Dell XPS 13 and XPS 14 Gorgeous laptops with usability quirks, Style and substance come at too high a price
The Dell XPS 14 inherits the stylish looks of its recent predecessors and packs in some powerful hardware to make doing serious work look good. But style alone isn’t enough to merit the lofty price tag the XPS 14 wears, and with so many cheaper alternatives running equally capable hardware in attractive packages of their own, the XPS 14 has its work cut out for it.
The new Dell XPS 14 9440 has a range of configuration options that can start from a modest $1699 MSRP or range up to $3479. All configurations run on the Intel Core 7 Ultra 155H, but Dell provides options for graphics, memory, storage, display, Windows version, color, and whether or not Intel vPro is included.
CPU: Intel Core 7 Ultra 155H
Memory: 32GB LPDDR5
Graphics/GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 (30W TGP)
Display: 14.5-inch 3.2K OLED
Storage: 1TB PCIe Gen4 SSD
Webcam: 1080p
Connectivity: 3x Thunderbolt 4 / USB-C with Power Delivery and DisplayPort, 1x microSDXC card reader, 1x 3.5mm combo audio
Networking: WiFi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3
Biometrics: Windows Hello fingerprint, facial recognition
Battery capacity: 68 watt-hours
Dimensions: 12.6 x 8.5 x 0.71 inches
Weight: 3.95 pounds
MSRP: $2,699 ($1,699 base)
Memory options range from 16GB to 64GB while storage ranges from 512GB up to 4TB. Intel Arc graphics are the base, but there’s an option to bump up to an NVIDIA RTX 4050 for $300 extra, which also comes with an automatic bump to the transfer rate on the memory from 6,000MT/s to 7,467MT/s. The laptop can come with either a 1920×1200 anti-glare LCD display with 30-120Hz variable refresh rate or the 3200×2000 anti-reflective OLED with 48-120HZ refresh rate tested here, with the former covering the sRGB color space and the latter covering the DCI-P3 color space.
Design and build quality
The design of the Dell XPS 14 calls for a lot of aluminum and glass, and in that way, it has much in common with the latest smartphones. The whole exterior is wrapped up in metal, which Dell says is 75 percent recycled aluminum.
The display is covered up in Gorilla Glass Victus, a hard glass made to resist scratches and cracks that should be more than up the abuse it’ll get from frequent touchscreen use.
The newer trackpad design, which effectively hides the trackpad sees the whole area under the keyboard covered in a single piece of Gorilla Glass 3.
Keyboard, trackpad
As on the XPS 16, the XPS 14 trackpad is gigantic. It’s close to the size of the 6.8-inch smartphone screens out there. Even though it’s impossible to feel out the edges of the trackpad area, it almost doesn’t matter since it’s so large that anywhere you’re likely to touch it will still register. With excellent palm rejection and pleasing haptics, it’s a solid piece of hardware.
It can be a little hard to double-click on, but double-tapping is just as viable. If Dell was going to change anything, I’d just want to see it go even wider (all the way to the sides, ideally), for more ergonomic mousing.
That would be especially helpful in select cases, as XPS 14 has a tendency to ignore any swipes that start from outside the actual trackpad region, though it’s somewhat inconsistent on the matter.
Display, audio
The Dell XPS 14 has a gorgeous display. While the LCD option is probably half decent, the OLED alternative offers a lot. It’s as sharp as could possibly be needed at this size, and 120Hz refresh rate allows for smooth visuals. It can move between 120Hz and 48Hz though to save on battery when necessary.
The XPS 14 combines four speakers — a pair of tweeters and a pair of woofers — to deliver surprisingly robust and full sound for a laptop with such a small footprint. For music, it provides life that most laptops lack. The bass is still on the weak side, but it’s still audible rather than being effectively erased by the speakers. There’s no struggle with speech either, which comes through easily, as the speakers emphasize the vocal range. The speakers get a little unpleasant at full volume, if I’m sitting close, but it’s not so much an issue of distortion as it is of their volume.
Dell has put together a decent package for conferencing. The 1080p webcam captures reasonably bright and crisp video footage that will serve well in video calls, though it’s still not up to the level of quality you might want to rely on if you’re making frequent presentations where you’ll be the focal point. The mics do a good job picking up my voice and shutting out background noise, even other voices, but they capture a bit too much echo in small rooms.
The XPS 14 can also use its webcam for Windows Hello facial recognition, which proves an especially quick way to sign into the system. There’s also a fingerprint scanner at the top-right corner of the keyboard.
Performance
The Dell XPS 14 has strong performance, to be sure, thanks to its Intel Core Ultra 7 155H and RTX 4050 pairing. That’s more than enough muscle for everyday computing and then some. And even though Dell shows fairly successful cooling for the parts inside, with scores not dropping precipitously over longer stress tests, it doesn’t manage to ultimately keep up with some of its competition. And that’s bad news, since the XPS 14 is hands down the most expensive option of the bunch, and it’s not even the only one offering a high level of polish.
Turning to PCMark 10, which assesses a system’s capabilities in a variety of common and office-related tasks, we see the Dell XPS 14 has modest overall performance, but not quite as much as its competitors. It’s not far off, and much of the difference is unlikely to be tangible in everyday use, but as more and more demand is put onto these systems by future applications, those with the extra muscle now will likely prove better able to keep up down the line.
It’s not Dell’s raw multi-core performance that has held it back, though. In Cinebench R20, we see it can plainly let it rip, beating out all of its competition in the test. That plays out in our Handbrake encoding test, where the Dell XPS 14 was able to encode our 4K video file faster than the rest at just under 13 minutes. There’s some variability to the performance, though, as the XPS 14 didn’t rank as highly in Cinebench R15 or Cinebench R23. So it’s not the all-out champ of CPU performance.
And while multi-core performance shows off the ability of a system to manage heavy loads, single-core performance can suggest the responsiveness of the system, and in that department the XPS 14 is closer to the middle of the pack, notably lagging behind the Lenovo Slim Pro 9.
While its performance is competitive, particularly in the CPU department, the Dell XPS 14 has to contend with much cheaper competition that leaves it little room to breathe. But competition from the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED, Dell Inspiron 14 Plus, and MSI Prestige 15 AI Evo B1MG isn’t quite 1-to-1 since those all run on integrated graphics. As configured, the Dell XPS 14 includes a discrete GPU that gives it a leg up in graphically demanding tasks.
Battery life
Dell’s minor performance shortfalls come with a solid positive: the battery life is no slouch. In our testing, the XPS 14 lasted over 13.5 hours playing back a video file on repeat with the display set as close as possible to 250 nits. That longevity sets it apart from Lenovo Slim Pro 9 that hounded it so thoroughly in performance. That said, Dell still has its competition cut out for it.
Dell’s own Inspiron 14 Plus may have a lackluster display compared to the XPS 14 Plus’s OLED panel, but it’s a power sipper and lets the Inspiron 14 Plus run for over 3 hours longer. The Asus ZenBook 14 OLED pulled off a similar feat and still had the benefit of a regal OLED panel. The MSI Prestige 16 AI EVO B1MG may have fallen short by more than an hour, but it also had to illuminate a 16-inch OLED panel.