Dell XPS 14 Ultrabook Review: A Multimedia Marvel - lewisovelly1950

At a Coup d'oeil

Expert's Military rank

Pros

• Handsome, high-res reveal; hot audio and webcam
• Peachy bombardment life, classy industrial intent

Cons

• Heavy and on the pricy side for its screen sized
• Narrow field of vision

Our Verdict

The Dell XPS 14 excels at multimedia, boasts gravid battery life, and performs decently–but it's heavy and a little high-priced.

Although it's supported Intel's fastest new Ivy Nosepiece CPU for Ultrabooks, the Dell XPS 14 at 4.7 pounds hovers perilously draw in weight unit to the entirely-purpose laptop family. Just Dingle gives you different reasons to lug the extra ounces about, especially if you value good multimedia system features.

Sitting in between the XPS 13 and the XPS 15 on the consumer-focused XPS laptop continuum, the XPS 14 we looked at boasts an exceptionally bright high-res (1600-by-900-pixel) 14-edge widescreen exhibit and discrete nVidia GeForce GT 630M graphics with 1GB of memory board to help with games and video.

Waves MaxxAudio technology, meanwhile, contributes full-bodied audio from two built-in 2-watt stereo speakers, and the high-def (1.3-megapixel) webcam captures smooth video for Skype calls and YouTube clips. As an added bonus, battery life in our tests was a praiseworthy 7 hours, 37 transactions.

But the XPS 14 disappoints in a couple of its features. The brilliant, LED-backlit display suffers from a middling narrow field of vision, especially when wake videos from above or below.

And the XPS 14 isn't inexpensive. Our review unit, which also included an Intel Core i7-35178u processor, a 5400-rpm 500GB Winchester drive with startup help from a 32GB mSATA hard-state caching drive, and the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Bounty, goes for a somewhat high-priced $1500. Dingle does, yet, offer less big-ticket configurations start at $1100, likewise atomic number 3 a version with a 512GB SSD for (gulp) $2000 (every bit of July 20, 2012).

Performance, meanwhile, is a miscellany that skews to generally good. Although the superior battery animation helped lift our XPS 14's boilers suit performance grudge to a estimable 79 (on a equation with scores for the contemporary ultraportable chart-toppers), the 5400-rpm hornlike drive did drag the XPS 14 down on some components of our WorldBench 7 benchmark, nigh notably hard-campaign operations and picture encoding.

While the XPS 14's overall WorldBench score was a bit unsure of Holocene averages, it had some bright spots, including an above-average score on the PCMark 7 Productivity Suite. Gaming results were too amalgamated–many slightly higher than average and others a trifle below–but the overall gaming score of 84 out of 100 (somewhat above recent averages) is certainly within the ballpark for a laptop with discrete graphics.

The XPS 14 looks sturdy, yet at just under an inch thick, it is slimmer than you power look for its weighting. The pewter-colored, soft-aluminum eyelid contrasts with the black soft-touch coating on the magnesium medal rest and the pitch blackness Si base (which absorbs a great deal of the heat generated during prolonged use) to give the unit a layered look when shut. Bonded Corning Gorilla Glass covers the display, contributory to the framework's generally classy appearance, but also contributes to the weight.

Lifting the lid straightaway reveals a roomy, backlit keyboard. The keys are fairly flat and a bit slimy, but travel is decent, and the conventional layout makes for a reasonably satisfying come to-typing experience. The clickable touchpad is amenable–and pretty much in line with what we've seen on a number of laptops lately.

The XPS offers good connectivity options via ports arrayed on the left edge. From back to front, they let in gigabit ethernet, HDMI, DisplayPort (for monitor connections), and two USB 3.0 ports, one and only of which has PowerShare technology for charging devices even when the notebook computer is powered down. On the right sharpness is a phone/microphone jazz group port, an SD/MMC card lector, and a slot for a security transmission line. The XPS 14 also supports dual-band (2.4GHz/5GHz) Wi-Fi.

Dingle's software bundle is fairly typical, including the starter variant of Office 2010 (with adver-supported, limited-functionality versions of Word and Excel), Skype, Windows Live Essentials, and the annoying 30-daytime trial of McAfee Security Core (annoying because you have to uninstall it to stop the ceaseless appearance of pop-leading nag windows), as well as Dingle-branded webcam and online backup software.

Bottom Line

On the whole, the XPS 14 has a lot to offer up notebook users who lav get past its weight and are willing to deal out a bit extra for its multimedia and gaming potency. Scorn the enceinte battery life, I'd recommend this unitary more for occasional travelers than frequent fliers.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/460133/dell_xps_14_ultrabook_review_a_multimedia_marvel.html

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