While MSI’s build quality left us with questions, Dell’s XPS 14z looks to be a reasonable compromise between battery life, weight and strength. It packs in Intel’s dual-core Core i7-2640M along with 8GB of DDR3-1333 RAM and a 14in LCD panel. Its weight falls just over 2kg, but its chassis feels strong and solid. The compromise here is that Dell has built the battery inside the chassis. We think that’s resulted in a smaller battery, too, given it only lasted 3 hours 21 minutes, which is nearly an hour less than the X460.
You get both a hard drive and optical drive here — Western Digital’s 750GB WD7500BPKT platter-based option and LG’s GS30N slot-loading DVD burner. Dell also offers dual graphics in Intel’s integrated HD Graphics 3000, plus Nvidia’s GeForce GT 520M discrete solution. We’re not sure of the value of having the GT 520M, as it’s not significantly better than the integrated graphics.
That said, Dell offers plenty of peripheral ports including HDMI, DisplayPort and USB 3.0. Application speed is only around 10% down on the X460, which shows that in notebooks, the difference between quad-core and dual-core app performance isn’t as much as you’d think. All up, it’s a solid package that’s $50 cheaper than the X460, but the loss of an hour’s battery life does hurt.
