Dell 14 Premium Review: Lame Name, Great Performance

Dell has gone through a major rebrand, but its actual model lines are still on track, going through annual iterations. What was the Dell XPS series, Dell's flagship line of laptops, is now...Dell Premium? Yeah, it's a silly name, and the branding is endlessly confusing.

Regardless, the first Dell Premium laptops are now rolling out, picking up where XPS left off. The Dell 14 Premium has the same familiar sleek and flush keyboard, unmarked touchpad, and — more importantly — top-tier specifications, of the XPS. It also has the same high price. Is the Dell 14 Premium worth the cash, or should you go for something else?

It's been a good three years since Dell revamped the design of its XPS laptops, and the overall look and feel of that redesign continues with the Dell 14 Premium. That's a good thing, though. The laptop is sleek, stylish, and well-built. Plus, it still looks like nothing else out there.

Part of what makes the Dell 14 Premium look great is its flat keyboard deck with the keys at the same height as the rest of the surface around them. It's coupled with a touchpad that's embedded in the lower third of the laptop and is completely unmarked. You might assume that the unmarked touchpad is difficult to use, but you get used to it really quickly, and you'll find that you don't actually look at the touchpad when you're using it much anyway.

Everything else looks great, too. The Dell 14 Premium has an edge-to-edge display with a slightly thicker bezel at the top to fit the webcam. I'm glad that the days of a webcam at the bottom of the display are behind us.

The weight of this iteration of the Dell 14 Premium is decently light, but not as light as some other laptops out there. It sits at 3.66 pounds, which is noticeably heavier than a laptop like the MacBook Air, though only slightly heavier than the perhaps more comparable 14-inch MacBook Pro, which weighs 3.5 pounds.

The port selection isn't bad. On the left side, you'll get two Thunderbolt 4 ports, while on the right side can be found a third Thunderbolt 4 port with an audio jack and a microSD card slot. I think most creatives would probably prefer a full-size SD card slot.

The design of the keyboard isn't just about looks. Thankfully, the keyboard feels great, too. The keys themselves are nice and big, and they have enough travel to make for a tactile typing experience. They're a little softer than I personally like, but they don't necessarily feel super mushy or low quality.

The quality of the touchpad is quite good. It's harder to figure out how it performs at its edges when you don't know where the edges actually are, but I found it to be mostly responsive and smooth. No one makes touchpads like Apple, and that has always been the case, but the Dell 14 Premium has a touchpad that's about as good as you can get on a Windows laptop.

The Dell 14 Premium comes with a quad speaker setup that's made up of two main speakers and two tweeters. It all adds up to 8 watts.

The speakers sound fine. They're lacking in bass and aren't super clear, but they can get loud enough and work in a pinch, especially for things like podcasts, audiobooks, or other spoken word content. They're a bit less usable for music, but again, they work in a pinch. The speakers on both the cheaper MacBook Air and the more expensive MacBook Pro are far superior to the ones that come on the Dell 14 Premium. So, if you want high-quality audio, you'll want to use a pair of headphones or external speakers.

The Dell 14 Premium is available with two display options. Both are 14.5 inches, with the base option being an IPS screen that has a refresh rate of up to 120Hz, 500-nit brightness, and 2K resolution. This display does not support touch. The more expensive option, and the one on our review model, is a 3.2K OLED screen with a 400-nit brightness that does support touch.

Unsurprisingly, this higher-end display looks stunning. It delivers vibrant colors and high contrast despite being slightly less bright than the base display option. Like other OLED screens, you'll get deep, inky black levels, and as a result, watching movies on the laptop is a dream. It isn't the tandem OLED screen that you can get on some of Dell's laptops, but it still looks excellent.

I do wish it was slightly brighter, though. The glossy display glass means that it's not the best at handling reflections, and if you're working outdoors or facing a window, you will notice those reflections. I hope more companies, including Dell, adopt anti-glare glass for their laptops, as Apple has done on the MacBook Pro.

The webcam offers a 1080p resolution and it looks good. Details are crisp and colors are relatively accurate, plus it's reasonably good at handling difficult lighting, like a window directly behind you when you're on a Zoom call.

The Dell 14 Premium is designed for performance, and it delivers on that front. The laptop comes with an Intel Core Ultra 7 255H processor, coupled with either 16GB or 32GB of RAM. In the base model, you'll get integrated graphics, but you can upgrade to a discrete GPU in the form of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050. Our review model is maxed out, offering 32GB of RAM and that RTX 4050 GPU.

The laptop performs excellently. That's unsurprising. The Intel Core Ultra 7 255H is an excellent chip, and while certainly not as impressive in performance as the likes of Intel's Core Ultra 9 chips, or its HX workstation chips, it's great for the kinds of tasks you would expect a thin-and-light laptop to handle — and more — without drawing too much power.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 helps make the Dell 14 Premium better for gaming and creative tasks, too. In other words, without it, you could probably still perform basic creative tasks like light photo editing without issue — but add the GeForce RTX 4050, and you'll get a machine that can handle more intensive creative tasks like video editing and gaming. To be clear, the laptop comes with an RTX 4050 laptop GPU, and you can obviously still get better graphics performance in a desktop system. But what you get in a thinner laptop these days as far GPU performance goes is pretty impressive.

Of course, Intel and Nvidia aren't the only companies making impressive silicon. Apple kind of reset the industry when it launched its M-series chips, and those chips have only gotten better. The Apple M4 performs better than the Intel Core Ultra 7 255H in single-core performance, and almost as well, if not as well, in multi-core performance. The M4 is available in the $999 MacBook Air. Then there's the M4 Pro-equipped MacBook Pro, which costs the same as the Dell 14 Premium if you configure the Dell model to come with the GeForce RTX 4050. The M4 Pro blows the Intel Core Ultra 7 255H out of the water in performance, while consuming less power — plus, it's at least competitive with the RTX 4050 in graphics performance in its base iteration. If you're spending $2,000 on a laptop, you still can't do better than the MacBook Pro when it comes to performance.

Of course, most interested in the Dell 14 Premium aren't considering the MacBook Pro — they want to use Windows. On the Windows side, the price-to-performance ratio is pretty good here. That doesn't mean it'll stay good forever, but many similarly-priced machines offer less for more at this point in time.

The Dell 14 Premium comes equipped with a 69.5Whr battery, and Dell claims you'll get up to 20 hours out of it — though you obviously won't hit that if you opt for the discrete GPU, like our model has. That said, under lighter workloads, most will likely be able to stretch the battery life to a full work day — though, that will again depend on how you use it, what you set the screen brightness to, and so on.

Generally, I found the battery life of the laptop to be solid. I got to the end of a work day with a little juice left, though for the most part, my workload was relatively light, and I kept screen brightness lower than I could have in my office space.

No matter what, Intel's x86 chips aren't going to be as power-efficient as ARM-based chips, even if Intel has made improvements. For now, if you want a Windows laptop, buying an ARM-based chip means sacrificing performance. But, there's no reason the likes of Qualcomm and others won't eventually work on higher-performing chips that more closely align with the M4 Pro than the M4.

The Dell 14 Premium is an excellent laptop. It's expensive, but for the $1,500 price range, it has a lot to offer — especially if you're only interested in a Windows machine. Beyond performance, the laptop has a nice-feeling keyboard, a sleek-and-stylish design, and the potential for solid GPU performance and a stunning OLED display, if you're willing to pay a little more.

The competition

There are competitors that also have plenty to offer. I find the Dell 14 Premium to occupy a great middle-ground between performance, design, and features. If you're willing to sacrifice some of that performance, you can get things like an OLED screen for a similar price in the Asus Zenbook S14, for instance.

Then there's the world of Apple. If you're debating between the Dell 14 Premium with a GeForce RTX 4050 and a MacBook Pro, the MacBook Pro is probably the better option. It performs better in most respects.

Should I buy the Dell 14 Premium?

Yes. It offers a good balance between performance and features.