Dell 16 Premium

The Dell 16 Premium holds its own against even the 16in MacBook Pro, with creative and gaming skills aplenty

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Thanks to its larger body, the Dell 16 Premium - the model formerly known as the Dell XPS 16 (see issue 357, p50) - can pack up to an RTX 5060 GPU compared to the RTX 4050 found in its 14in sibling. In fact, the chassis can cope with an RTX 5070, which is what Dell sent us for testing - but that's not on offer in the UK. Like the Dell 14 Premium, the 16 uses Intel's Core Ultra H series chips and that means cores aplenty, going right up to a Core 9 Ultra 9 285H.

If you're paying this much for high-end silicon it makes sense to use Dell's Ultra Performance settings, which add fan noise but also a welcome 10% (sometimes more) bump up in speed. With this setting in place, the Dell 16 Premium romped to 11,409 in 3DMark Time Spy, 92fps in Bordlerlands 3 and 32fps in Cyberpunk 2077 - both at its most punishing settings at 1080p. That's roughly a 15% improvement compared to last year's RTX 4070-toting Dell XPS 16.

Choose your graphics settings wisely and you'll be able to play games at the 4K native resolution of our tested screen (we advise against choosing the 1,920 x 1,200 IPS panel across a 16.3in diagonal). Its colour coverage isn't as stunning as the 14 Premium's, with 80% of the DCI-P3 gamut under its spell, but colour accuracy remains excellent, it hit 572cd/m² in our HDR tests and will look fantastic whether you're creating animations or watching films. The speakers are great, too.

The downside is battery life, where both OLED panels and Nvidia GPUs take their toll. With a maximum battery life of about nine hours, according to Dell, this laptop can't keep pace with the 16in MacBook Pro, which lasted about 20 hours in our tests. The Dell 16 Premium struggled past five hours of mixed use, and 2hrs 30mins under heavy load at best.