Dell 16 Premium review: The perfect blend of sleek and powerful at a steep price

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When I first lifted the lid of the Dell 16 Premium, I let out a small gasp. This is unquestionably one of the most attractive clamshell Windows laptops I’ve seen, with a gorgeous silver and off-white color scheme, a fingerprint-resistant aluminum lid, and smooth glass above and below the zero-lattice keyboard.

And here’s the kicker: it’s not just a pretty face. The Dell 16 Premium has wildly powerful internals that run Cyberpunk 2077 like a dream, a speaker system that slaps, and fairly decent battery life considering how draining its 4K OLED display and dedicated GPU are.

Of course, it’s too much to expect perfection from a single laptop. The Dell 16 Premium’s keyboard ultimately disappointed me, but I am a self-proclaimed keyboard snob, so take that as you will. Looking past that minor hangup, the Dell 16 Premium might just be one of the best Windows laptops I’ve tested to date, as long as you have the money to splurge on it.

Dell 16 Premium price and specs 

As its name implies, the Dell 16 Premium is a high-end laptop, and it has quite an exorbitant price to match. That said, it’s been on sale up to $400 off recently, and Dell has a price match policy that will refund you the difference if it goes on sale within 30 days of purchase. 

Our Dell 16 Premium review unit is $3,199 at Dell and comes with the following specs: 

• Intel Core Ultra 7 255H CPU

• Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 GPU

• 32GB RAM

• 1TB of SSD storage

• 16-inch 4K (3840 x 2400) OLED touch display

The base configuration for the Dell 16 Premium is $1,799 at Dell and features the same processor listed above, but opts for integrated Intel Arc 140T graphics, half the RAM and storage, and a non-touch, non-OLED 2K display. There are also options for an RTX 5050 or 5060 GPU instead of a 5070, along with an Ultra 9 285H processor instead of an Ultra 7 255H processor.

Sleek, MacBook-rivaling design for the win

The Dell 16 Premium is, hands down, one of the most attractive Windows laptops I’ve ever tested. It even rivals the MacBook’s aesthetic. The laptop is covered with machined aluminum that gives off a silvery sheen, and the keyboard and trackpad area inside is a beautiful off-white, light gray shade. Our review unit’s color scheme is platinum, but there’s a gray graphite colorway if that’s more your vibe.

It’s cool to the touch, resists fingerprints wonderfully, and exudes luxury. Despite how delicate it looks, Dell’s 16 Premium is a solidly constructed laptop. There’s no give or creaking in the bottom chassis when pushed, and the hinge operates strongly and smoothly.

That durable construction translates to quite a hefty footprint, so this might not be the best laptop for you if you want something lightweight to travel with. The Dell 16 Premium measures 14.1 x 9.4 x 0.8 inches, so it’s fairly thin albeit long, and it weighs 4.7 pounds.

This display is made for royalty

The Dell 16 Premium features a 16.3-inch, 4K (3840 x 2400) OLED touch display with thin bezels, and it’s nearly perfect. Its OLED panel looks stunning, delivering rich, vivid colors and deep, accurate blacks, and its 4K resolution is crystal-clear icing on the proverbial cake. 

Whether you’re streaming the latest season of Wednesday, doing a bit of online shopping, or even playing a beautiful AAA game, this display makes the experience better. For gaming specifically, the display is fitted with a variable refresh rate up to 120Hz, a step up from its predecessor’s 90Hz max refresh rate.

My only minor gripe with the Dell 16 Premium’s display is its max brightness of 400 nits. Don’t get me wrong, it’s bright enough to comfortably work in a fully lit room or even sunlight, but at this laptop’s steep price, a max brightness of 500 nits would have been better.

This laptop’s display also has smooth and responsive touch functionality, though, because it’s not a 2-in-1 laptop, it might not get a ton of use.

Only USB-C ports, but at least they’re conveniently placed

I appreciate the Dell 16 Premium sporting USB-C ports on both its left and right edges. With this design, you don’t have to worry about awkwardly finagling a cable around the laptop when your charging port is on the ‘wrong’ side. That said, I wish this laptop had a greater variety of ports.

On the left, you’ll find: 

• Two USB-C ports (Thunderbolt 4 Gen 2, DisplayPort 2.1, and power delivery)

And on the right: 

• One USB-C port (Thunderbolt 4 Gen 2, DisplayPort 2.1, and power delivery)

• Audio jack

• A microSDXC card reader

Considering this laptop’s premium price and its discrete GPU, it would have been nice to see an HDMI port or a USB-A port added. Many modern peripherals connect via Bluetooth or via USB-C (or at least come with an adapter), but for those who already have a collection of USB-A peripherals, a native USB-A port would be great.

A speaker setup other laptops should aspire to

The Dell 16 Premium is equipped with a quad-speaker design, and put simply, it sounds amazing.

Diving into the details, every song I listened to came through well-balanced, with crisp vocals, punchy bass that resonates (as opposed to sounding clipped or short), and definable high notes. I played my go-to song for testing speakers, “Real” by Unprocessed (feat. Tim Henson and Clay Gober), and these speakers surprised me with how well they were able to capture the tiny details you can typically only hear with a great standalone speaker.

The speakers are loud enough for casual, personal use at only 20 to 30 percent volume. Turning the volume up to max, they’re loud enough to fill a large room without any distortion or tinny-sounding vocals.

For some odd reason, the Dell 16 Premium doesn’t come with the Dolby Access app pre-installed, but it’s available through the Microsoft Store for free. After downloading it, the quality noticeably improves slightly, and there are preset profiles available for switching between music, movies, games, and more.

A so-so keyboard paired with a glamorous haptic touchpad

There’s no denying the keyboard and trackpad design of Dell’s 16 Premium laptop is eye-catching. Both the keyboard and trackpad are a beautiful off-white shade, the trackpad is nestled within a seamless glass area that spans the entire length of the laptop, and a fancy touch-controlled function bar sits above a sleek, zero-lattice keyboard. 

The zero-lattice design isn’t for everyone, but I don’t mind it. What bothers me is how typing on this keyboard feels. There’s minimal travel, so it doesn’t take much for the keys to fully depress, and there’s no satisfying feel or sound with each keypress, which results in a disappointing typing experience, at least for a keyboard snob like me.

I also didn’t like how the keyboard’s matte surface felt under my fingers. All of the keys feel like this, but the spacebar is the worst, with an audibly scratchy, sort of nails-on-a-chalkboard sound when I rub my thumb over it. That said, this could simply be something that only affects people sensitive to specific sounds and certain textures.

One feature that may be more universally disliked is the touch-controlled function bar above the keyboard. It’s a unique, good-looking attribute of the Dell 16 Premium, but in practice, it can be a bit annoying for frequently used keys, like the Delete key while typing in Google Docs and the Escape key when gaming. Whereas I can usually hit these keys without looking, thanks to muscle memory, I had to stop typing and actively look for these keys to make sure I pressed the right one.

Moving on, the seamless glass area below the keyboard is one of my favorite parts of this laptop. The smooth glass stretches from left to right, but the trackpad is only in the center. It feels great to operate, especially with built-in, customizable haptics that make clicking much more satisfying.

There aren’t any lines to indicate where the trackpad starts and stops, but that didn’t impact ease of use for me. After a while, you just remember where the trackpad is without looking, even for left- and right-clicking as well.

An above-average webcam for this premium laptop

The Dell 16 Premium has an above-average webcam, but for built-in laptop webcams, that’s not saying much. 

Through its 1080p RGB-IR camera, my complexion and sky blue hoodie come through accurately shaded, and the overall picture looks fairly sharp at first glance. Closer inspection reveals a blurry background, a smoothed face, and a lack of fine details with defined edges, like individual strands of hair.

Dell 16 Premium benchmarks and performance

Equipped with an Intel Core Ultra 7 255H and an Nvidia RTX 5070 GPU, the Dell 16 Premium is set up well for performance success. 

It sailed smoothly through our traditional stress test, which involves opening multiple apps and 20 RAM-hungry Chrome tabs. With all these tabs open, I had no issue loading new pages, typing in Google Docs, or switching between apps. The fans also stayed insanely quiet. They were definitely on, but I had to turn off my music and lean toward the laptop to make sure. 

After hours of use, the laptop’s underside is only warm, not hot. The only activity that made the underside get hot was playing Cyberpunk 2077 for about an hour, and even then, it was never too hot to touch. In that hour of play, the fans were noticeably louder than during the traditional stress test, but still shockingly quiet compared to most gaming laptops. I was able to clearly hear the game over the fans with the volume set to only 20 percent.

In addition to real-world performance tests, we also run a few standard benchmarks on our laptops. The Dell 16 Premium delivered a highly impressive Geekbench 6 multi-core score of 16,881 and a decent 3DMark TimeSpy score of 10,129. For comparison, the Acer Predator Helios 16, a gaming laptop, earned scores of 17,462 and 16,837 on the same tests, respectively.

Although Dell’s 16 Premium isn’t technically a gaming laptop, it does have a discrete GPU, and it ran Cyberpunk 2077 like a dream. For a decent frame rate, I wouldn’t recommend playing at this laptop’s native 4K resolution, but if you drop it to just 2560 x 1600, it runs beautifully. 

We also ran the in-game benchmark for Cyberpunk 2077 at 1920 x 1080 resolution with High presets and DLSS turned off, and the laptop averaged 87.98 frames per second (fps). Keeping the same settings and turning DLSS on resulted in an average of 106.35 fps. Considering this isn’t a laptop designed with gaming in mind, those results are pretty great.

Lastly, if you want a laptop with AI features that’ll supercharge your work experience, I’d go with a Copilot+ PC instead of the Dell 16 Premium. This laptop features built-in Copilot, so you’ll have easy access to your own AI chatbot, but it lacks a lot of the perks reserved solely for Copilot+ laptops.  

Dell 16 Premium battery life

Every laptop we test endures the same battery rundown test, which involves looping a 1080p video at 50 percent brightness until the laptop dies. The Dell 16 Premium lasted 13 hours and 49 minutes on this battery test. That’s an impressive feat for a laptop with a 16-inch OLED display and a discrete GPU.

If you’re trying to find the best laptop for battery life from Dell, there are better options out there, like the Dell 14 Plus 2-in-1 that lasted 20 hours and 52 minutes on the same battery test. But if you’re trying to find a good middle ground between top-tier battery life and jaw-dropping specs, the Dell 16 Premium delivers.

Is the Dell 16 Premium worth it?

Whether the Dell 16 Premium is worth it depends entirely on what you’re looking for in your next laptop. There are quite a few objectively great features of the Dell 16 Premium, like its colorful and sharp OLED display, well-balanced speaker setup, and solid all-around performance, capable of running AAA titles with ease, answering emails, and everything in between. If you’re looking for a laptop with premium looks and plenty of power, Dell’s 16 Premium is an excellent choice.

However, one of the biggest drawbacks of the Dell 16 Premium is its price, which could be an instant dealbreaker if you’re shopping on a budget. At full price, our review unit is $3,199. For an inconspicuous gaming laptop, that price might be worth it to some people; though, I’d recommend waiting for it to go on sale for $2,799 if you can.

If you don’t need your laptop to play games, edit videos, or perform any other graphically intensive tasks, here’s the configuration I’d opt for instead: an Intel Core Ultra 7 255H processor, integrated graphics, 16GB of RAM, 1TB of SSD storage, and the same beautiful 4K OLED display as our review unit, for only $2,099 at Dell full price. Or, check out the best laptops we’ve reviewed to date if that’s still too far out of your price range.