Dell Latitude 7420 14 Inch FHD Business Laptop, Intel Core i7-1185G7 (4.8 Ghz), 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, Win10 Pro, (Black)

Product Information

The Inspiron 14 2-in-1, with a boost from Intel’s 12th Generation processor, holds its own against more expensive laptops (and in the case of the Asus B7 Flip, one that’s double the price). By no means is the Inspiron 14 a content-creation system, but it is very good at its intended use as a portable, convertible, modestly priced laptop. It exceeds the 4,000 points in PCMark 10 that indicate excellent productivity for common apps like Microsoft Office. Graphics Tests

The next figure shows how well the display is able to reproduce really dark parts of an image, which is essential when watching movies or playing games in low ambient light. I'm also including the ThinkPad X1 Yoga, a 2-in-1 that competes with the convertible version of the Latitude 7420. Finally, since our Latitude is a clamshell laptop without a touch screen, a comparison with the 13-inch Apple MacBook Pro is also useful. Many corporate users covet Mac laptops, too. Still, we’ve included other color spaces like the famous DCI-P3 standard used by movie studios, as well as the digital UHD Rec.2020 standard. Rec.2020, however, is still a thing of the future and it’s difficult for today’s displays to cover that well. We’ve also included the so-called Michael Pointer gamut, or Pointer’s gamut, which represents the colors that naturally occur around us every day.Storage performance as measured by PCMark 8 proved roughly equal across the Latitude 7420 and its competitors, since they all use speedy SSDs as their boot drives. The built-in speakers are adequate, despite some distortion at higher volumes, but since the audio is more satisfactory when using a decent set of headphones, my inclination would be to use the speakers only in a pinch. Dell does offer an optional Dell Mobile Adapter Speakerphone that might be just the thing for frequent conference-callers. Compared with the higher-end Latitude 9420 I tested recently, there are trade-offs for this slightly lower end model, but they are small. There is no longer a 4K option for the screen, nor is there a touch for the clamshell 7420. On the other hand, our 400-nits IPS is just as bright, has wide viewing angles (Comfy View Plus), covers sRGB, and has a strong contrast of 1,800:1. The 4K panel of our former 7410 version was not missed; the high resolution is rarely needed for Office applications. In my benchmarks, the 1145 tended to run 10 to 20 percent slower than the 1185-based systems, which wasn’t a surprise. On tougher tests, transcoding a 4K video to FHD took 3 hours and 15 minutes on the 7420 compared with two hours and 32 minutes on the 9420. A big Excel data table took 46 minutes to run, compared with about 41 on the other systems; and a MatLab portfolio simulation took 52 minutes, compared with 47-49 minutes on the others. One important thing to note: even this slower Tiger Lake chip performed notably better than the high-end 14nm Comet Lake chips that were in this class of machine a year ago. When I tested last year’s Latitude 7410 with a four core/eight thread Core i7-10610, the Excel data table took 63 minutes and the MatLab simulation took 73 minutes; so the difference is significant. Typical users should be quite pleased with the performance.

Estimated delivery times are provided to us by the respective delivery companies. We pass this information onto you, the customer.It is also worth mentioning that Dell offers the Latitude 14 7420 in both Carbon and Aluminum outfits, both of which feel premium enough. Dell Optimizer also includes a number of audio options, such as letting you select the room environment for doing conferencing in a quiet room, noisy office, one with multiple voices speaking, or in a recording studio; allowing 3D audio through your headphones (which I personally don't care for); and an auto-mute feature that removed sounds that occur when you are not speaking. It doesn't have the fancy audio of the 9420, but for most applications, the microphone and dual speakers worked just fine. The CPU and graphics are optimized for light office work. Dell's power control allows for whisper-quiet work with little waste heat or, alternatively, moderate performance. However, this 14-incher is not made for continuous performance. Anyone looking for this should look at AMD Ryzen alternatives ( ThinkPad T14s) or individual Core i7 models ( ThinkPad T14 Gen2). The section below provides links to articles that contain information about the different hardware on your system. They can help you to troubleshoot any problems that might be identified by the above diagnostics. There are also general "How to" articles that can help with tasks, for example like updating the BIOS or upgrading a hard drive. AC Adapter and Battery Lastly, the bottom panel is home to the speaker cutouts and the ventilation grill, which is placed right beneath the cooling fan. In this case, the heat is being exhausted from the left side of the notebook.