Dell recently renamed its PC offerings, with Dell Pro replacing the venerable Latitude name for enterprise systems. I recently traveled with a Dell Pro 14 Premium and found it to be more than just a rebranding. With an Intel Second Generation Core Ultra (Lunar Lake) processor, a new design, and a lighter package, the Dell Pro 14 Premium provided great performance and by far the best battery life I’ve ever seen.
A Sturdy, Standard Design
From a design perspective, this PC looks much like other high-end 14-inch enterprise laptops. It has a sturdy magnesium chassis in a dark gray magnetite color. It measures 12.25 by 8.53 by 0.64 to 0.71 inches, which puts it in line with other 14-inch machines. My unit weighed 2.64 pounds (3.25 pounds with the included 65-watt charger), similar to the older Latitude 7440 Ultralight but not quite as light as the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13.
On My Wish List: A Touch-Screen Option
It has a 14-inch 1,920-by-1,200 IPS display in the now-standard 16:10 ratio with up to 400 nits of brightness, which looked good. Dell plans to offer a “tandem OLED” with a 2,880-by-1,800 display, which may result in lower battery life, and I hope it adds touch-screen options, but neither feature is available right now. As usual on such machines, the bezels are pretty minimal, but the top is big enough to hold an 8-megapixel HDR camera.
Ample Ports and Security Features
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The Dell Pro 14 Premium has a nice layout of ports. The left side has an HDMI port, Thunderbolt 4/USB-C, and audio jack, while the right side has a USB-A 3.2, another Thunderbolt/USB-C, and a locking slot. I like the fact that it continues to have both USB-A and HDMI while offering USB-C on both sides, which makes plugging in the charger more convenient. Dell says the USB-C port is now modular so it enables easier repairs. In addition, a 5G modem is an option, but my unit did not have one.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The Dell Pro 14 Premium has a “zero-lattice keyboard” with what Dell describes as a battery-saving mini-LED backlit technology, which reduces power usage. The keyboard has less space between the keys than those from HP and Lenovo and looks more like a consumer keyboard, but it’s comfortable to type on. However, I definitely missed having indicator lights on the mute speakers and mute microphone keys.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
For video and audio conferencing, the 8-megapixel IR camera had a wide field of view and looks sharp and very bright. It also supports Windows security features, such as locking when you step away and waking on approach if you’ve set up Windows Hello; both work quite well. A physical switch on the top of the display covers the webcam, which is always appreciated.
One unusual feature is a nice set of collaboration tools on the haptic touchpad, which can do things like turn the audio and video on and off, open a chat window, or share the screen.
The laptop has two top-firing and two bottom-firing speakers, along with two noise-cancelling microphones. The sound is good though not quite as rich as I’ve heard on some other machines.
Performance
Of course, performance is a big deal, and this is the first machine I’ve tested based on Intel’s Core Ultra 7 268V (Lunar Lake), a slight upgrade from the 258V I tested in the X1 Carbon Gen 13. The main processing parts of the chip are made on TSMC’s N3B (3nm) process, a departure from previous generations of chip made by Intel itself.
It has eight threads: four performance cores and four efficiency cores, but no multi-threading. That’s notably less than the previous generation, Meteor Lake. Still, it runs at a base frequency of 2.2GHz, with turbo speeds up to 5.0GHz, requires 17 to 35 watts of power, has Intel Arc Graphics 140V with 8 Xe cores, and an NPU that Intel rates at 48 Int8 TOPS. (For comparison the 258V has a maximum CPU turbo of 4.8GHz and 47 Int8 TOPS).
The machine supports vPro, Intel’s enterprise management technology, which is required by many enterprise buyers.
Performance tests produced excellent results. On basic benchmarks, the Dell Pro 14 Premium is generally comparable with the other Lunar Lake systems I’ve tested; a little better than the X1 Carbon on some things, a little worse on others. In general, systems based on Intel’s Lunar Lake deliver scores fairly similar to the Meteor Lake version and a bit behind the HP OmniBook Ultra 14 with AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 HX375 known as Strix Point. That’s a little faster on CPU-centric benchmarks, though in some graphics test, the Lunar Lake systems are faster.
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On my toughest tests—those that run for a long time—the Dell Pro 14 did well, if not quite as well as the X1 Carbon.
Running a large model in MatLab took over 25 minutes on the Lunar Lake system, about half a minute longer than on the x1 Carbon, but a huge improvement compared with about 36 minutes on Strix Point systems and over 30 minutes on Meteor Lake ones. A huge Excel model ran in 38 minutes, compared with 34 on the X1 Carbon, 44 on the Strix Point machine, 46 on the Meteor Lake systems, and 35 minutes on the old Raptor-Lake ones.
One anomaly was transcoding a video in Handbrake, which took 92 minutes compared with 40 minutes on the X1 Carbon. I’m not quite sure why; on some systems, Handbrake just seems to be a lot slower, which may have something to do with drivers or other software installed.
On AI applications, the 48 TOPS NPU seemed to work pretty well for local applications. I tried running local versions of Stable Diffusion (though Automatic) and Llama 3.2 (through LM Studio), and the Lunar Lake systems did notably better than the Meteor Lake systems but not quite as strong at the AMD Strix Point ones.
I saw similar results with UL’s Procyon AI Inference test, where the Dell slightly lagged the X1 Carbon, but was far better than Meteor Lake systems and nowhere near the numbers reported on AMD Strix Point or Qualcomm Snapdragon-based systems such as the Dell Latitude 7455. I’m still not sure most people want to run these applications locally yet, but it’s something to keep in mind.
Recommended by Our Editors
Phenomenal Battery Life
It’s battery life where the Dell Pro 14 Premium really stands out. It has a 60 watt-hour battery, which seems about average for this size machine. But on PCMark 10’s Modern Office test, I was able to run the new system for 31 hours at 40 nits and almost as long at 100 nits. That’s far better than the 16 hours and 54 minutes at 40 nits, and 15 hours and 58 minutes at 100 nits I saw on the x1 Carbon, and 10 hours better than I’ve seen on any other laptop of this size.
Those results are so good, I wondered if I was doing something wrong, but I’ve carried it a lot and in practice it just seems to go and go. After a whole working day of using it on battery power (and with a brighter screen, usually connected to Wi-Fi), it still reported over half the battery remaining. This is phenomenal.
This Is a Copilot+ PC
On the software side, the Dell Pro 14 Premium is marketed as a Copilot+ PC, with a dedicated Copilot key and all of Microsoft’s typical set of Copilot+ applications, including Windows Studio Effects, Live Captions, and Cocreator. Presumably, it should support other Copilot+ features Microsoft has promised, including the Recall feature, Click to Do, and improved search.
The PC includes a Dell Optimizer app that gives you control over the collaboration touchpad. You can also adjust the machine’s performance to the best performance, optimized, cool, or quiet (although even at top performance, it didn’t seem too loud or hot). A separate Dell Command Update app checks for the latest BIOS enhancements, drivers, and firmware updates. I’d prefer it if one application did it all, but it seemed to work well.
The machine has a number of security features, including on-host BIOS verification and integrated telemetry. For enterprise manageability, Dell offers its Trusted Workplace and Management Portal accessible from within Microsoft Intune that can manage a fleet of Dell systems.
A Solid, Portable Package
Overall, the Dell Pro 14 Premium is an appealing laptop with great performance and excellent battery life. I have a few nits—no indicator lights on the keyboard, not the best sound, and not my favorite keyboard—but it has a solid feel, great camera, and terrific selection of ports in a lightweight, portable package.
Prices start around $2,000 for a model with an Ultra 5 236V processor, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB SSD. A version close to what I tested with the Ultra 7 268V and 32GB of RAM and 1TB SSD was selling for about $2,564 on Dell’s site as I wrote this. While this is a pricey laptop, it’s less than the starting price of the previous-generation Latitude 9450, and Dell points out that most customers would buy this as part of a larger purchase, with various discounts.
About Michael J. Miller
Former Editor in Chief
