Dell Latitude E6330: Perfectly Professional

26.08.2012
The Dell Latitude E6330 may not look like much: It's a business-oriented laptop focused on, well, productivity. It's not as pretty as an Ultrabook, nor as powerful as a gaming laptop, but it gets the job done. The E6330 particularly shines when it comes to business-oriented tasks, such as when you're working in Office programs and saving documents. Thats not terribly exciting, to be sure, but Dell has definitely found the Latitudes niche.

Our review model, which costs $1832 as configured, has a third-generation Intel Core i7-3520 processor, 6GB of RAM, and a 128GB solid-state drive. The Latitude E6330 also sports a dual-pointing backlit keyboard, an Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 wireless mini card, and a DVD-RW drive. Like many business-oriented laptops, the Latitude E6330 can be optionally fitted with 3G or 4G networking service, though our review unit did not come with either of these. The E6330 runs the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Professional.

In PCWorld's WorldBench 7 benchmark tests, the Latitude E6330 scores an impressive 163, which means it's 63 percent faster than (which sports an Intel i5-2500K processor, 8GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti discrete graphics card). The E6330 scores higher than the portable gaming laptop (143), but lower than the (195).

However, just because the Latitude E6330 has a higher WB7 score than does the Alienware M14x, that doesn't mean the E6330 is necessarily a better performer. The E6330 has a 128GB SSD, which is speedier than the M14x's 750GB traditional hard drive, but the E6330 is no match for the M14x when it comes to graphics and gaming performance. In our Dirt 3 graphics tests, the Latitude E6330 managed acceptable, but nowhere near excellent, frame rates of between 22.7 (high-quality settings, 1366-by-768-pixel resolution) and 59.8 frames per second (low-quality settings, 800-by-600-pixel resolution). By comparison, the Alienware M14x boasted frame rates of more than three times that (between 82.8 and 186.5 fps).