The webcams with the XPS 14 and 16 are surprisingly good, better than most other integrated webcams I’ve tested this year.
Photography: Scott Gilbertson
Really expensive
Dell sells several configurations between these two sizes, but I don’t recommend the base model at all. The problem with the base model is the screen, which is 1,920 x 1,200. At 14 inches, that’s 154 pixels per inch (PPI). While I haven’t used this model, I’ve spent a lot of time testing displays with similar specs, and you should never pay $1,700 for a laptop with a 154 PPI screen. (For comparison, a 14-inch MacBook Pro has a PPI of 254.) Worse yet, the base 16-inch model also comes with a 1,920 x 1,200 display, which is such a low PPI that, frankly, it should only be on cheap sub-$500 laptops.
Just don’t buy the base model, mmmkay?
The models I tested had gorgeous 3200 x 2000 OLED displays, which are beautiful, but raise the base price of both models by $300. That puts the price of the minimum configuration I would recommend at $2000 for the XPS 14 and $2200 for the 16. Note that that price gets you only 16GB of RAM, no dedicated graphics, and a 512GB SSD. While you can always add your own SSD, the RAM cannot be upgraded.
Adding the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 brings the price of the 14-inch model to $2,400. This is the configuration I tried; Performance was poor on demanding tasks.
Performance issues
I was surprised by the benchmarks I got of the XPS 14 against the RTX 4050, and not in a good way. My results were noticeably lower than with other laptops using the same chip, particularly in Geekbench, which measures graphics performance. After looking up some specs and analyzing the test results, I came to the conclusion that Dell does not have enough power for the RTX 4050 graphics. The XPS 14 gives the RTX 4050 only 40 watts, which is just above the minimum of 30 watts that Nvidia recommends. For one thing, that keeps the heat down, meaning the fans spin less and the battery lasts longer. In fact, the fans on the XPS 14 and 16 ran less than those on other laptops I’ve been testing, at least until I started doing more demanding things like editing videos.
However, the cost of that efficiency is performance. The They will warm up. The bad news is that if you want a video editing workstation, the XPS 14 is not the answer.
