The new 's screen lid has a glossy surface with customizable colors which you can configure on Dell's website. Our review unit came with purple colored horizontal lines streaking across its screen lid -- clearly not the best look the Studio 14 has to offer. The laptop preserves characteristic Studio design elements like its dropped hinges, sturdy build quality, slot-loading optical drive and the laptop's overall tapering design. The Dell Studio 14 continues to cloak itself in a simple-yet-functional design, which is admirable. In fact, a lot of its design and build characteristics have trickled down to the entry-level Inspiron series of laptops, as we saw on the and .
The Studio 14 laptop's very well built (better than the MSI CX420 laptop), and its dropped central hinge is sturdy to say the least. The laptop weighs a moderate 2.45-kg, which isn't too bad for a 14-inch mainstream laptop. It comes with a glossy LED-backlit 14-inch screen (1366x768 pixel resolution) with a 16:9 aspect ratio. The Dell Studio 14's screen isn't as large as the one on , but it is very close to it in terms of image quality. The screen displays crisp, clear text and video, and has very good horizontal viewing angles. The Dell Studio 14's keyboard and touchpad are as good as ever. The keyboard sports large, easy-to-type on keycaps that are closely packed -- they are different than the Ideapad Y550's or 's keys, and great for fast typing. The touchpad is very finely textured and a treat to use, and the two mouse buttons are nice to press. If anything, the Studio 14's touchpad lacks multi-gesture support (found on the Ideapad Y550).
The has very good hardware components. The basics include an Intel Core i3-350M 2.26-GHz processor, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, 500GB hard drive and an ATI Radeon HD 5450 graphics card with 1GB VRAM -- this is pretty good for a mainstream 14-inch laptop. Unlike the Inspiron series of laptops, the Studio 14 comes with a slot-loading DVD drive. It comes with three USB ports all of which support charging of gadgets (mobile phone, MP3 player, etc). One of these USB ports doubles up as an eSATA port -- convenient to hook up an external storage device. The Dell Studio 14 comes with Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi 802.11n, and Bluetooth 2.1 wireless connectivity. Apart from three audio jacks, the Dell Studio 14 also has an HDMI port, multicard reader, and ExpressCard slot on its chassis. The laptop comes with a six-cell battery and 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium operating system. The only thing it doesn't have is a FireWire port, compared to the older Studio 15 Artist Edition, but the Studio 14 laptop still has very good features -- it's rivaled only by the Lenovo Ideapad Y550.
In a nutshell, the offers very good performance. A WorldBench 6 score of 95, PC Mark Vantage score of 5296, and PC Mark 05 score of 5811 are the highest we've seen in a sub-Rs. 50,000 (US$1,079) mainstream laptop. Multitasking with several processor and memory-intensive tasks is smoother on the Dell Studio 14 Artist Edition. Although a 3D Mark 06 score of 3440 on the Dell Studio 14 is the lowest in our , the dedicated ATI Radeon HD 5450 graphics card is good for casual gaming at best -- Far Cry 2 at 1024x768 and High setting gave 22.9 fps.