Buyers of rugged laptops, sturdy systems designed to be bolted to first responders’ dashboards or dropped onto rocky ground, make a distinction between “semi-rugged” and “fully rugged” notebooks—machines rated to survive a fall of three feet versus six feet, say, or pouring rain versus a high-pressure hose. Its maker calls the Durabook S14I ($3,004 as tested) “one step above semi-rugged,” meaning it’s not the most bulletproof laptop you can buy, but it’s still formidably tough, versatile, and well-equipped. The S14I hits a sweet spot for users whose work takes them (and their gear) into harm’s way. The only thing keeping it from an Editors’ Choice award is its mediocre battery life. You’ll definitely want to fill its modular bay with the available second battery pack instead of the DVD drive found in our test unit.
May Experience Some Turbulence
The Durabook S14I (technically S14I-G2, to differentiate it from a predecessor with 8th Generation instead of 11th Generation Intel processors) is built to withstand a drop of four feet, one foot more than two rival 14-inch laptops for field workers, the Dell Latitude 5424 Rugged and the Panasonic Toughbook 55. Its IP53 ingress protection rating means it’s secure against dust and sprays of water, but not pressurized jets or immersion. (See our guide to what these ratings mean.)
As you’d expect, it’s no ultraportable—its aluminum-magnesium alloy chassis weighs 5.07 pounds, a bit more than the 4.6-pound Panasonic but noticeably less than the 6.8-pound Dell (and far less than the 8.5 pounds of the latter’s six-foot-droppable sibling, the Latitude 7424 Rugged Extreme). At 1.5 by 13.8 by 11.1 inches, it’s bulkier than the less well-armored and much less costly Acer Enduro N3 (0.98 by 13.8 by 9.7 inches), closer to the Toughbook 55 (1.3 by 13.6 by 10.7 inches).
At $3,004, our test unit is far from cheap, though a comparable Latitude 5424 I configured at Dell’s site was about $400 more. It combines a Core i7-1165G7 CPU, 16GB of memory, a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive, a touch screen with full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) resolution, Wi-Fi 6, and Windows 10 Pro. Options that our system lacked include a SIM card for 4G LTE mobile broadband, a backlit keyboard, a fingerprint reader, and a face recognition webcam.
Don’t expect the thin bezels or near-borderless display of today’s sleek notebooks. Lift the lid (a two-handed job since it’s latched down) and you’ll see the screen set in a sizable armored plate. A sliding shutter covers the webcam centered at top. There’s a carrying handle on the front edge and fingernail-breaking covers or doors over all the ports (except, oddly, the AC adapter connector).
We like to see a Thunderbolt port on laptops costing over $1,000, let alone over $3,000, but except for that omission the Durabook offers ample connectivity. On the right side are an audio jack, an SD card slot, an on/off switch for the Wi-Fi radio, a USB 2.0 port, and two USB 3.2 Type-A ports. At left are a SmartCard reader, a hole for the supplied stylus, and the modular bay holding our unit’s optical drive.
Around back are HDMI and VGA video outputs, a USB 3.2 Type-C port, and serial and Ethernet ports. Sliding latches on the bottom let you remove the storage caddy (which can hold two M.2 solid-state drives) and the contents of the modular bay (either the DVD drive, a second battery, or a third SSD).
Can You Beat This Laptop?
As usual with borrowed review units, I didn’t abuse the S14I to the absolute limits of its endurance, but I did knock it from my lap to a carpeted floor (a fall of about two feet) while in use and dropped it from three to four feet, both open and closed, a few times. One of the side doors popped open a couple of times, but nothing untoward happened. I also gave it a soaking under the kitchen faucet, which didn’t faze it.
At the top of the keyboard, along with the power button, are two customizable buttons, which by default toggle stealth mode (turning off the screen backlight, LEDs, and speakers) and cycle through touch-screen modes, depending on whether you’re using the stylus, gloves, or your finger, or are dealing with a wet display.
The stiff keyboard offers dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys, though the Delete key is on the bottom row instead of in the top right corner where it belongs and the cursor arrow keys are in an odd T instead of the usual inverted T formation. (The down, not up, arrow is the one set apart from the other three.) The two-button touchpad is too small and, like some others on rugged laptops that are engineered to be compatible with gloved fingers, sometimes skipped or ignored the touch of a bare hand.
Rated at 1,000 nits of brightness, the 1080p touch screen is readable in outdoor sunlight and actually too bright or washed out if turned all the way up indoors—75% brightness is fine and even 50% is perfectly usable. Colors are fair if not really vivid, viewing angles are broad, and fine details are sharp. I could have used a bit more contrast.
The webcam offers sharper 1080p instead of the usual, marginal 720p resolution; it captures relatively well-lit and colorful images with a bit of noise or static. The S14I’s audio is about the weakest I’ve heard, though, from a laptop: flat, tinny, and awfully quiet even at max volume. There’s no hint of bass, and you can’t hear overlapping tracks. Durabook keeps its systems free of bloatware and backs them with a three-year warranty.
On the Test Bench (Indoors for a Change)
For our benchmark charts, I compared the Durabook S14I to three other semi-rugged 14-inch laptops: the abovementioned Panasonic Toughbook 55, Acer Enduro N3, and Dell Latitude 5424 Rugged. That left one spot which I filled with a 15.6-inch Durabook stablemate, the Durabook S15AB. You can see these survivalists’ basic specs in the table below.
Productivity and Media Tests
PCMark 10 is a holistic performance suite developed by the benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). Its primary test simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also use a storage subtest from PCMark 8 to assess the speed of a system’s boot drive. (See more about how we test laptops.)
The S14I led the way, the only laptop here to clear the 4,000-point hurdle that we consider means excellent productivity in PCMark 10. (Not that rugged laptops like these spend a lot of time preparing office presentations in Excel and PowerPoint, but still.) PCMark 8’s storage measurement is easy for today’s speedy SSDs.
Next is Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. (This program acted wonky on the Acer, apparently using only one core to return an ultra-low score, so I dropped the Enduro from this bar chart.)
Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video editing benchmark, in which we put a stopwatch on systems as they transcode a brief movie from 4K resolution down to 1080p. It, too, is a tough test for multi-core, multi-threaded CPUs; lower times are better.
The only Core i7 and only 11th Generation Intel processor here, the S14I’s quad-core Core i7-1165G7 easily outran its competitors. It doesn’t claim to be a CAD or 3D rendering workstation, but the machine’s more than powerful enough for everyday applications.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and add up the total (lower times are better). The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters.
Another easy win for the 14-inch Durabook, though Photoshop is hardly a high priority for rugged laptops, and its screen falls short of professional imaging quality.
Graphics Tests
We test Windows systems’ relative graphics muscle with two gaming simulations, 3DMark and Superposition. The first has two DirectX 11 subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, suitable for mainstream PCs with integrated graphics and higher-end gaming rigs respectively. The second uses the Unigine engine to render and pan through a detailed 3D scene at two resolution and image quality settings with results measured in frames per second (fps); 30fps is usually considered a fair target for smooth animation while avid gamers prefer 60fps or higher.
The Core i7-1165G7’s Iris Xe integrated graphics are more capable than Intel’s older UHD Graphics, but still miles behind even a modest dedicated GPU. Durabook says the S14I can be ordered with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 dedicated chip, for users who may need a modicum of local GPU acceleration for specialized tasks, but it’ll never be mistaken for a gaming laptop.
Battery Rundown Test
After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop into airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the Blender Foundation short film Tears of SteelTears of Steel—with screen brightness set at 50% and volume at 100% until the system quits.
The only positive here is that 50% brightness on the S14I is much sunnier than on most other notebooks; I tried this test twice, but the Durabook showed less stamina than a system built for field work should. Buyers should unquestionably opt for the second battery pack rather than the DVD drive.
The Strong, Almost Silent Type
Though expensive, the Durabook S14I costs significantly less than fully rugged laptops while being almost as resistant to drops, weather, and damage. Again, with better battery life (and maybe better sound) it would have earned Editors’ Choice honors. Even as is, it deserves a place on outdoor and factory-floor workers’ short lists.
