Dell 16 Premium Review

Design and Keyboard

• Svelte and stylish construction
• Meagre, but modern port selection
• Lattice keyboard and seamless trackpad may be quite divisive

As much as Dell may have confusingly changed the name of this laptop for 2025, it is at heart a rebadged XPS of old. That means the same svelte and virtually seamless chassis as when the XPS line was redesigned, which makes it look and feel especially modern, with a machined aluminium frame.

In spite of its discrete graphics inside and the cooling that it needs, Dell has managed to keep this laptop at a sub-20mm thickness, which is quite ridiculous to be honest. As much as laptops with discrete GPUs can feel quite bulky, the fact that the 16 Premium is just 19.05mm thick reinforces an ultrabook-style feel – a 2.11kg weight does bring things back to earth, though.

The continuation of the XPS look and feel is good in some respects, but not in others. It means that the port selection of this Dell laptop isn’t brilliant. You get three USB4-capable Type-C ports (one of which can be used for charging), plus a 3.5mm headphone jack and a microSD card reader. No HDMI, USB-A or anything of the sort here – sometimes I think Dell takes the MacBook Pro comparison a little too close to heart.

The keyboard here is an unchanged ‘zero-lattice’ style option that, if you’re familiar with the keyboard from when this was an XPS laptop in the past, hasn’t changed. It ditches the traditional chiclet-style option seen on lots of other laptops for a seamless design in the name of a more modern and unified look, complete with the capacitive function row above that is permanently backlit it seems.

Admittedly, it takes some time to get up to speed with the 16 Premium’s keyboard, but I found it to provide a surprisingly tactile keypress plus shorter travel. In spite of this being a larger-screen laptop, Dell has followed Apple’s lead and given this laptop a smaller form factor layout. This is plagued with the same issue as the smaller XPS model I tested last year, with the Backspace key offset by a fingerprint reader-cum-power button that you can accidentally hit if you’re not careful. 

Looking down towards the trackpad can also be quite jarring, as there seems to be no boundary at first as to where the trackpad is. It’s what Dell calls a ‘seamless trackpad’ and feels more of a stylistic choice than a functional one. Granted, I don’t mind it, and the glass surface is slick and smooth, plus it comes with all the fun of haptic feedback for gestures and such.

Display and Sound

• Rich 4K OLED screen
• Lovely colours, black level and contrast
• Surprisingly good speakers

Dell has gone to town with the screen on the 16 Premium, even in spite of its more modest RTX 5060 GPU. This is a 16-inch edge-to-edge OLED panel with a 16:10 aspect ratio for more vertical real estate to suit modern working, plus a 4K resolution (or 3840×2400 with that extra vertical space in mind) and a slick 120Hz refresh rate.

It should come as no surprise to learn that it serves up some gorgeous image quality, especially with that high resolution in mind, while its higher refresh rate keeps motion smooth for anything from gaming to general use.

It’s a typical OLED otherwise, with deep blacks and excellent dynamic range, as measured with my colorimeter with its 0.01 black level and 28180:1 contrast. Its 6600K colour temperature is also impeccable.

A peak SDR brightness of 386.1 nits gives displayed images some punch and is in line with a lot of this laptop’s OLED-driven rivals, although it’s virtually half of the tandem 4K Lumina Pro OLED panel on the newer Asus ProArt P16.

The colour accuracy of the 16 Premium is great, too. We’ve got perfect 100% coverage of the sRGB gamut and  99% DCI-P3, plus 88% Adobe RGB coverage. With it, it proves this laptop’s impeccable credentials for work with both colour-sensitive and productivity workloads.

As for its speakers, this Dell laptop has some surprisingly excellent ones with good depth and clarity, plus the fact that they’re top-firing means audio won’t be muffled or sound different depending on where the laptop is placed.

Performance

• Beefy mid-range components
• RTX 5060 supplements graphical horsepower well, although only games at 1080p
• Decent RAM and SSD combo

Dell has opted for a powerful set of components inside the 16 Premium, pairing a mid-range Intel Core Ultra 7 255H processor with an RTX 5060 laptop GPU for some extra oomph for 3D workloads where needed.

I’ve recently tested this Intel Arrow Lake-H chip inside the environmentally-conscious Acer Aspire Vero 16 (2025), and was very impressed with its potency there. With this dearer Dell laptop, it’s much the same story. We’ve got 16 cores and 16 threads with the Core Ultra  255H, with cores split between six Performance cores, eight Efficiency cores, and two Low-Power Efficiency cores. 

For reference, that works out to double the cores and threads you’ll get in a Core Ultra 7 256V or Core Ultra 7 258V-powered laptop, and gives you potentially more oomph than the Ryzen 9 AI HX 370 that I’ve lauded elsewhere.

In running the 16 Premium through the customary Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 tests, I found it to offer some potent single-core performance that powers ahead of the Core Ultra 200V chips and largely in line with the Ryzen 9 AI HX 370. 

It’s in the multi-threaded scores where those extra cores count, making the Core Ultra 7 255H a powerful chip against AMD’s chip with fewer cores but more threads, and pulling even further ahead of the Core Ultra 200V chips.

The Arc 140T integrated graphics that the chip comes with are normally beefy enough for powering through some 3D workloads, with a decent score in 3DMark Time Spy on its own, although Dell has supplemented the Core Ultra 7 255H with an RTX 5060. This gives it a much higher score in the 3DMark test, owing to the power of discrete graphics, and means you can do some gaming on this laptop if you wish to.

The RTX 5060 isn’t enough to drive games at a high frame rate natively with this laptop’s 4K 120Hz OLED screen, with Ultra-preset Cyberpunk 2077 falling to its knees at just 15.11fps. 

However, dial things back to 1080p where the 5060 is much more comfortable, and you’ll be able to get above 60fps in both Cyberpunk 2077 and Returnal, plus max out the 120Hz refresh rate in Rainbow Six Extraction. It’s possible to game on this laptop, even if it isn’t really what it’s designed for.

32GB of fast DDR5 RAM is welcome for unlocking the ability for intensive loads and heavy multi-tasking, while the 16 Premium’s 1TB SSD is capacious and decently speedy. I tested read and write speeds of 6596.10MB/s and 5854.95MB/s, respectively. 

Software

• Especially clean Windows 11 install
• Not much in the way of Dell-specific software
• Copilot+ PC functionality is present

The 16 Premium comes running Windows 11, and comes with very little additional software, be it from Dell itself or from a third party.

The most useful pieces of Dell-specific software are Dell Optimizer, which is an app for checking on your system’s vitals and allowing for changing power modes and similar settings to get your machine running how you wish. There is also Dell Command, which is a system updater.

Otherwise, most of the other system apps come in the form of Microsoft’s AI features, as the 16 Premium has enough AI horsepower (or TOPS) to be considered a Copilot+ PC. This gives you access to features such as the clever Windows Studio webcam effects for auto-framing and background blur, as well as generative AI capabilities in Photos and Microsoft Paint.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 6 hours 43 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for one working day

Dell has bundled the 16 Premium with a sizeable 99.5Whr battery, which rivals beefier gaming laptops such as the Medion Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate (RTX 5090) in terms of capacity. With this in mind, its estimate of this laptop with the 4K OLED screen option running for nine hours for video streaming feels a little conservative.

In running the PCMark 10 Modern Office battery test with the brightness at the requisite 150 nits, this Dell option fell some way short of even their estimate and is quite a disappointing result. It lasted for six minutes and 43 minutes, meaning with some hypermiling, you should be able to get through a working day just about. The Asus ProArt P16 (2025) mustered nearly four hours longer in the same test.

The 130W charger that the 16 Premium comes with is easily one of the fastest I’ve used on any laptop, taking 26 minutes to get this laptop back to 50 percent. A full charge took just 62 minutes.

Should you buy it?