Dell 14 plus | Photo Credit: Bijoy Ghosh
Design
The Dell 14 Plus strikes an excellent balance between portability and substance. Its slim profile—just 0.67 inches thick and starting at around 1.52 kg, means it’s genuinely easy to slip into my daily bag, yet it never feels flimsy. The laptop’s lid and base are made of aluminum, which provides rigidity, while the bezel and palmrest are constructed from plastic, a sensible trade-off that helps maintain the low overall weight.
The unit I reviewed came in the Ice Blue colour variant, which appeared as a soft, smoky blue hue against the office’s backdrop of cream and white tones, lending it a professional look in a subtle way.
Display
The Dell XPS 14 plus features a 14.0-inch 2K (1920×1200) Anti-Glare (Matte) Non-Touch 300 nits WVA/IPS Display. At 300 nits, while not too bright for outdoors, the display was well lit for indoor use and serves its purpose as a productivity laptop more often than the other.
I caught up on Kalki 2898 AD on Netflix, and the display impressed with its rich detail, vibrant yet balanced colours, and strong contrast—delivering a visually satisfying experience without oversaturation.
Sound
The Dell 14 plus features stereo-quality speakers powered by Realtek SounzReal and Dolby Atmos. The audio output from the speakers was adequate, though far from exceptional. From virtual meetings to movie nights, the audio experience is clear with vocals coming across while listening to Battle Symphony by Linkin Park. The loudness of the speakers was just about 2 on a scale of 5 even at full volume. The music seemed rather muted with the vocals being clear, but all the synth and the bass instruments almost merging into one another, making it hard to recommend enjoying music on.
Keyboard
The keyboard emerged as one of the standout features during the review. The plastic keys had a good amount of key travel, and each keypress felt very planted during the duration of typing a close to 700-word review piece. The two-level keyboard backlight also helped with clear visibility of the keys at night.
Ports
The Dell 14 Plus has a pretty minimalist setup with a HDMI port and 2 USB-C ports with support charging on the left side with a solitary USB-A port and 3.5 mm headphone jack on the right. This is absolutely bare minimum, but I wish they had offered a mix of one 1 USB-A, 1-USB-C ports on each side making it easier to charge as well as plug legacy accessories into it.
Performance
The Dell 14 Plus is powered by the latest AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series CPUs. The review unit features an AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 (2.00 GHz) processor with Radeon 860M graphics, 16 GB RAM and 512 GB storage.
For CPU performance, we turned to CineBench R24, where the Dell 14 Plus delivered impressive results. It scored 49 points in Single-core and 489 points in Multi-core. To put that in perspective, the Single-core result places it near the performance of a high-end Ryzen 5800X—a solid indicator of its responsiveness for everyday tasks and a decent showing for a mid-range productivity machine.
The system ran cool during the review, without many issues. I was able to run Counterstrike 2 at around 30-45 FPS without many stutters, but since this is a mainstream laptop, I would keep away from playing video games on this device.
Battery
The battery on this laptop is rated 64WHr, Dell promises up to 20 hours of battery life, but in my testing came close to the 11-to-12-hour mark with a mix of document typing, social media browsing and watching YouTube and Netflix . More demanding uses such as video editing and playing is likely to bring it down to the 2–2.5 hour mark. The Dell 14 Plus is ideal for long typing sessions and binge watch marathons. Using the supplied USB charger, it took about 1 hour 30 minutes to charge the laptop from 0-100 per cent. Dell’s ExpressCharge technology helped top up the battery up to 80 per cent in around 60 minutes.
Conclusion
The Dell 14 Plus comes across as a laptop with good specs reaching out to the mainstream users. Given that the Dell 14 Plus has a good display, great keyboard and a great value for money quotient for the specs. The average sound, non-touch display might not make it ideal for a multimedia consumption laptop but makes a great one for your home or workspace
Dell 14 Plus review
Price: ₹76,940 onward
Pros: Good display, great keyboard and value for money laptop.
Cons: Average sound, non-touch display.
Published on October 15, 2025
