Dell Studio 14: Defining Solid
by Dustin Sklavos on August 19, 2010 2:49 AM ESTDell 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.
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XZerg - Thursday, August 19, 2010 - link
It would be nice to post the basic specs and the upgrades and their costs. This will help us understand where the extra money is going from the basic price...Dustin Sklavos - Thursday, August 19, 2010 - link
Honestly, Dell changes system configurations and options on their site more often than most people change underwear. We got this notebook less than a month ago and it's already obsolete in certain ways.Shadowmaster625 - Thursday, August 19, 2010 - link
"After all, the Xbox 360 is nearly five years old, and 720p is the target for that console." Even the latest and greatest and slimmest xbox 360 still burns over 80 watts playing a game. I'm sure a notebook would produce great gaming benchmarks if it pulled that much power.JarredWalton - Thursday, August 19, 2010 - link
The Xbox 360 revisions haven't had the chance to really change things up. Yes, they did a process technology shrink, but they still have to maintain 100% compatibility with the original Xbox 360 so there are limitations to what they can do. I also don't think the CPU/GPU in the Xbox 360 gets the same level of power friendly optimizations that laptop parts get, but then the manufacturers aren't very forthcoming about console architectures and such.Anyway, look at the 5650 and 335M; they consume around 20W max on the 5650 (15W for the 5470... Dell really couldn't get 5W extra out of the chassis?), and 28W max on the 335M. Idle power draw is down around 5W on both. At 100% load, such a laptop would be about 20W less than the 360, but that's well within reason. If MS binned 360 CPUs/GPUs for minimum power draw like mobile parts, they could easily get below 80W.
skrewler2 - Thursday, August 19, 2010 - link
It would be more interesting to see how this compares to something like a Thinkpad?Or any other laptop for that matter...
Kishkumen - Thursday, August 19, 2010 - link
Dear College Students,You don't want this laptop, You don't want a glossy display because you want to be able to go outside and study once in a while. Also , you want a nice matte display, with a nice, high resolution, say 1920x1080 or hell even 1600x900 so that you are more productive in your work and can get better grades. This is not the laptop for you. If you can't afford a better, new business class laptop, look for a used one (say one or two years old) with a good display and just buy a new battery. You'll be much happier. I would be anyway.
JarredWalton - Thursday, August 19, 2010 - link
It depends what sort of work you're doing. If all you need to do is write papers in Word, screen resolution is generally a non-issue. You look at one or two paragraphs at a time and go from there. If on the other hand you want to do video and photo editing, resolution becomes far more important.The glossy stuff is a different matter of course. I wish there were non-business laptops with matte LCDs still. But, buying used is a bad idea IMO. Laptops don't usually last more than 4 years of constant use, batteries stop holding a charge after 1-2 years, hinges wear out, and battery life is something that has just as much impact on usability for college campuses as the screen. Take a 15.6" LCD with a matte display and you're probably looking at 2-3 hours battery life in most cases. If it's used, more like 1 hour if you're lucky, unless you spend $100 on a new battery.
AnnonymousCoward - Friday, September 3, 2010 - link
He addressed the battery issue by saying to buy a new one.I disagree that resolution is ever a non-issue. Who wants to only be able to see 2 paragraphs at once? And if you do any formatting or visual organization to the paper, you will want to see each page at once. That doesn't work with 768.
justniz - Thursday, August 19, 2010 - link
...so I avoid all laptops with ATI graphics.semo - Thursday, August 19, 2010 - link
when you plug in a microphone or headset through linein, do you have to change any driver settings and are those settings remembered.I have a studio 1557 that asks me to confirm linein settings every time i plug in a headset and even between restarts. My other laptop will start using an external mic even in the middle of a conversation. Im sending it back and if they cant fix i will be looking for a replacement