Dell 14 Premium Review: Powerful Ultrabook, But on the Heavier Side!

Dell’s new naming scheme might make you do a double-take, especially when trying to grasp it quickly. The Dell 14 Premium, a top-tier ultraportable offered by the company in 2025, highlights the brand’s distinction in this segment over the years. But does the Dell 14 Premium live up to expectations? Our review delves into this question.

Technical Specifications

Design

The Dell 14 Premium unmistakably carries the Dell signature with its fully metal chassis and meticulous attention to detail. Although it maintains the sleek design lineage of the XPS series, it’s slightly thicker at 18 millimeters and a bit heavier at 1.72 kilograms.

In the realm of ultrabooks, it opts to be sturdier to enhance chip performance. This is expected given some models house the RTX 4050 graphics part, but for a model without it, as tested here, these physical choices are somewhat harder to justify.

Nevertheless, it retains the sophisticated look and presence we’ve come to expect from Dell. However, if you’re seeking a pure ultrabook that balances lightness with battery life, there are better options available. On the other hand, if you desire an ultrabook configuration that still delivers a decent level of performance, the Dell 14 Premium with the RTX 4050 might be a suitable compromise. This leads us to conclude that, in the context of its chassis, the existence of our test model is hard to justify.

Keyboard and Touchpad

Dell continues to adopt a design with a large glass plate incorporating the keyboard and touchpad. This design choice may be divisive, but we find it quite appealing, especially since the keyboard maintains high quality with incredibly wide and stable keys that are a pleasure to use. However, the capacitive touch bar is not particularly enjoyable, though it’s not a dealbreaker either.

The touchpad, made entirely of glass, remains one of its strongest features. Perfectly centered, it offers a pleasurable user experience and a large diagonal that blends seamlessly with the overall design.

Connectivity

On the left, there are two Thunderbolt 4 ports, and on the right, a combo jack, a third Thunderbolt 4 port, and a microSD card reader.

Once again, Dell makes a bold choice. While numerous Thunderbolt 4 ports unlock many advanced uses for the computer, including connecting an external graphics card, it also necessitates the use of various dongles for more typical users. It’s up to you to decide whether this is a strength or a weakness based on your needs.

Webcam and Audio

The Dell 14 Premium includes a fairly basic 1080p webcam at 30 FPS, but its image processing is very successful. While sharpness may not be impressive, the dynamics of the image and colors are well-preserved, making the final result pleasing to the eye.

The audio setup, with speakers positioned both at the top and bottom of the device, is very good. The laptop delivers a sound that is richer than average, though naturally limited by the size of the chassis.

Screen

In our test configuration, the Dell 14 Premium boasts the best available screen. This is a 14.5-inch OLED display supporting a resolution of 3200 x 2000 pixels, with a 16:10 aspect ratio. It is touch-enabled and offers a refresh rate of 120 Hz.

Using our probe and the CalMAN software by Portrait Displays, we observed a color gamut coverage of 153% for sRGB and 102% for DCI-P3. The maximum SDR brightness is measured at 357 cd/m², with an average color temperature of 6490—perfect—and an average delta e00 of 1.94—also perfect. The only downside is the brightness, which isn’t particularly impressive.

Although the screen is Dolby Vision certified, Dell does not activate HDR by default and does not heavily promote it. This is understandable, as we noticed that this mode is not particularly well-calibrated in our measurements, showing a peak brightness of 602 cd/m² with an HDR delta e00 measured at 25.22 due to poorly adjusted brightness. While the dark mode improves matters, relying on SDR is advisable.

Overall, we are looking at a very well-calibrated screen that could benefit from a bit more brightness in SDR to compensate for the glossy coating required for touch functionality.

Software

We’re still on the familiar Windows 11, and still on computers validated for the Copilot+ label. Dell’s software solution remains fragmented across several applications, but the central Dell Optimizer app is very easy to use and offers the right options.

There’s still room for optimization, particularly with SupportAssist, which remains somewhat bulky and slow to open. However, there’s noticeable progress over the years, with fewer applications becoming more optimized across devices.

Performance

Our test model of the Dell 14 Premium is the DA14250, which features an Intel Core Ultra 7 265H SoC with 16 cores—6 performance, 8 efficient, and 2 ultra-efficient—capable of turbo boosting up to 5.3 GHz. It includes the default integrated Intel Arc 140T graphics, without the RTX 4050, along with 32 GB of RAM at 8400 MT/s and 1 TB of PCIe Gen 4 storage.

Benchmarks

On Cinebench 2024, we see scores of 944 points in multi-core and 123 points in single-core. As often is the case, the Intel Core performs well on simpler tasks but falls short of its direct AMD competitor on multi-threaded applications. For a computer aiming to bridge the gap between an ultrabook and a high-performance laptop, perhaps choosing AMD would have been better.

The Intel Arc 140T graphics continue to perform very well in benchmarks, with an impressive score of 3206 points. While gaming might not be its strongest suit, Intel remains ahead in audio and video production.

The SSD meets the demands of the end-of-life Generation 4, with very satisfactory read and write rates.

Cooling and Noise

The Dell 14 Premium excellently manages its temperatures. Even under full synthetic load, we observed that it does not exceed 36°C on the chassis, setting a record for an ultrabook. This underscores again that the chassis is designed to integrate a graphics card; thus, opting for the RTX 4050 version is advisable.

Battery Life

The Dell 14 Premium incorporates a 69.5 Wh battery that recharges through a 100W power adapter provided. This charging relies on the Power Delivery protocol, allowing you to use any charger of this standard.

In typical office use, with the brightness set to 50%, we observed a battery life of between 7 and 8 hours. This isn’t particularly impressive, especially for this SoC, and again highlights that this computer is primarily designed to integrate an RTX 4050.

Price and Availability

The starting price for the Dell 14 Premium is 1898.99 euros in France without a graphics part. The first model incorporating an RTX 4050 is priced at 2348.99 euros.