Dell 14 Premium

Dell's Premium line picks up where XPS laptops left off, with the option for RTX 4050 graphics to give extra lift

-  JOHN LOEFFLER

Like the Dell 16 Premium overleaf, the Dell 14 Premium carries on the XPS formula with little changed beyond the branding; regular readers will know that Dell has simplified most of its product ranges into plain Dell, Dell Plus and Dell Premium, using the good, better, best principle. Professional products then see the word “Pro” squeezed in. But all this means that the Dell 14 Premium is really the 2025 update to last year’s Dell XPS 14 (see issue 356, p48), with its most obvious rival being the 14in MacBook Pro (see issue 364, p50). Where the XPS 14 used Intel's Lunar Lake chip, geared towards efficiency, the 14 Premium packs an Arrow Lake H chip. This can be paired with an Nvidia RTX 4050 GPU, something last year’s model wasn’t capable of due to the limitations of the Lunar Lake chip design. The Dell 14 Premium starts at £1,499 inc VAT, which includes a Core Ultra 7 255H, integrated Arc 140T graphics, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD and a non-touch IPS panel with a 1,920 x 1,200 resolution (Dell has taken to calling this 2K, perhaps because it sounds better). For our review sample it ups the ante with RTX 4050 graphics, 32GB of integrated memory and a 1TB SSD. This takes the price to £2,199 if you configure it, but look out for deals on Dell’s site and with other retailers.

Graphics chops

As your biggest decision is likely to be integrated graphics or discrete, let’s tackle that first. 3DMark gives our first indication of how far Intel’s Arc graphics have come: the Dell’s result of 5,372 isn’t light years away from the 4,226 of the Acer Aspire Vero (see p60), which relies on the Core Ultra 7 255H’s integrated GPU.