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.
