mostly in respect of the graphics performance since it has eight Xe cores in the ARC 140V GPU, whereas the Core 7 Ultra 165U has half as many. It’s also significantly better in the single-core mode that can utilise that 5GHz turbo clock.

However, with only eight cores, of which only four are performance, the Core Ultra 7 268V has a major problem when confronted with a multi-threaded problem, something that also plagued the Core 7 Ultra 165U.

The Cinebench 23 multitasking score is 9567, which looks decent against the older series 100 CPU. But looking back at even older data, I’ve reviewed at least two laptops that have exceeded that score. The Dell Precision 5470 using the Intel Core i7-12800H CPU and the Framework 7040 with its AMD Ryzen 7 7840U both went faster with scores of 11872 and 13735, respectively.

My conclusion is that older Intel Alder Lake processors and previous generation AMD Ryzen mobile chips multitask better than the Core Ultra 7 268V.

This chip is undisputedly superior with battery life, where it takes a great score of the Core 7 Ultra 165U and, with the same battery capacity, achieves approximately two hours more. That battery life should convert into at least two working days and possibly the majority of a third if you work the timescales that most Europeans would consider a working day.

The problem for Intel is that it is possible to get equivalent battery life using the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite CPU, as seen in the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6. And, it’s possible to get a machine using these Qualcomm chips for half what Dell is asking for the Dell Pro 14 Premium.

I wouldn’t read much into this laptop’s having an NPU of 48 over the 40 of the predecessor series since most people won’t be running locally trained AI on a laptop. It can run Microsoft Copilot using the NPU, if you can call that AI, but compared to cloud-based models and processing power, this laptop isn’t a serious AI tool.

• Performance: 3.5 / 5

Dell Pro 14 Premium: Final verdict

If this machine was still called a Latitude, would I have gone easier on it? Probably not. It has several problems, some of which involve the underlying hardware platform.

I don’t think the Intel Core Ultra 200 series chips are great, as they sacrifice multitasking performance to achieve power efficiency without considering how people use these systems every day. But for light tasks, they’re good, and the battery life is exceptional.

My biggest issue with the Dell Pro 14 Premium is the price being asked, for what isn’t anything special when you look at the construction, screen and very limited upgradability.

Putting the words “Pro” and “Premium” in the name suggests a design, build and performance level that this hardware doesn’t deliver.

The cost that Dell is asking is just adding insult to injury.

Should you buy a Dell Pro 14 Premium?

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