The Dell 16 Premium is a striking and sophisticated high-end enterprise-grade machine with best-in-class Windows performance – but it will set you back considerably

Dell excels at making high-end and genuinely premium machines, which we've long come to expect throughout the years. Last year's AI PC-driven rebrand raised some eyebrows, but the Dell 16 Premium is probably one of the most familiar of the machines on the roster. It inherits the ultramodernist design of the XPS 16 – the brand that was then killed off and has since been revived – with this spiritual successor offering plenty for creatives and professionals alike.

With an Intel Core Ultra 200 Series CPU as well as a new Nvidia graphics card, this machine offers plenty of power to complement what seems to be, at face value at least, a sharp and vibrant OLED display. Questions remain over the machine's battery life, however, with 16-inch ultraportables usually struggling to match the capacity of smaller 14-inch cousins. Price, also, is a key sticking point, with an estimated $3,400 retail price, meaning that the machine needs to show how truly exceptional it is to beat the competition.

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Dell 16 Premium review: Design and display

The Dell 16 Premium adopts an incredibly familiar design – it's identical, in fact, to the Dell XPS 16 9640 (2024) and showcases the same fresh, light, ultramodernist look and feel. This is embodied perfectly in the Platinum coating, which makes it akin to a work of art.

The aluminum chassis includes75% recycled material on the top cover and 25% reduced emissions aluminium in the palmrest, in addition to 21.5% recycled glass in the display and up to 18.5% recycled plastic. The machine's body is relatively sleek too, a little smaller than the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 2-in-1 Gen 10 Aura Edition, for instance, but at the expense of several ports. Its weight, meanwhile, is marginally heavier, weighing 2.11kg versus the 16-inch Lenovo's 1.93kg. The MacBook Pro weighs about the same as this Dell machine, so it's no less portable.

We have mixed feelings about the design itself. It's aesthetically beautiful, and the premium feeling is inescapable each time you look at it, let alone use it. As always, the bezels housing the display are phenomenally narrow, and adjusting the lid has robustness and firmness, with no weakness in the hinges. However, functionality does suffer with the keyboard, touchbar, and the invisible haptic touchpad. From a design perspective, each element looks exceptional, but makes for a slightly fiddly user experience – especially as they take some getting used to.

The 16.3-inch OLED HDR display, meanwhile, looks fantastic when you use it – thanks especially to a 120Hz refresh rate and an incredibly sharp 278 pixels-per-inch ratio, thanks to a monstrous 3,840 x 2,400 maximum resolution. These aspects make the screen a joy to use for all kinds of day-to-day tasks, but the real potential comes in its accurate colors, with our testing using a display calibrator producing excellent results. With a 99.9% accuracy sRGB color gamut, it's about as good a result as you'll find, while creators will be pleased to know it also scores 89.1% coverage of the Adobe RGB spectrum and an outstanding 99.7% coverage of the DCP I3 spectrum. While it's one of the strongest set of results we've recorded, it falls slightly short of the 100%, 94.9%, and 100% the Lenovo Yoga Pro. Brightness is also slightly below average 353 nits, compared with the Lenovo's 868 nits. Anything less than 350 nits is not ideal, and it's bright enough to use in most conditions, but brighter screens do render media playback much more viable.

Dell 16 Premium review: Performance and battery life

We expected plenty from the Dell 16 Premium on the performance front, considering its lofty pricetag, and this laptop certainly delivered. An Intel Core Ultra 7 255H (16 cores) is paired with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 GPU, as well as 32GB DDR5 RAM and a 1TB SSD.

Overall, performance is outstanding, with testing via Geekbench 6 producing single-threaded and multi-core scores of 2,803 and 16,016, respectively. This is phenomenal workstation-grade performance that we'd expect in only the most powerful machines. The multi-core performance score is comparable with the HP ZBook X G1i (featuring the Intel Core Ultra 7 265H), which scored 16,103 – and considerably better than the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i Gen 10 Aura Edition's 12,057 (which featured an Intel Core Ultra 9 285H CPU). The MacBook Pro (M4) scored 15,116, for comparison.

The Nvidia GPU similarly impresses – with an OpenCL benchmarking score of 92,099. The Dell extracts more punch than the same chip in the Lenovo Yoga Pro, scoring 81,654, and even the Nvidia RTX PRO 2000 Blackwell that featured in the ZBook. Although the integrated AI processing is only capable of 13 TOPS – meaning you miss out on a handful of AI processing efficiencies – you do benefit from a really fast SSD, with average reads of 6,581MB/s and 5,841MB/s respectively.

The one downside is battery life, with the machine lasting 10hrs 20mins in our looped video playback test. While a relatively poor result by the standards we're used to seeing from 14-inch ultraportables, modern 16-inch machines tend to be much more power-hungry. The Lenovo Yoga Pro lasted 8hrs 58mins in the same test, for instance, while the ZBook lasted 12hrs 44mins.

Dell 16 Premium review: Features

No matter how hard we tried, we simply couldn't gel with the Dell 16 Premium's gapless keyboard. The keystrokes aren't so much the issue; although the travel distance is shallow, the feedback is satisfactory and means that touch typing is relatively straightforward and satisfactory – with a catch. We couldn't adapt so easily to the spacing between the keys, and often found ourselves hitting the wrong inputs routinely. Granted, this is something you can wrap your head around if you use it for longer than a few weeks, but it's markedly different from most other machines we're used to. Swapping out the top row of function keys – and the Escape key – for a touchbar feels unnecessary, and there's disappointingly no feedback when you're pressing these digital keys.

Similarly, while the lack of a physical touchpad with hard borders might make your palms feel more comfortable as they're resting on the surface of the machine, it represents a learning curve. Scrolling feels a little slippery, as if the surface of the palm rest is too smooth, while the left-click and right-click functions are hollow compared with some of the punchier physical buttons we're used to.

Physical connectivity is not one of this laptop's strong suits, with only three USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 4 support (two on the left and one on the right), upgradable to Thunderbolt 5, alongside a 3.5mm headphone jack and a MicroSDXC card reader. Wireless standards are completely up-to-date, with Bluetooth 5.4 and Wi-Fi 7 compatibility at your disposal, however.

The laptop is otherwise light on features, with none of the standard AI PC software utilities like webcam alterations available, nor specialist security features – beyond the standard Windows Hello login and fingerprint sensor baked into the power button. Dell Optimizer lets you adjust your display and battery settings, but it's nothing you couldn't do on Windows anyway.

Dell 16 Premium review: Is it worth it?

When you happen upon a machine as premium as this, unfortunately, it comes down to how much value for money it represents. If money were no object, then we'd recommend a top-end configuration for creative professionals or enterprise power users who want a premium-looking machine that can handle almost anything you could throw at it.

In that respect, the Dell 16 Premium is near-unrivalled when compared with most high-end machines released so far this year, as well as during 2025. There are, however, minor quirks -- including the fiddly keyboard and touchpad – as well as shortcomings, like the lack of physical ports and a middling battery life, that means it's far from perfect.

For more than $3,000, it's often perfection that you're looking for in a high-end machine. We certainly enjoyed using this laptop, but can't help coming away from it feeling that with just a few minor tweaks, it could be much closer to being the truly special machine that it deserves to be.

Dell 16 Premium review: Specifications