I spend a lot of time testing enterprise laptops, but I nearly always test the top-end of specific models, as that’s what the vendors send for testing. But recently, I’ve been working with a more modestly configured version of the Dell Latitude 7420, and it’s a good reminder of just how much laptops have improved in the past few years. I had reviewed the previous version, the Latitude 7410, and this year’s machine offers nice improvements, including the Intel 11th-generation Core (Tiger Lake) processors.
Compared with the higher-end Latitude 9420 I tested recently, there are trade-offs for this slightly lower end model, but they are small.
The unit I tested had a carbon fiber weave design, which I don’t find as modern as the aluminum case in the 9420, but it’s a good-looking laptop and carbon fiber is about 0.2 pounds lighter. Measuring 0.68 by 12.65 by 8.22 inches (HWD), the 7420 is a bit bigger than the 9420 two-in-one I tested (0.54 by 12.2 by 8.5 inches), but still pretty small (HWD). It’s actually lighter, with a starting weight of 2.7 pounds. The unit I tested, which has a touch screen, weighed 3.0 pounds, 3.8 pounds with the charger; the Lenovo Carbon X1 and HP EliteBook 840 Aero are both a little lighter, but this is an easy machine to carry. The bezels around the screen are noticeably larger, but that certainly doesn’t impact the usability of the machine. It has a solid, modern look.
The left side has a USB-C/Thunderbolt port used for charging, along with a headset jack, while the right side has another USB-C/Thunderbolt port, a USB-A 3.2 port (both with power), HDMI, and more unusually, a micro-SD slot and a microSIM slot if you have an optional modem (which my machine didn’t have). It supports Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2; and includes a 4-cell 63Whr battery.
The keyboard is pretty traditional, with decent spacing between the keys, and there’s a good-sized touchpad. My biggest concern – and one that may just be a random problem – is that the touchpad frequently doesn’t work properly. Other similar machines haven’t had this issue.
My machine has a 14-inch FHD 1920 by 1080 touch display rated at 250 nits of brightness in the more traditional 16:9 ratio. Again, while I prefer the newer 16:10 ratio with smaller bezels, this is still a very nice display. The touch screen worked well, and while it’s not a 2-in-1, it’s fine for basic usage, and I do think touch screens make some functions easier to use, particularly in the things like communications apps. (Note that the Dell website currently offers the touch screen only in the two-in-one configuration, though enterprises typically customize their configuration.)
The unit I tried had a 2.1-megapixel 1080p webcam with a proximity sensor. I was a bit disappointed in the camera—even though it’s higher resolution than the 720p cameras I see on a lot of machines, the video was a bit softer in focus and had more of a tendency to whiteout than I’d like. It’s adequate, but the cameras in the machines I’ve most recently tested from both Lenovo and HP are better than what I’ve seen from Dell.
It has a physical shutter above the camera. Using the included Dell Optimizer software, which is similar to the version on last year’s model, you can set the camera and IR system to automatically lock and turn off the display when you step away from the machine, and to wake up as you approach. This would work best with the facial recognition features of Windows Hello, though I wasn’t able to test that yet.
Dell Optimizer also includes a number of audio options, such as letting you select the room environment for doing conferencing in a quiet room, noisy office, one with multiple voices speaking, or in a recording studio; allowing 3D audio through your headphones (which I personally don’t care for); and an auto-mute feature that removed sounds that occur when you are not speaking. It doesn’t have the fancy audio of the 9420, but for most applications, the microphone and dual speakers worked just fine.
It also has options that let it adapt the battery usage to fit your behavior, or to maximize the performance if you need that for specific applications. One thing to note is that at full performance, the bottom of the laptop fan gets noticeably warm and the fan is a bit loud; still most people will choose to run it at balanced performance most of the time. In general, I found the battery life to be like the 9420, with more than 11 hours on PCMark 10’s modern office test when set for best battery performance. It should get you through a full day of general work with the screen at half brightness.
You can also optimize the network bandwidth to give preference to video conferencing.
As far as performance goes, the unit I had was based on an Intel Core i5-1145G7 processor (Tiger Lake), which has four cores and eight threads, with a rated speed of 2.6 GHz and a maximum turbo speed of 4.4 GHz, manufactured on Intel’s 10 nm SuperFin process. You can get it with the higher-end Core i7-1185, which has a base speed of 3.0 GHz and a turbo of 4.8 GHz, which is what the higher-spec laptops I’ve been testing this year have had. Both processors have integrated graphics and support vPro, Intel’s enterprise management feature. The unit I used had 16GB of memory and a 512GB solid-state drive, similar to the others.
In my benchmarks, the 1145 tended to run 10 to 20 percent slower than the 1185-based systems, which wasn’t a surprise. On tougher tests, transcoding a 4K video to FHD took 3 hours and 15 minutes on the 7420 compared with two hours and 32 minutes on the 9420. A big Excel data table took 46 minutes to run, compared with about 41 on the other systems; and a MatLab portfolio simulation took 52 minutes, compared with 47-49 minutes on the others. One important thing to note: even this slower Tiger Lake chip performed notably better than the high-end 14nm Comet Lake chips that were in this class of machine a year ago. When I tested last year’s Latitude 7410 with a four core/eight thread Core i7-10610, the Excel data table took 63 minutes and the MatLab simulation took 73 minutes; so the difference is significant. Typical users should be quite pleased with the performance.
As I write this, the lowest price I see for the 7420 on the Dell web site is $1,749 with the Core i5 processor, 8 GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD; while a 2-in-1 version with a Core i7, 16 GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD shows at $2,427. But as always, enterprise buyers tend to buy in bulk, and all the vendors negotiate prices and configurations.
Overall, the version of the Dell Latitude 7420 I tested was a fine corporate laptop, with all the features that typical enterprise users want. It’s a good size and weight for a 14-inch laptop, and the performance of this year’s model is a nice step up from the year before. It has a good selection of ports, but I do think the webcam has room for improvements. The X1 Carbon is lighter and has a better webcam, while the Latitude 9420 has better audio. While the 7420 may not quite match the top end of this year’s machines, my guess is a lot of corporate users would be quite happy with it.
Here’s PCMag’s full review.
