Living With the Dell XPS 14

The combination of an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H (Meteor Lake) CPU and Nvidia GTX 4050 graphics gives the Dell XPS 14 a lot of power, and the basic design certainly looks sleek with a rather flat keyboard, invisible touchpad, and function keys indicated by lights rather than physical keys. The model I tested had a wonderful 14.5-inch touch OLED display that looked great. All that power comes at a price, and the keyboard will attract some users, while turning others off.

Measuring 12.6 x 8.5 x 0.71 inches, the XPS 14 (9440) is just barely larger than the X1 Carbon Gen 12 and a bit smaller than the HP x360 Spectre 14. It looks good in CNC aluminum and is available in either a lighter platinum or a darker graphite shade; I used the former, and it looked quite good. The 14.5-inch display has very small bezels and is on a hinge that drops down, so you don’t see as much of the bezel as on other machines, with the hinge leaving room for air vents on the bottom of the unit. In short, it looks very modern.

Probably because of the included discrete graphics, it’s heavier than the other machines I mentioned – my model, which had an OLED display, weighs 3.87 pounds (4.59 pounds with the included 100-watt charger), about 1.5 pounds more than the X1 Carbon. But it’s still rather sleek, and the weight is light compared to most machines with this level of graphics.

As mentioned, the keyboard will be controversial. It has a seamless glass touchpad, with haptic feedback and a Gorilla Glass cover. You don’t see the outlines of the touchpad area, but it reaches from the Windows key to the backspace, a larger area than on almost any laptop I’ve seen. Instead of traditional function key buttons, it has a capacitive touch function row, in which lights show you the various functions. All the essential keys are there, but since they don’t change, I’m not quite sure about the benefit this offers for users. I wish it had indicator lights showing you when the speakers are muted. But it does allow for more cooling, which is important because of the graphics.

The backlit keyboard itself is flatter than I’m used to, but the keys are large with little room between them, and with 0.3mm travel, it’s an improvement from similar keyboards I’ve seen in the past. This is one of the first laptops I’ve used that has a dedicated physical Microsoft Copilot key, and that worked fine. Overall, the keyboard took a little getting used to, but I could touch type on it without difficulty.

The version of the XPS 14 I tested is based on the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H (Meteor Lake), which Dell says is running at 30 watts in this configuration. The 7 155H includes six “performance” cores, each capable of running two threads, and eight “efficient” cores on the main CPU tile, along with two additional “low-power efficient” cores on a separate tile. The performance cores have a base frequency of 1.4GHz and a maximum turbo of 4.8GHz. For graphics, the Intel processor has Intel Arc Graphics, which means eight Xe graphics cores; it includes Intel’s AI Boost with an NPU. Of course, if you want great graphics, you’ll use the internal Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050, which comes with 6 GB of GDDR6 memory and can run at up to 30 watts. Combined, the system can use up to 47 watts, with the power distributed, depending on the application. The system I tested came with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD.

The combination yields good to great performance, depending on the application. On basic PC benchmarks, the XPS 14 did as well as any thin laptop I’ve tested; and on graphics performance, it unsurprisingly handily beats machines with integrated graphics, even those with the latest Intel chips. It’s not as fast as the larger workstation machines like the ThinkPad P1 or the HP Zbook Studio 16 I tested last fall, but those are far bigger, far heavier machines. The XPS should do a far better job at graphics-intensive tasks like photo and video editing than most similar-sized machines.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

On my toughest tests, the XPS 14 completed a video transcode in Handbrake in an hour and 18 minutes, ran a MatLab portfolio simulation in just under 33 minutes, and completed a large Excel model in 46 minutes, all in line with other Meteor Lake-based machines I tested. (Note that for Excel, older Raptor Lake-based systems seem faster, probably because of their faster clock speeds).

It really shined on the AI benchmarks I tried. On UL’s Procyon AI inference test, the scores were in line with the other Meteor Lake systems when running with Windows ML or OpenVino; testing it with the Nvidia Tensor RT software made a huge difference, scoring more than twice as fast. In testing with a local installation of Spatial Diffusion, it created graphics in 6 or 7 seconds, compared with 3 or 4 minutes on the Meteor Lake machines with discrete graphics. If you intend to be running local AI models, that’s a huge improvement.

One downside is battery life. On PCMark 10’s Modern Office test, the XPS 14, which has a 70-watt-hour battery, lasted 9 hours and 18 minutes at 40 nits, and 8 hours and 38 minutes at 100 nits, both 2.5 to 3 hours less than the Meteor Lake systems with discrete graphics. Still, that’s not bad.

The XPS line is available with both OLED and more traditional LCD displays. My unit had a 3200-by-2000-pixel resolution OLED with up to 400 nits of brightness a default showing text at 250%; it looked terrific. It comes with a 1080p FHD webcam that I thought looked very sharp, with nice colors.

Dell supports the basic Windows Studio Effects through the Camera app, including automatic framing, eye contact, and background effects. Unlike the recent HP and Lenovo systems I tested, Dell does not offer its own video enhancement software. I was surprised not to see any webcam shutter, though a light next to the camera does let you know when it’s on.

The camera supports Windows Hello, and with presence detection, so you can set the machine to lock when you step away from it and unlock as you approach. This is enabled through the MyDell application, which also includes such things as color calibration, 3D audio features, and the ability to remove background noise in audio. It supports Dolby Atmos and Waves MaxxAudio for 3D sound, plus has four speakers (two main and two tweeters). I thought the audio quality was quite good.

The XPS 14 has a limited variety of ports. The left side has two Thunderbolt/USB-C ports, while the right has another one, a microSD slot, and an audio jack. It’s convenient to be able to charge the machine through the USB-C ports on either the left or right, and the unit came with a USB-C dongle that supports both USB-A and HDMI, but for now, I prefer having HDMI and USB-A built-in.

As I write this, a similar model to my configuration (with the top-end Meteor Lake processor, Nvidia graphics, 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage) lists at $2,699 while a version without discrete graphics, non-touch LCD display, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage starts at $1,699. If you want the extra performance, you’ll pay for it.

In summary, there’s a lot to like about the XPS 14, with its modern look, very nice webcam, and great performance. There are tradeoffs—a keyboard that won’t appeal to everyone, no webcam shutter, and weaker battery life than machines with integrated graphics. But if you’re looking for discrete graphics in a smaller machine, or want to run AI models locally, the XPS 14 offers much to like.

Here’s PCMag’s review of the similarly equipped Dell XPS 16 (9640).

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