Dell XPS 14z Review

1. Introduction2. Dell XPS 14z (1)3. Dell XPS 14z (2)4. Dell XPS 14z (3)5. Dell XPS 14z (Super High Res Gallery)6. Installed Software, Hardware Configuration and Testing Methodology7. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra8. Synthetic: PCMark 79. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.5 64 bit10. Synthetic: 3DMark 1111. Synthetic: Hard Drive Performance12. Real World: BluRay Playback with PowerDVD 1113. Real World: MKV Performance14. Real World: Flash HD Performance15. Real World: Media Encoding16. Gaming: Dead Island17. Gaming: Resident Evil 518. Technical: Acoustics Performance19. Technical: Thermal Dynamics20. Technical: Battery Life21. Closing Thoughts22. View All Pages

Whether you like them or not, almost everyone agrees that Apple have been consistently creating some of the most beautiful laptop computers for many years. Dell are keen to showcase that they have the engineering prowess to compete with Apple and today we are looking at their XPS 14z, a slim laptop built around a beautiful aluminum/magnesium chassis which fits a 14 inch screen into a 13 inch chassis. Our particular review sample costs £999 inc vat.

The machine we are reviewing today has a Core i7 2640M processor, 8GB of DDR3 memory, a slot drive DVD burner and IntelHD/Nvidia GT520M graphics. For a slimline laptop, the specifications are certainly impressive on paper. Our review sample ships with a Western Digital 750GB hard drive, although Solid State options are available at extra cost.

HDMI 1.4 (1), Mini DisplayPort (1), RJ-45 (1), headphone (1), microphone (1)
2 total USB ports; USB 3.0 (1); USB 2.0 (1)

Starting at Weights
Starting at 4.36lbs (1.98 kg)
Starting at 4.12lbs (1.87 kg) with optional SSD

Dimensions (HxWxD)
Height: 0.9” (23mm) / Width: 13.9” (335mm) / Depth 9.21” (234mm)

Display
14” High Definition (720p) WLED with TrueLife™ with edge-to-edge glass (1366×768); 200-nit typical

Keyboard/Touchpad
Standard full size, backlit chiclet keyboard; spill-resistant
Multi-Touchpad with Integrated Scrolling & Gestures and two mechanical buttons; 100 x 53 mm – centered on system

Productivity & Entertainment Software
Dell Stage & WebCam Central, Skype, Cozi, Adobe® Acrobat Reader X, Adobe Photoshop Elements Trial 8, Microsoft® Office Starter 2010 (reduced–functionality versions of Word and Excel with advertising), Internet Explorer 8, Windows Live, McAfee SecurityCenter trial, Dell DataSafe; Roxio Creator Starter

The Dell XPS 14z arrives in a very attractively designed box with the XPS badge on the front, and a ‘reflected' image of the laptop offset to the left. Very stylish artwork and rather reminiscent of Apple packaging.

Inside, the XPS 14z is protected inside a smaller cardboard box with heavy duty foam surrounds for additional shipping protection. There is a smaller box which contains the power plug.

The XPS 14z is protected securely inside a strong box, covered in plastic protective wrapper which rests on a felt pad.

The bundle covers the basics. An optical disc with drivers for a reinstall, and some literature on the product itself, including warranty information. There is also a multi region power adapter.

The power adapter works inside a 100-240v range. It is a 19.5V / 4.62A model. Dell include a regional specific power plug in a separate package.

There is no doubt that the XPS 14z is an attractively designed product, and it immediately reminded me of a Macbook Pro, with silver aluminum chassis and minimalistic design.

Underneath is a vented area to help with airflow. The pattern they have cut into the chassis is rather complex, on close inspection.

Above, the Dell XPS 14z, with an 11 inch Macbook Air resting on top for size comparisons.

The Dell XPS 14z ships with a soft protective felt cover between keyboard and screen.

Inside, Dell have opted for a slightly darker colour of material which gives it a very high cost appearance. To give you an indication of the darker shade (magnesium), we have taken an image of the laptop alongside the Apple MacBook Air 11 inch, above right.

The screen itself is a seamless design with a glass sheet covering it. The screen measures 14inches with a narrow 1cm bezel, ensuring it is as big as possible for the modest chassis design. Resolution is 1366×768 which is perfectly acceptable for the dimensions, although we would have preferred 1,440×900.

Screen quality is a little disappointing for a luxury laptop, although for a TN panel it is quite good. There are obvious viewing angle limitations which are inherent with this technology however within the contexts of a small laptop, there shouldn't be any viewing angle concerns. Black levels are impressive, with great impact given to high definition media and games, with only minimal bleed in regards to backlighting. The additional glass layer helps boost contrast and the vibrancy of the colour definition. There is a fair amount of reflectivity which makes viewing with a light positioned behind the user rather difficult.

All in all, I would say the screen is just slightly above average and I had hoped for better on such a luxury, high grade design. I had the same modest concerns with the excellent Lenovo ThinkPad X1 which we reviewed earlier this year.

There is no doubt that the build quality of this machine is exceptionally good. The aluminum and magnesium chassis is very strong, with no issues in regards to fitting. The lid and base are single pieces of milled grey aluminum, and the palm and keyboard surround are crafted from a darker magnesium. This is actually a very clever engineering design as magnesium is slightly warmer to touch.

Connectivity is a little weaker than we might expect. Many of the ports are positioned on the rear panel of the laptop which helps to clean up the appearance. Negatively this makes connection at times rather fiddly, with the user forced to tilt the machine forward for access. At the rear of the machine are two USB ports, one of which is super speed USB 3.0 (marked with SS). There is also a mini displayport, HDMI, GB lan and a power connector closeby. The USB ports are rather close, meaning that having a mouse and a large USB drive attached may prove impossible. They should have positioned these ports at opposite sides of the I/O panel.

There is a security lock at the far left of the rear panel.

Connectivity on the left and right offers headphone and microphone ports, a media card slot (SDXC), and a 8x slot load DVD burner. A handy battery level indicator, with button, rests in front of the optical drive.

The XPS 14z keyboard is an unusual design, which offers two levels of very attractive, white backlighting. It can't compete with the class leading ThinkPad X1 keyboard, but overall it is perfectly fine for modest typing duties. We would like a more defined response click, but on a positive level it has a dual height return key and offers good spacing, especially considering the small chassis size.

There are two modest sized speaker grills on either side of the keyboard which offer decent sound although as expected it lacks power, with weak bass response. We didn't expect a powerhouse sound system however as smaller laptops always have to make compromises. Surprisingly, we didn't notice a huge amount of distortion at higher volumes.

The trackpad is a great size, and is centrally positioned to cater easily for both hands. I could use this pad without problems when traveling in confined spaces.

The internal build quality is fantastic, with everything crammed carefully into the confined space. Dell are using a 58Wh battery which should translate to good battery life. The hard drive is positioned next to the battery and above is the motherboard and optical drive. We noticed that the heatpipes were painted black so they wouldn't be noticeable through the chassis holes. A small fan is placed in the top corner to force cool air in and over the components nearby.

On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source.

The install isn't the cleanest we have seen, but we expect this with Dell. They include a lot of their own software such as Dell MusicStage/PhotoStage and Webcam central, which would be generally useful for the target audience. We aren't so happy about seeing Ebay and McAfee software installed ‘out of the box' and wish Dell would allow the end user to install their own anti virus protection software and third party tools.

The overall score of 5.9 is held back by the use of 7,200 rpm mechanical hard drive.

CPUZ highlights the system overview, based around the Intel Core i7 2640M processor, which is a 32nm part, with 4 MB of level 3 cache. This is a dual core design with hyperthreading, for a total of 4 physical/logical cores. The default clocks are 2.8ghz, although it can turbo up to 3.5ghz. Full details on the processor are available here. The Dell XPS 14z contains onboard Intel HD graphics and the Nvidia GT520m discrete solution. This runs at 740mhz core, and the 1GB of GDDR3 memory operates at 800mhz, connected via a 64 bit memory interface. There are 4 ROPS and 48 CUDA cores. Not the most capable discrete solution, but it will offer extra power, for casual gaming duties.

Dell are using two 4GB DDR3 memory sticks, which runs at 1333mhz at 9-9-9-25 timings.

Comparison Systems (for specific synthetic test compares):
Medion Erazer X6813 15.6″ (featuring Core i7 2630QM processor)
AlienWare M18X (featuring Core i7 2960XM Extreme Edition).
MSI CX640 (featuring Core i5 2410M).
Intel Core i5 2500k desktop processor.

Software:
3DMark 11
PCMark 7
Cinebench 11.5 64 bit
FRAPS Professional
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
CrystalDiskMark
HD Tach
Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra 11
Cyberlink MediaEspresso
HQV Benchmark V2
Alien V Predator
Dead Island
Resident Evil 5

Technical Monitoring and Test Equipment:
Asus BluRay Drive
Lacie 730 Monitor (Image Quality testing)
Thermal Diodes
Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp
Extech digital sound level meter & SkyTronic DSL 2 Digital Sound Level Meter
Kill A Watt Meter
Nikon D3X with R1C1 Kit (4 flashes), Nikon 24-70MM lens.

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.

Sandra is a (girl’s) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
• Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
• Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
• Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

• SMP – Multi-Processor
• MC – Multi-Core
• SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
• GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
• NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
• AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
• IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

Good all round performance from the Dell 14z system, scoring very well in the synthetic Memory test.

PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use.

The score is decent considering the small form factor but the on board graphics and mechanical hard drive are bringing down the overall average score.

CINEBENCH R11.5 64 Bit is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more.

CINEBENCH is the perfect tool to compare CPU and graphics performance across various systems and platforms (Windows and Mac OS X). And best of all: It’s completely free.

The system scores 2.78 points which is impressive considering the limitations of two physical cores. This wouldn't be the ideal purchase for a mobile rendering station, however it could be used in a pinch for moderate tasks.

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance.

Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads. We tested at the default performance setting.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

The system scored 977 points, which would indicate rather weak gaming performance for modern game engines.

A very important part of overall system responsiveness is down to hard drive performance. We use two of our favourite benchmark utilities Crystalmark X64 Edition and HD Tach to rate performance from the onboard SATA controller. The Dell 14z can be configured with a solid state drive, but our sample was supplied with a 7,200 rpm 750GB Western Digital Scorpio Black Hard Drive.

This is as good as it gets for a 2.5 inch mechanical drive, achieving around 110 MB/s with both sequential read and write tests. It is however much slower than even a budget priced Solid State Drive.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

The results in ATTO confirm the CrystalDiskMark findings, peaking around 110 MB/s with both sequential read and write tests. Dell offer a 256GB SSD option for around £180 more (£1,178.99) and we feel it would really benefit this particular system as we found it could be sluggish to respond due to the mechanical hard drive.

Cyberlink PowerDVD 11 is one of the finest solutions for the BluRay experience on Windows and we found this software to work perfectly with this chipset. We tested with the new extended Bluray Disc of Lord Of The Rings.

Overall performance is good, with plenty of CPU cycles left over for multitasking inside other applications.

The Matroska Media container is a very popular, open standard Multimedia container which is usually found as .MKV files. It is a very popular format in enthusiast circles and can be played directly in Windows Media Player with suitable codecs installed. We use the Combined Community Codec Pack (CCCP).

We ripped our BluRay disc of Sniper Reloaded to 1080P MKV and use Windows Media Player to playback the file.

1080p contained MKV files can place a serious strain on a processor, and in this case the dual core design of the 2640M suffers a little when compared against competing quad core solutions.

Many people using this system will be enjoying Flash related content so we feel it is important to test with some of the more demanding material available freely online. Full hardware acceleration is enabled.

Flash HD playback is a problem free experience, supported by hardware encoding from the GT520M processor.

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

• Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
• Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
• Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
• Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
• Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
• Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

For our testing today we are converting a 3.3GB 720p MKV file (2h:12mins) to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power. We are using the newest version which has been optimised for Sandybridge processors.

Nvidia Cuda acceleration is enabled.

A final score of 18 minutes and 17 seconds places the Dell XPS 14z in a ‘mid ground' pack of systems, well behind the performance leaders. Quad core Intel mobile systems have often scored less than 13 minutes with this test.

Dead Island is set in the fictional island of Banoi, located off the coast of Papua New Guinea. The main characters wake up in the Palms Resort hotel to find the island attacked by zombies and mysteriously, they are immune to whatever is making people into zombies. As they try to find and help other survivors, they must also find a way to escape the island as well.

The system managed to maintain playable frame rates with balanced settings at the native resolution of the 14 inch panel. A very good result.

Resident Evil 5, known in Japan as Biohazard 5, is a survival horror third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is the seventh installment in the Resident Evil survival horror series, and was released on March 5, 2009 in Japan and on March 13, 2009 in North America and Europe for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. A Windows version of the game was released on September 15, 2009 in North America, September 17 in Japan and September 18 in Europe. Resident Evil 5 revolves around Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar as they investigate a terrorist threat in Kijuju, a fictional town in Africa.

Within its first three weeks of release, the game sold over 2 million units worldwide and became the best-selling game of the franchise in the United Kingdom. As of December, 2009, Resident Evil 5 has sold 5.3 million copies worldwide since launch, becoming the best selling Resident Evil game ever made.

In Dx9 mode with moderate image quality settings, the system maintains playable frame rates, dropping once under 25 fps.

We measure from a distance of around 2 foot from the chassis with our Extech digital sound level meter to mirror a real world situation.

KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refridgerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum

The system is inaudible when idle, and when watching High definition media the fan spins up a little, becoming audible, registering 33.8 dBa. When pushed harder, the system can get quite noisy as the little fan spins into overdrive to help maintain internal temperatures.

The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 23c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this. Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes. Load measurements were acquired by running Furmark and Cinebench together.

The cooling system works hard to maintain stable temperatures, which would verify our findings on the previous page, in regards to the noise emissions.

The rear of the machine can get hot, in the area of the heat pipe and fan. The other surface areas of the 14z are actually cool to the touch, even after extended load.

To test the battery today we put the machine through three sets of real world situations.

One as a media movie lover on the move, a person wanting to watch HD media on a train journey or bus with two thirds screen brightness (any less and quality suffers).

Secondly as a business man, using the machine for productivity with wireless enabled and balanced power settings with a mid way (around half) brightness setting.

Thirdly as a gamer on the move, with the nVidia graphics card fully active and screen brightness up high.

We managed to wrestle 4 hours and 38 minutes from the machine before it would shut down. When watching media, the time reduced to 3 hours and 14 minutes and gaming reduced the life further to 2 hours and 42 minutes. Sadly due to the internal battery design, the replacement of the battery on the move isn't practical.

The Dell XPS 14z is an extremely well built system that will suit an audience who have grown weary of shoddy, sub par plastic laptops. The 14z is certainly a viable, attractive alternative to the Macbook Pro which will look great in a living room, or when used as a ‘jack of all trades' machine, on the move.

The pricing of this system is actually quite competitive, although we would have to opt for the more expensive version, complete with 256GB SSD drive. This large SSD raises the price from £999 to £1,178.99, which in reality is very cost effective.

Dell might be using older SATA 2 based Samsung solid state drives, but £179 for a 256GB drive is still good value for money. If you are willing to live with a little less responsiveness, then the £999 configuration we have tested today packs a reasonable punch.

Intel's Core i7 2640m is a very capable CPU although the dual core design (2 physical + 2 logical) means that it suffers a little when compared against the latest quad core processors. The Nvidia GT520m is certainly no gaming powerhouse, but it delivers smoother frame rates than the onboard Intel HD solution, while only demanding a modest battery drain. As a full time executive oriented machine, the 14z is well balanced, although business users might not like the fact that the battery is inside the machine, making on the move changes impractical. There is a penalty to pay for minimizing the physical footprint.

We like the keyboard and trackpad, although the TN screen is slightly disappointing. I had hoped Dell might have incorporated an IPS model, offering improved viewing angles and a higher quality image. The onboard sound is acceptable, with only a modicum of distortion when tasked hard, although as expected it completely lacks any depth of bass response across the range. This is a common problem for laptops in this sector however.

Connectivity could be better, with only 2 USB ports at the rear of the machine and they are closely spaced meaning that some fatter USB drives may conflict with other devices. The internal optical drive is a welcome addition however and earns the 14z a bonus point.

Overall I have been impressed with this machine, it earns our ‘WORTH BUYING' award, but there is a lot of competition around £1,000. If you want an extremely well built, attractive machine with decent all round capabilities, then this is worth shortlisting. If you demand the highest quality screen however, then we suggest you look elsewhere.

You can specify your own on the Dell site, over here.

Pros:

• Decent price point
• good overall performance.
• capable of light gaming duties.

Cons:

• can get noisy.
• screen is average.
• connectivity isn't the best.

Kitguru says: For £1,000, it offers decent value for money and looks great.

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