Review: Dell 14 Premium

Dell is facing an uphill battle. It’s relaunching an already divisive laptop design with no significant changes. The new Dell 14 Premium retains the limited ports, touch-button function keys, and the invisible trackpad of its predecessor, none of which were particularly popular.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t have the XPS pedigree to lean on. The axing of the XPS name was one of the many casualties in the company’s new, “simplified” brand. So, with a new name and an old design, I've been testing the Dell 14 Premium to see if the XPS magic has been lost or if it can revive the glory days when Dell was at the top.

New Name, Who Dis?

Photograph: Luke Larsen

This is a divisive laptop. Most people either love the forward-thinking aesthetics or detest the snooty, form-over-function nature of the design. I land somewhere in the middle. I love the invisible haptic feedback trackpad, for example. It gives the laptop a super sleek look, blending right into the palm rests.

I also enjoy the edge-to-edge keyboard, filling out the space with extra-large keycaps. It’s one of my favorite laptop keyboards to type on. Until you get to the function keys. I love the look of the glowing touch buttons, but Dell hasn’t done anything to make them more usable. They still don’t have haptic feedback and don’t feel nearly as responsive as standard keys do. For me, they aren’t a deal-breaker, as I don’t use function keys as much as others. But if you’re a programmer or even just someone who uses lots of keyboard commands, this is not the laptop for you.

It is for you, however, if you want something that feels undeniably slick. The trim bezels around the display are still unbeatable, especially without the need for an ugly notch. Even the simplified Dell logo on the lid gives a modern touch. It makes the MacBook Pro look downright dated.

Photograph: Luke Larsen

The port selection is another design choice that’s easy to complain about. On the left, you get two Thunderbolt 4 ports, while the right side has one more Thunderbolt 4 port, a microSD card slot, and a headphone jack. This is unchanged from last year’s model. I wasn’t expecting a move to Thunderbolt 5, though that would have been a nice surprise for future-proofing. Thunderbolt 5 accessories and docks are finally here, so it’d be nice to see some more laptop options other than gaming laptops that support those faster speeds. I miss having a full-size SD card slot, and an additional USB-C port or HDMI port would have been handy.

The other thing worth mentioning is the thickness—0.7 inch isn’t overly thick, per se, but it’s thicker than the MacBook Pro and Razer Blade 14. It matches the thickness of the Acer Swift X 14, and there aren’t many 14-inch nongaming laptops with discrete graphics anyway.

Beautiful OLED

Photograph: Luke Larsen

Displays have been an Achilles' Heel for Dell in the past. You’re often paying more for a higher-end display on a Dell laptop or getting something lower-quality. That’s especially true when you try to make a direct comparison to MacBooks. The $1,600 14-inch MacBook Pro comes with a high-resolution, Mini-LED display that’s great for HDR. To get the 3.2K OLED display on the Dell 14 Premium, the price starts at $100 more. That might not sound like a big difference, but when you’re coming in more expensive than Apple, you’re playing a dangerous game.

There are three primary configurations to choose from. The base model has integrated graphics and a nontouch “2K” IPS display. You can bump it to discrete graphics with the Nvidia RTX 4050 paired with the same display, or go for the full, touch-enabled 3,200 x 2,000 OLED panel. The RTX 4050 models come with 32 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage, but at the time of writing, Dell charges $200 for the display upgrade. All display options have a dynamic refresh rate up to 120 Hz.

I tested the high-end configuration, which costs $2,200. You can also add an extra terabyte of storage for $200 more to get 2 TBs. Either way, this is an expensive laptop. You can certainly buy cheaper RTX 4050 laptops designed for creators, such as the Asus Vivobook 15 Pro or Acer Swift X 14.

Photograph: Luke Larsen

The OLED display on offer here is really pretty, though. Strangely, it comes with dozens of color profiles in the Windows settings, only one of which nets you HDR: Dolby Vision. This is something every company does differently, but it was a bit of a mess to sort through. With HDR on in Dolby Vision, I measured a high of 615 nits in a 4 percent window. That's not as bright as Mini-LED laptops, like the MacBook Pro, which can be cranked up to 1,200 nits. These OLED displays also aren't as bright as the QD-OLED monitors, which can hit up to 1,000 nits. This Dolby Vision profile improves color accuracy and SDR brightness, up to 393 nits.

Unfortunately, the Dolby Vision profile reduces color space coverage, meaning there isn't a great profile for content creators who need better colors, at least not without calibrating it yourself.

A Thin Line

Photograph: Luke Larsen

If you aren't interested in the RTX 4050 model, I would not recommend buying the Dell 14 Premium over the Dell XPS 14, which the company still sells for hundreds of dollars less at the moment. The only difference is a one-generation step-up in Intel processors, from Core Ultra Series 1 to Series 2. In this case, it's the Ultra 7 255H.

Unlike the jump from V-series chips (as seen from the Dell XPS 13 to the Dell 13 Premium), these H-series chips don’t get a significant increase in efficiency and battery life. There is an increase in performance, though it's not monumental. We're talking about a 7 percent increase in multicore performance and a 17 percent bump in single-core performance, as tested in Cinebench R24. I'm not writing that off, but I don't think it's worth an extra $500.

The real problem is that Dell didn't step up the laptop from RTX 4050 to the latest RTX 5050. Dell didn't provide a reason, but the RTX 4050 version of the Dell XPS 14 is no longer available, and the RTX 5050 is only configurable in the larger Dell 16 Premium. That's unfortunate, as we've been waiting years for an RTX 50-series graphics card to breathe new life into laptops.

Photograph: Luke Larsen

The RTX 4050 is not exactly a banger of a GPU, either, especially since it only has 6 GB of VRAM. The move to the RTX 5050 at least gets you to 8 GB, in addition to providing support for multiframe generation. There aren't many nongaming laptops to embrace the RTX 50 series just yet, but they're coming. When they do arrive, like the upcoming 2025 Acer Swift X 14, they will be configurable up to an RTX 5070.

I tried to get Cyberpunk 2077 to play as well as I could on the Dell 14 Premium. Once I set the resolution to 1200p, I wasn't able to get anything smooth enough without the use of upscaling, which isn't too surprising. I dropped the graphics preset to Medium and turned on Nvidia DLSS to the “Balanced” mode, and was averaging 74 fps (frames per second) without ruining the image quality. You can always crank up the frame generation to achieve over 80 fps if you value smoothness over input lag and clarity. Point being, the Dell 14 Premium can pass off as a decent laptop for some gaming on the side, even up to and including triple-A titles. But perhaps not at a level you'd expect for this price.

Photograph: Luke Larsen

And yet, for my money, there still isn’t a laptop as attractive as the Dell 14 Premium. There just isn’t. That's still an achievement in my book, even if not all of the trade-offs are wins, such as the light-up touch buttons. I wish Dell had found a way to get the RTX 5050 onboard, though, because as is, this doesn't feel like much of an upgrade.

If you're willing to buy a gaming laptop, you can find them with the RTX 4050 for well under half the price of the Dell 14 Premium, and they'll likely perform better thanks to louder fans and a thicker chassis. The Dell 14 Premium is just not a performance-first machine, and I don't think it was ever intended to be. But with laptops like the MacBook Pro and Razer Blade 14 as direct competition, it needs to be.