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IDC Whitepaper: “Optimizing Performance with Frequent Server Replacements for Enterprises” commissioned by Dell Technologies and Intel, March 2021. Results are based on interviews with 18 IT practitioners and decision makers at midsize and large enterprises and a web survey of 707 IT practitioners and decision makers at midsize and larger enterprises using Dell Technologies server solutions across 7 industries. See full whitepaper: https://www.delltechnologies.com/resources/en-us/asset/white-papers/products/servers/server-infrastructure-resiliency-enterprise-whitepaper.pdf
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. Not providing a full-size SD card slot is mildly annoying, but adapters for Type-A USB ports don’t cost much. The Latitude 9420 returned to the top of the class in our Adobe Photoship image editing benchmark, in which we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image, timing each operation and adding up the total. Graphics and Battery Tests Standard wireless connections include Bluetooth 5.2 and Wi-Fi 6E, which means the laptop is capable of operating on 6Hz channels that are now available for Wi-Fi networking. Few other devices such as routers support this protocol yet, but once they do, the Latitude 9420 will be ready. You can also configure the system with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X20 or X55 cellular modem; the latter supports the 5G networks of AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile and uses a micro SIM card.In this test we use 100% on the CPU cores, monitoring their frequencies and chip temperature. The first column shows a computer’s reaction to a short load (2-10 seconds), the second column simulates a serious task (between 15 and 30 seconds), and the third column is a good indicator of how good the laptop is for long loads such as video rendering. Before I joined the tech-journalism ranks, I wrote on topics as diverse as Borneo's rain forests, Middle Eastern airlines, and Big Data's role in presidential elections. A graduate of Middlebury College, I also have a master's degree in journalism and French Studies from New York University. In more intense multimedia content creation tasks like video conversion and image editing, the Latitude 7420 also delivered competitive results. It finished second to the M1-equipped MacBook Pro in Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. 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.
In 2023, Dell had an approximate 17% market share of global PC sales, ranking #3 after Lenovo and HP. Further information can be found in our Comparison of Mobile Graphics Cards and the corresponding Benchmark List. 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. Our temperature development and power consumption results below show that the maximum power consumption of the CPU in the Dell is 50 watts ("Ultra Performance" mode). The CPU also heats up to almost 90 °C, which suggests that the 64-watt PL2 is not achievable under low temperatures.
Thunderbolt 4 Comes Standard
Dell's hardware offering includes a wide range of 7420 clamshell and 2-in-1 SKUs from 1,275 to 2,950 Euros with 11th-generation Intel Tiger Lake U CPUs and the options of vPro, 8GB or 16GB permanently soldered RAM, and M.2 PCIe SSDs. The touchscreen and 4K option of the predecessor are omitted, while the FHD touchscreen is only available in the 2-in-1 system. We strongly recommend springing for the upgraded 4-cell, 63-watt-hour battery in our review unit, since the base model comes with a 3-cell, 42-watt-hour battery that likely won't last as long. As far as performance goes, the unit I had was based on an Intel Core i5-1145G7 processor (Tiger Lake), which has four cores and eight threads, with a rated speed of 2.6 GHz and a maximum turbo speed of 4.4 GHz, manufactured on Intel’s 10 nm SuperFin process. You can get it with the higher-end Core i7-1185, which has a base speed of 3.0 GHz and a turbo of 4.8 GHz, which is what the higher-spec laptops I’ve been testing this year have had. Both processors have integrated graphics and support vPro, Intel's enterprise management feature. The unit I used had 16GB of memory and a 512GB solid-state drive, similar to the others. The advantage of subnotebooks is that the entire laptop can be small and therefore easily portable. The smaller display also has the advantage of requiring less power, which further improves battery life and thus mobility. The disadvantage is that reading texts is more strenuous on the eyes. High resolutions are more likely to be found in standard laptops.» To find out how fine a display is, see our DPI List.
The principal role of a premium business laptop is to handle everyday tasks like word processing and videoconferencing. We measure performance on these and similar workflows using the PCMark 10 suite, which the Latitude 9420 2-in-1 aced with a score of over 5,000 points. (Any score above 4,000 represents proficient office productivity.) Dell currently ships the Latitude 9420 with Windows 10 Pro, and the company plans to offer a Ubuntu Linux version starting later this year. Given the amount of gutter space to the left and right of the keyboard, maybe a wider design could have been employed. That said, the keyboard design works well enough for typing, even with large hands.Buyers can choose between a 42 Wh or 63 Wh battery. Our model was equipped with the ExpressCharge battery with four cells and 63 Wh. Fast charging is detrimental to battery life, which is why it has to be selectively activated in the Dell Power Manager. After that, the battery charges to 80% in one hour. The Latitude lasted 14 hours at 100% in the Wi-Fi test with reduced brightness to 150 cd/m², which is a very good value. Only the Ryzen ThinkPad T14s can top this figure. 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. The Latitude 9420 2-in-1's time in our battery rundown test was admirable, at more than 14 hours; the system should easily get you through a full day of work away from a wall outlet, which the ThinkPad X1 Yoga might not be able to do. But it's a far cry from the nearly 24-and-a-half hours that last year's Latitude 9410 2-in-1 managed with its optional large battery.
I spend a lot of time testing enterprise laptops, but I nearly always test the top-end of specific models, as that’s what the vendors send for testing. But recently, I’ve been working with a more modestly configured version of the Dell Latitude 7420, and it’s a good reminder of just how much laptops have improved in the past few years. I had reviewed the previous version, the Latitude 7410, and this year's machine offers nice improvements, including the Intel 11th-generation Core (Tiger Lake) processors. Those looking for the best possible performance are not well advised with this SoC. The ThinkPad X1 Carbon gets 8 to 20% more performance out of the nominally weaker i5-1135G7, as Cinebench R15 and R20 show. The Latitude 7420's direct competitors include other high-end business subnotebooks such as the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon G9, ThinkPad T14s, the HP EliteBook 840 Aero, and - as dGPU models - the affordable MSI Modern 14 and the ThinkPad T14 Gen2.
The results of our Handbrake video editing trial are clustered close together, and although the Latitude 7420 tied for last place the differences were negligible. Handbrake is another tough, threaded workout that's highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads. In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video to a 1080p MP4 file. It’s a timed test, and lower results are better. Thanks to its speedy SSD, the Latitude 9420 2-in-1 had no trouble with our PCMark 8 storage test, although these results are clustered together since most modern solid-state drives breeze through this benchmark. Another strong point is the AU Optronics 14-inch IPS panel that’s a decent brightness and has a healthy color gamut. It also doesn’t use pulse-width modulation (PWM) to adjust brightness, with the negative impact that can have on eyesight.
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