Dell XPS 14: A reboot that delivers style and substance at a price
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Premium design and build quality -
Excellent 1440p webcam -
High-quality sound system
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No USB-A ports -
For the price, the base models are underpowered
Dell managed to make itself look quite foolish by announcing the end of the XPS brand in January 2025 and resurrecting it a year later.
The rebirth of the XPS brand came as no surprise to me, though. Ever since the launch of the brand-defining XPS 13 in December 2023, I’ve regarded it as the most interesting part of the Dell laptop lineup by some margin.
That’s not to say that Dell’s recent XPS machines, with their trademark zero-lattice keyboards, invisible trackpad, touch function bars and refusal to have any truck with USB-A ports, have been perfect. But they have been bold, distinctive and beautifully engineered.
What you need to know
For the 2026 reboot, Dell has reined in some of the XPS brand’s more extreme eccentricities. The touch-sensitive function bar has been shown the door, and the keyboard no longer extends to the edges of the deck, though there’s still hardly any space between the keys themselves.
The basic aesthetics of the brand remain in place, though, so you’re getting a laptop as well-built as any of the market, and that looks very distinctive: Dell’s XPS laptops, along with Asus’s ZenBooks and Lenovo’s ThinkPads, are amongst the few laptops where you can tell the manufacturer before you see the logo.
Price and Competition
Specifications as tested: Intel Core Ultra 5 325 CPU, Intel Graphics iGPU, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 1,920 x 1,200 IPS display
The new XPS comes in three pre-built flavours. At the entry level, you get an Intel Core Ultra 5 325 CPU, 16GB of fixed RAM, a 512GB SSD and a 1,920 x 1,200 IPS screen for £1,749.
Upgrade to a Core Ultra X7 358H CPU, Arc B390 graphics and 32GB of RAM, and the price jumps to £2,399. At the top of the pile is the model with a 2.8K OLED touchscreen, Core Ultra X9 388H CPU, Arc B390 graphics, 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. This will set you back £2,749.
There are also other options; for instance, you can have the OLED screen and an Ultra 7 355 CPU for £1,999. With Dell, you can also opt for up to 64GB of RAM and up to 4TB of storage. Dial all the options up to 11, and you’ll be spending £4,399.
I think Dell has missed a trick by not offering the 12-core 338H CPU and Arc B370 iGPU as a halfway house between the 8-core 325/355 with Intel Graphics and 16-core 358H/388H with Arc B390 graphics chipsets.
Four fantastic alternatives
Needless to say, if you are spending that sort of money on a compact laptop, you have options. The battery life king of compact laptops, the new Snapdragon X2-powered Asus Zenbook A14, will run for nearly 30 hours on a charge, which is remarkable. Performance is strong, and the wide-gamut FullHD OLED display is colourful.
You can’t talk about compact laptops without mentioning the new M5 update of the evergreen MacBook Air. It can’t match the new Dell XPS 14 for battery life, but the display is brighter and sharper, and it’s several hundred pounds cheaper even in 15.3in form.
One of the lightest 14in laptops around, the 805g Acer Swift Edge 14 AI is built around a wonderfully vivid 2.8K OLED touchscreen and an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V CPU. It’s a tasty combination and is often on offer for much less than its £1,399 RRP.
Finally, it may be worth waiting for the UK release of the 2026 Honor MagicBook Pro 14. With a 14.6in 3,120 x 2,080 OLED display, a Core Ultra X9 388H CPU and Arc B390 graphics, the new Pro 14 promises to be another strong performer and is likely to be aggressively priced.
Design and connectivity
There’s no denying that the XPS 14 is a handsome bit of kit. The semi-industrial design language, combined with the Graphite colourway, makes a device that, if not as outright pretty as some Asus Zenbooks, has a more serious, business-like look.
Apparently, the decision to replace the Dell logo on the lid with the letters XPS was in reaction to consumer feedback. Dell is clearly going all-in with the resurrection of the XPS brand; the only place you’ll see the word Dell is on the baseplate.
It’s not all about the looks either. The unibody design, made from CNC-milled aluminium, gives it a reassuring stiffness and solidity. The all-aluminium body and chassis do have an impact on weight, though. At 1.37kg, the XPS is significantly heavier than the Zenbook A14, but only 140g heavier than the 13.6in MacBook Air. At 309.5 x 209.7 x 15.2mm, the XPS 14 doesn’t compare too badly to the MacBook Air in terms of size either. It’s a little wider and thicker, but not as deep.
Not a USB-A port in sight
Like the MacBook Air, the XPS 14 is an all-USB-C affair with two Thunderbolt 4 ports on the left and a third on the right, along with a 3.5mm audio jack. Some potential buyers will think that the Zenbook A14’s offering of two USB-C 4.0 ports, one USB-A and an HDMI video output is more practical. Wireless connectivity comes courtesy of an Intel Wi-Fi 7 BE211 WLAN module, which also supports Bluetooth 6.0.
Getting inside the XP14 is a rather more involved process than with most laptops. You have to remove the four Torx screws in the base plate before pushing something like a plastic scribe into those four holes to nudge the keyboard assembly out of the chassis. Dell has created a playbook for this.
Once you’ve removed the keyboard – being careful of the ribbon cable connecting it to the main unit – and laid it flat, you can access the innards. Beyond changing the SSD and battery and blowing dust out of the fans, there’s little else of interest to the DIY-inclined.
Keyboard, touchpad and webcam
While the zero-lattice keyboard on the XPS 13 extended right out to the edges of the deck, the XPS 14 stops at a more conventional 15mm from the sides. Other than that, it’s a true-blue XPS keyboard.
The key travel feels more shallow than the quoted 8mm would suggest, but the typing action is light and crisp, and though there is a little give in the middle of the keyboard deck, you have to press down deliberately hard to notice it.
The white-on-black keycap graphics are spot on, and the white backlight self-adjusts to keep brightness levels in sync with your surroundings. I’ve never found the absence of space between the keys on Dell’s zero-lattice keyboards an issue. I’ll take larger keys and no gaps over smaller keys with a gap any day of the week.
I miss the capacitive touchbar that was a feature of the XPS 13 and 16, but I understand Dell’s thinking. Reaction to this feature was mixed, with our own Sasha Muller calling it “awful”. The new XPS 14 has a conventional Fn button row.
Goodbye to the invisible touchpad
Dell has clearly decided that a wholly invisible touchpad is not such a great idea after all, because two thin raised lines now mark the sides of the XPS 14’s touchpad. These have been designed to be just visible and just discernible to the touch, without messing with the aesthetics of an unbroken palmrest.
The haptic touchpad between the lines is still sizeable at 150 x 80mm, and its action is well calibrated with just the right amount of feedback. Thanks to a Gorilla Glass cover, it’s also supremely smooth.
The 1440p 8MP webcam is superb. The images it captures are colourful, bright and sharp, and it handles changes in ambient lighting with aplomb. It also supports Windows Hello facial recognition, which, in the absence of a fingerprint scanner, is all the biometric security you get.
Display and audio quality
A non-touch 1,920 x 1,200 IPS panel sounds a little low-rent for a £1,750 laptop, but it’s actually a pretty decent panel and makes me wonder if the extra cost of the 2.8K OLED screen will be money well spent. Let’s put it this way: when I first fired up the XPS 14, it wasn’t immediately obvious which screen I was looking at.
Dell reckons the IPS panel can hit a brightness level of 500cd/m2. I’m not sure how it measured that because the highest I managed to record was 423cd/m2, but that’s still pretty solid for an IPS display.
Combine that useful maximum brightness with a low black level of 0.235cd/m2, and you get a contrast ratio of over 1,800:1. Add to that an anti-reflective finish that still looks part glossy to the eye, and you begin to see how it could be mistaken for an OLED panel at first glance.
The screen covers 100% of the sRGB gamut and is colour accurate with a Delta E variance of 1.5 against the sRGB profile. Given that 100% sRGB equates to just 72% DCI-P3, this isn’t a wide-gamut display by any stretch of the imagination, but colours still look saturated and punchy to the eye.
VRR up to 120Hz
The trick up the XPS 14’s display sleeve is that it boasts a variable refresh rate of between 1 and 120Hz, which means it uses less power when showing static images.
You have to take Dell’s word for that, though, because Windows refuses to recognise refresh rates below 20Hz even if that’s what the screen is doing. As we’ll see below, support for an ultra-low refresh rate impacts battery life, but only when the display is static, which isn’t a common scenario.
The sound system is a quad-speaker affair consisting of two 3W full-range drivers and two 2W tweeters, and it’s a belter. Not only is it loud, pumping out 79.1dBA when measured against a pink noise source at a 1m distance, but there’s also plenty of bass, good stereo separation and excellent levels of detail. It’s one of the best sound systems available in any compact laptop.
Performance
The Intel Core Ultra 5 325 processor is an 8-core Panther Lake chip with 4 performance cores and 4 Low-Power Efficiency (LPE) cores. The maximum boost speed is 4.5Ghz. An Intel Graphics iGPU with 4 Xe cores handles graphics, and there’s a 47 TOPS NPU, which means it’s technically Copilot-compliant.
In our in-house image and video conversion benchmark, the XPS 14 returned an overall score of 263, 13 points shy of the Honor MagicBook 16, which uses the same chipset, though that difference is far too small to matter in the real world.
The base model’s CPU is perfectly good enough for everyday tasks, but offers the same level of performance as you’ll find in some significantly cheaper laptops.
When it comes to graphics performance, the lack of an Arc B370 or B390 iGPU is evident. Running the SPECviewperf 3dsmax 3D modelling test on the XPS 14 returned a score of 16.7fps. That compares to 36fps on the B390-equipped Acer Swift 16 AI.
In the Geekbench OpenCL benchmark, the XPS 14 is trounced by both the MacBook Air and Zenbook A14. This is where the absence of an option to have an Arc B-series iGPU without spending an extra £650 hurts the XPS 14.
The Micron SSD in my test machine proved to be a surprisingly pedestrian performer until I updated the BIOS, after which it pulled its socks up, recording good sequential read and write speeds of 5,147MB/s and 2,718MB/s, respectively.
Battery life
In our standard battery test, which involves looping a video in VLC with the display set to 170cd/m2, the XPS 14’s 70Wh battery kept the lights on for 18hrs 49mins.
By Intel standards, that’s a strong showing and nearly four hours longer than a MacBook Air (66.5Wh). However, it’s also 10 hours shorter than the Snapdragon X2-powered Asus Zenbook A14 (70Wh).
Obviously, our video test doesn’t highlight what effect the ultra-low 1Hz display refresh rate has on overall power consumption. To get a handle on that, I left the XPS 14 sitting doing nothing. With Windows variable refresh rate engaged, the run time came in at 25hrs 4mins. Fixing the refresh rate to 120Hz reduced that to 22hrs 11mins, an improvement of 14 per cent.
Dell XPS 14 review: Verdict
There’s a lot to like about the new Dell XPS 14, and I, for one, warmly welcome the return of the brand. But the pricing structure makes me pause from giving it an outright recommendation.
If the base model came with the Core Ultra 5 338H CPU and Arc B370 GPU, it would be an easy recommendation, even if that specification pushed the entry-level price to a Zenbook A14-matching £2,000.
But £1,750 for a relatively flaccid GPU/CPU combination that can be shown a clear pair of heels by the more expensive but OLED-screened Asus Zenbook A14 and the cheaper MacBook Air? That’s a hard sell.
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