Dell Pro Max 14 Premium

Design and Keyboard

• Thick and heavy for a 14-inch laptop
• Very modern port selection
• Tactile keyboard, but a smaller trackpad

Dell has stuck with an XPS-style fit and finish with the Pro Max 14 Premium, although has added a bit more chonk to the chassis owing to the beefier components inside. Looks-wise, it’s generally modern and understated, looking excellent in its dark grey colourway that’ll fit well in any modern office this laptop is put into. Apart from the small Dell logo on the lid, you wouldn’t know this was one of theirs.

At 1.72kg, it’s hefty for such a compact 14-inch laptop, and makes it a little more difficult to transport than, say, a modern MacBook Air. Nonetheless, it justifies its weight with a solid shell that has very little flex to it – arguably expected for such an expensive, business-class machine.

It stands at 25mm thick, providing enough room for a very capable and modern set of ports. The left side is home to two Thunderbolt 5 USB-C ports with up to 80Gbps of directional bandwidth – that’s double Thunderbolt 4. On the right, you get two Thunderbolt 4 USB-Cs, a microSD reader and a headphone jack. As with the bigger Dell Pro Max 16 Plus, the USB-C ports here are modular, although in a slightly different vein to the Framework Laptop 13 (2025), for instance.

The lack of a USB-A or wired networking is a shame, although you can purchase a number of adapters that’ll add this back if you need it in a pinch.

The Pro Max 14 Premium’s keyboard and trackpad remain unchanged from both the less powerful Dell Pro 14 Premium and even the older Dell XPS 13 (2024) models. It’s a ‘Zero Lattice’ option that does away with the chiclet-style keyboards you’ll find elsewhere in favour of keys that are closer together and much more tactile under finger. 

It takes some getting used to, although is a comfortable keyboard to use. As a more compact laptop, its layout foregoes a number pad and some navigation keys, but is sensible. It also has a Mini LED backlit to allow for a potent white light to shine through when working after dark.

This Dell laptop’s on the smaller side against more modern ultrabooks, although it is still roomy enough for navigation with accurate tracking and solid tactility under finger.  

Display and Sound

• Sharp tandem OLED screen
• Excellent contrast, black level and colour accuracy
• Decent speakers

Dell hasn’t skimped out in the slightest with the Pro Max 14 Premium’s screen, opting for a compact 14-inch 2880×1800 tandem OLED panel. The only bugbear I have out of the gate is that it’s only 60Hz, lacking the slickness of a 120Hz option that has become a lot more common in recent times.

Otherwise, the fact that it’s a tandem OLED screen is quite exciting, as they still remain quite rare on laptop screens full stop, apart from on some of Asus’ latest ProArt models. Being a tandem OLED means it stacks OLED panels atop one another to yield potentially higher brightness and battery life.

We’ve seen it fitted to everything from TVs to the latest iPad Pro models, although I don’t think it’s particularly common for laptops to have them, so to see it with this Dell machine is a pleasant touch. The only other one that comes to mind is the Asus ProArt P16 (4K Lumina Pro OLED).

A high resolution keeps displayed images and text especially sharp, plus it comes with wonderfully deep and inky blacks and fantastic contrast, as per my testing with my colorimeter. It measured respective levels of 0.01 for black level and 25890:1 for contrast, plus a virtually perfect 6600K colour temperature.

I’m a little less enthusiastic about the idea that this tandem OLED has yielded any boost in brightness, though, with a peak SDR result of 372.7 nits. That’s fine for indoor and outdoor working, although with a tandem OLED screen on a laptop at this price, I expected a bit more vibrancy.

Where I can’t complain with the Pro Max 14 Premium’s panel is the virtually perfect colour accuracy, with 100% sRGB coverage proving it perfectly displays mainstream colours for productivity tasks, while the 100% DCI-P3 and 94% Adobe RGB results are well above the requisite level where I can recommend this screen for more colour-sensitive tasks.

This laptop also has some good speakers that provide solid depth and clarity to the sound, and are a step up from more traditionally tinny units inside lots of other laptops.

Performance

• Potent performance from workstation components
• RTX Pro Blackwell 2000 provides additional 3D power
• Beefy RAM and SSD combo

This top spec version of the Pro Max 14 Premium isn’t short of power, pairing Intel’s most powerful Arrow Lake-H chip, the Core Ultra 9 285H, with Nvidia’s RTX Pro Blackwell 2000 8GB GPU to provide a very potent mobile workstation.

I’ve covered the Core Ultra 9 285H in a few laptops now, but if you’re unaware, it’s a chip that I’ve previously encountered in the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025), complete with 16 cores and 16 threads. It’s designed as a more efficient choice than the HX-suffixed Arrow Lake gaming chips that Intel also employs in a range of gaming laptops, packing lots of power relative to its efficiency.

The core arrangement is split between six Performance cores, eight Efficiency Cores and two Low-Power Efficiency cores. There is also a boost clock of up to 5.4GHz, making this quite the brisk chip for any laptop, let alone a potent workstation such as this.

Its results in Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 are capable, with strong single and multi-threaded scores, given Intel’s bundling of 16 cores with this chip. They’re particularly strong numbers against the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 chip inside the Asus ProArt P16 (2025) and other creative-designated laptops out there.

The more intriguing addition with this specific Pro Max 14 Premium version is Nvidia’s RTX Pro Blackwell 2000 mobile workstation GPU. You can spec this Dell laptop with anything from an Intel iGPU to this 8GB mobile workstation chip, making it the most powerful chip for the chassis.

In essence, it is an RTX 5060 if you quantify this in gaming terms, with somewhat similar performance when I run it through a set of unorthodox gaming tests in Cyberpunk 2077 and Returnal, for instance. The results are playable 60fps at 1080p, with dents in performance at 1440p; native res ray-traced Cyberpunk isn’t a possibility with it.

The point of including a GPU like the RTX Pro 2000 Blackwell inside the Pro Max 14 Premium is more as a helping hand for intensive tasks such as editing and running large language AI models, and reflected well in the 3DMark Time Spy score it garnered. Instead of prioritising outright gaming power, it’s here more for reliability and stability.

In further regard to this laptop’s suitability for more enterprise-style use, it comes with 64GB of DDR5 RAM, providing lots of headroom for more intensive tasks and use with AI models for instance, plus a solid 1TB SSD. It’s also quite a fast option, with tested read and write speeds of 7096.94 MB/s and 5944.40 MB/s, respectively.

Software

• Especially clean Windows 11 install
• Solid amount of Dell-specific software
• Copilot+ PC functionality is present

The Pro Max 14 Premium comes running Windows 11 Pro, and comes with very little additional software, be it from Dell itself or from a third party.

The most useful piece of Dell-specific software is Dell Optimizer, which is an app for checking on your system’s vitals and allowing for changing power modes and similar settings to get your machine running how you wish. There is also Dell Command, which is a system updater, plus Dell Pair, Dell Peripherals Manager, and Dell SupportAssist.

Otherwise, most of the other system apps come in the form of Microsoft’s AI features, as the Pro Max 14 Premium has enough AI horsepower (or TOPS) to be considered a Copilot+ PC. This gives you access to features such as the clever Windows Studio webcam effects for auto-framing and background blur, as well as generative AI capabilities in Photos and Microsoft Paint.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 7 hours 21 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for one working day

Dell doesn’t provide any specific estimate for the battery life of the Pro Max 14 Premium’s 72Wh cell, which is a bit surprising given the sheer expense of the model. Nonetheless, the capacity looks to be reasonable to deal with the beefy internal components, including the hungry tandem OLED screen.

The PCMark 10 Modern Office test, run at the requisite 150 nits of brightness, spat out a result of seven hours and 21 minutes before this Dell laptop decided to conk out. That’s fine, if quite disappointing, as it barely means you’ll get through a working day before needing to charge it back up. Nonetheless, it is slightly longer than the consumer-grade Dell 16 Premium.

The 130W charger that Dell provides with the Pro Max 14 Premium is certainly one of the fastest I’ve ever used, taking just 18 minutes to get this laptop back to 50 percent, while a full charge took 45 minutes. It almost makes battery life a non-concern if you’re near an outlet.

Should you buy it?