Look and feel
With its lid closed, the Inspiron 14 7000 is short and flat, like a rectangular gift box with rounded corners. It's as thin and light as Apple's current 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display, but for some reason feels bulkier. The body is made of "forged aluminium", according to Dell, which is mostly a dull matte texture except for shiny silver bevelled edges.
There isn't much to see on the outside - only a few ports along the back of each side along with the speakers, and two tiny LEDs on the front. Surprisingly, the lid is almost as thick as the base, and so you'll need to use both hands to open the laptop.
With its lid closed, the Inspiron 14 7000 is short and flat, like a rectangular gift box with rounded corners. It's as thin and light as Apple's current 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display, but for some reason feels bulkier. The body is made of "forged aluminium", according to Dell, which is mostly a dull matte texture except for shiny silver bevelled edges.
There isn't much to see on the outside - only a few ports along the back of each side along with the speakers, and two tiny LEDs on the front. Surprisingly, the lid is almost as thick as the base, and so you'll need to use both hands to open the laptop.
The first thing we thought when we opened the laptop was how minimal it looked. There's blank space everywhere, and no colours of materials have been used for relief. The only visual discrepancy is a bright blue Intel Inside sticker in the lower right corner. The keyboard sits in the middle of a sea of unused space, and even the screen seems to be surrounded by unnecessarily thick black glass borders. Both of these things make the laptop feel larger than it could have been.
Features and specifications
Despite being slim and using a low-voltage Intel processor, the Inspiron 14 7000 is not being sold as an ultrabook. That might be because of an odd balance in the hardware; the Core i5-4200U and 6GB of RAM are paired with an old-school 500GB mechanical hard drive. (A more expensive version with a Core i7 CPU and 8GB of RAM is also available). Most premium notebooks today use much faster solid-state drives, but these also have lower capacities. Graphics processing is handled by an integrated Intel HD4400 GPU, which is decent enough for most apps and casual games.
Despite being slim and using a low-voltage Intel processor, the Inspiron 14 7000 is not being sold as an ultrabook. That might be because of an odd balance in the hardware; the Core i5-4200U and 6GB of RAM are paired with an old-school 500GB mechanical hard drive. (A more expensive version with a Core i7 CPU and 8GB of RAM is also available). Most premium notebooks today use much faster solid-state drives, but these also have lower capacities. Graphics processing is handled by an integrated Intel HD4400 GPU, which is decent enough for most apps and casual games.
The Inspiron 14 7000 does have a 32GB solid-state drive which is used for caching. This should result in a little bit of a speed boost when booting up, shutting down, and launching frequently used apps. It's a compromise, and if you're used to running Windows off an SSD, you'll know that it isn't quite as snappy.
It's always nice to have a touchscreen, but the Inspiron is not bendable or foldable in any way to make it easy to reach. The screen has a terribly disappointing resolution of 1366x768 - in a world of full-HD smartphones, this just looks tacky and is a huge waste of available space.
Performance
Benchmark test scores revealed a mixed bag of results: CPU-related tests did fairly well, matching competition such as Acer's super-svelte S7 ultrabook. We recorded scores of 231 in Cinebench's CPU test and an impressive 9 minutes, 9 seconds to render the POVRay benchmark scene. SiSoft Sandra's CPU Arithmetic, Cryptography and Multimedia tests produced impressive results, as did PCMark 8 in its Work and Home run-throughs.
Benchmark test scores revealed a mixed bag of results: CPU-related tests did fairly well, matching competition such as Acer's super-svelte S7 ultrabook. We recorded scores of 231 in Cinebench's CPU test and an impressive 9 minutes, 9 seconds to render the POVRay benchmark scene. SiSoft Sandra's CPU Arithmetic, Cryptography and Multimedia tests produced impressive results, as did PCMark 8 in its Work and Home run-throughs.
Graphics scores were reasonable, but not very exciting. 658 overall in 3DMark should translate to decent performance for older 3D games and today's casual titles. Where things went south was in Sandra's storage subsystem tests: the overall drive score was abysmally low at about a tenth of what we might have seen from a modern SSD, and sequential read and write speeds were, on average, a fifth of what we would have liked.
These scores aren't bad on their own, but they reflect the massive performance gap between spinning drives and solid-state ones. Dell obviously chose a more budget-friendly option - the Inspiron 14 7000 costs just over half of what the Acer S7 costs and still looks fantastic - but buyers should know that there are much faster storage options available which do justice to the rest of the hardware.