Pros
- Beautiful 3.2K OLED display
- Quad speakers produce great sound
- Haptic touchpad feels lively and accurate
- Excellent webcam
Cons
- Shockingly heavy for the size
- Unimpressive battery life
- Form-over-function touch-sensitive function row
- Limited port selection and adapter costs extra
Dell must equate «premium» with sturdiness and heft. That’s the only reason I can think of as to why the Dell 14 Premium is one of the hardiest and heaviest 14-inch laptops I’ve ever encountered. On the plus side, it’s extremely well built to the point of feeling like a block of granite. The downside is being forced to carry around what feels like a block of granite.
Most 14-inch laptops weigh around 3 pounds, but the Dell 14 Premium is closer to 4 pounds. Pick it up for the first time, and its heft will certainly surprise you. It’s also surprising because there’s really nothing out of the ordinary about its makeup. There are RTX graphics options, but my test system features integrated graphics along with a common Intel Core Ultra processor, 32GB of RAM and a single M.2 SSD. Even the battery is of a usual size. And it’s all enclosed in a standard, all-aluminum chassis that’s a little thicker than usual, but still well under an inch thick.
I’m more willing to overlook a heavier-than-average weight with the Dell 16 Premium because portability is less of a concern with a 16-inch laptop. With a 14-inch laptop, I assume most people will want to move around with it to some degree, and lugging a 3.8-pound brick of a laptop gets old fast.
Dell 14 Premium
| Price as reviewed | $2,050 regularly on sale for $1,450 |
|---|---|
| Display size/resolution | 14.5-inch 3,200×2,000 touch OLED |
| CPU | Intel Core Ultra 7 255H |
| Memory | 32GB LPDDR5-6400 |
| Graphics | Intel Arc 140T |
| Storage | 1TB SSD |
| Ports | Thunderbolt 4 USB-C (x3), microSD card, combo audio |
| Networking | Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 |
| Operating system | Windows 11 Home |
| Weight | 3.8 lbs (1.7 kg) |
The Dell 14 Premium starts at $1,550 but has consistently been on sale for $1,000 since I received my test system weeks ago and started tracking the price. The base model features an Intel Core Ultra 7 255H CPU, 16GB of RAM, integrated Intel Arc 140T graphics, a 512GB SSD and a 14.5-inch 2K non-touch LCD. (The LCD will lighten the load by 0.13 pounds.)
My test system has a full price of $2,050, but is regularly on sale for $1,450. It features three upgrades:
- 32GB of RAM
- 1TB SSD
- 3.2K OLED with touch support
There are a few upgrades not included in my test system. You can bump up to a Core Ultra 7 265H CPU, expand the memory to 64GB and the storage to 2TB and swap the integrated GPU for Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 graphics. That’s the lone GPU upgrade option; the larger Dell 16 Premium offers RTX 50 series GPUs, but those aren’t offered here.
The Dell 14 Premium starts at 1,499 in the UK and AU$2,598 in Australia.
Dell 14 Premium performance
Based on Intel Arrow Lake CPUs, the Dell 14 Premium is built more for power than efficiency. The Core Ultra 7 255H is a higher-powered version of the Core Ultra 200V chips from Lunar Lake that you’ll find on more mainstream laptops like the Dell 14 Plus.
As you can see in the benchmark charts at the end of this review, the Dell 14 Premium outpaced the Dell 14 Plus and other Lunar Lake laptops on most tests. It showed especially strong multicore performance because of its high core count: 16 physical cores made up of six performance cores, eight efficiency cores and two low-power efficient cores. Compare that with the popular Core Ultra 258V, which has a total of eight cores (four performance and four low-power efficient cores). Despite its lofty standing among Windows laptops, however, the Dell 14 Premium was no match for the M5 MacBook Pro and M4 MacBook Air on our tests.
The Dell 14 Premium prioritizes power at the expense of battery life. There was a time not too long ago when lasting more than 10 hours on our YouTube streaming battery drain test was an excellent result. Today, that figure is below average. You’ll get battery life that’s hours and hours longer with a MacBook Pro or Air, as well as Windows laptops based on a Qualcomm Snapdragon X series processor or other Intel models with a more efficient Lunar Lake chip.
Read more: Laptop CPUs in 2025 Explained: What to Know Before Buying Your Next Laptop
Bold looks but heavyweight
The Dell 14 Premium has the same striking design as the Dell 16 Premium. It’s an ultra-sparse look with a borderless touchpad, latticeless keyboard and function row consisting of touch-sensitive icons. You can read in more detail about my thoughts on the overall design in my Dell 16 Premium review, but the quick of it is this: I love the haptic touchpad and the lack of borders isn’t an issue, and I liked typing on the latticeless keyboard more than I thought I would. But I’d really like to trade the slick function row for a traditional row of physical keys.
I’d also like the Dell 14 Premium to shed some weight. At 3.8 pounds, it quickly becomes a burden to carry around. A 14-inch laptop ought to be lighter, especially one marketed as «ideal for creators on the go.» Even the 14-inch MacBook Pro, which is built more for power than portability, like the Dell 14 Premium, is nearly half a pound lighter at 3.4 pounds. If you drop down to the 3.3-pound Dell 14 Plus, you’ll shave off half a pound. The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 is a gaming/content creation hybrid and is also a half-pound lighter than the Dell 14 Premium. And many 14-inch laptops are much lighter and weigh less than 3 pounds, including the HP OmniBook X 14 and Acer Swift 14. And then there’s the Asus Zenbook A14, which isn’t a content creation laptop but weighs just 2.2 pounds.
Like the larger Premium laptop, the Dell 14 Premium serves up an OLED display. It’s not the 4K panel of the Dell 16 Premium, but that’s overkill for a 14.5-inch display anyway (and would only shorten battery life.) The OLED here has a 3.2K resolution — that’s 3,200×2,000 pixels — and it’s a beauty. Images and text looked super sharp, and you get the usual OLED benefits of vivid, accurate colors and excellent contrast with deep black levels.
As with many OLEDs, the Dell 14 Premium isn’t the brightest panel around. But OLEDs don’t need to get as bright as IPS panels because their effective zero-nit black levels and awesome contrast allow them to produce an excellent image without needing to get as bright. On my display tests with a Spyder X Elite colorimeter, the Dell 14 Premium came up a bit short against its 400-nit rating, hitting a peak brightness of 359 nits. Its color performance was strong, covering 100% of sRGB, 87% of AdobeRGB and 99% of P3.
I had the display brightness set to its maximum nearly the entire time I used the Dell 14 Premium, including on overcast days and at night. But I rarely wanted to go higher, in part because the glossy screen coating isn’t overly reflective, allowing me to clearly see what’s on the screen unless I had the brightest of backdrops behind me. If you’re willing to forego touch support, the non-touch display option is rated for 500 nits.
I really liked the full sound of the quad speakers on the Dell 16 Premium and was excited to see that Dell found room for four speakers here. The audio output sounds dynamic and full, with even a hint of bass response — a rarity in a laptop.
The image from the 1080p webcam looks so good that I thought it was from a 1440p camera. It produces a clean, well-balanced image that will have you looking your best on video calls. And it also has an IR sensor for facial recognition logins, in addition to a power button that doubles as a fingerprint reader, giving you a second secure biometric option.
I’d describe the port selection as limited but fast. You get three Thunderbolt 4 ports, which is great, but there are no USB Type-A ports. And Dell doesn’t include an adapter but makes you pay $35 for it, which I find offensive. There’s also a microSD card slot, which you might find useful, but far more creators would find a full-size SD card slot even more useful.
Is the Dell 14 Premium worth buying?
As much as I like the sleek looks, OLED display, quad speakers and webcam, I can’t offer much of a recommendation for this 14-inch block of granite of a laptop. Sure, the chassis feels rock solid, but it’s a shoulder killer. Unless you absolutely love its minimalistic look, I’d steer you instead toward the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 for a more portable 14-inch laptop that still delivers the goods for creators.
The review process for laptops, desktops, tablets and other computerlike devices consists of two parts: performance testing under controlled conditions in the CNET Labs and extensive hands-on use by our expert reviewers. This includes evaluating a device’s aesthetics, ergonomics and features. A final review verdict is a combination of both objective and subjective judgments.
The list of benchmarking software we use changes over time as the devices we test evolve. The most important core tests we’re currently running on every compatible computer include Primate Labs Geekbench 6, Cinebench R23, PCMark 10 and 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra.
A more detailed description of each benchmark and how we use it can be found on our How We Test Computers page.
