Dell Studio 14: Defining Solid

Dell Studio 14: A Solid If Unexciting Contender

When beginning this review, it felt difficult to find the right tack—the right way to present Dell's Studio 14. Is it remarkable in that nothing in particular is that remarkable about it? That isn't necessarily a bad thing: there's something to be said for a good, balanced design, and we think the Studio 14 has exactly that going for it.

In terms of aesthetics and non-gaming performance, the Studio 14 fills a role and is a testament to the merits of just doing something well. The processor falls right in line with where you would expect it to be and the system feels snappy with the 7200RPM hard disk and 4GB of DDR3. Keyboard flex is a minor issue and the touchpad isn't the greatest, but neither of these are really deal breakers either. The design is nice and understated, looking neither too cheap nor too gaudy. Frankly it's a welcome change of pace in a market where manufacturers like ASUS are still trying to find their feet with mainstream designs, Toshiba can't figure out how to produce an elegant-looking notebook, and Acer builds are powerful for the money but utterly unimpressive externally and saddled with dismal keyboards. There is merit to just looking tasteful, and for some users this is going to be important.

What's more, the Studio 14 positively excels in battery life. It offers the kind of running time that we really want to see become the standard instead of the exception. Dell doesn't price the notebook out of competition, and that competition isn't packing high capacity batteries by default in this price range. Maybe the best part is just how efficiently the Studio 14 uses that high capacity battery, too.

If the unit falters anywhere, it's with the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470, and that's a more complicated situation. Dell can be faulted for pricing the upgrade far too high ($160 for this? Seriously?), but ATI and NVIDIA should both be taken to task for continuing to foist underpowered crap on this market segment. AMD's Fusion APU looks like it might help mitigate this situation somewhat, but it ain't here yet, and it can't be paired with a powerful Intel CPU. ATI and NVIDIA are both playing the rebranding game (ATI with the Mobility 540v and NVIDIA with the G 210M/310M), something we've called out before and will continue to call out until the consumer-unfriendly practice stops.

But with the 5400 series it's almost worse: every other GPU in the Evergreen line received a jump in shader power compared to the previous generation, but the Cedar core the desktop and mobile 5400s are based on is still stuck with a miserable 80 stream processors. Worse still, our own testing confirmed the 5000 series stream processors are generally slightly slower clock-for-clock than their predecessors.

That rant is essentially neither here nor there, though: Dell can really only equip their notebooks with what's available, and odds are good that jumping to a 5650 would've put too sizable a dent in that impressive battery life and perhaps generated too much heat for the chassis to handle. The rest of the Studio 14 is exceptionally well-rounded: quiet, powerful, flexible, portable. There's very little to find fault with in Dell's design, and we happily recommend it without reservation.