Dell Inspiron 14z Ultrabook Review

Battery Life

Let's face it, if you're shopping an Ultrabook, you're less concerned with gaming performance and more interested in what kind of battery life you can squeeze out of these featherweight systems. This is perhaps the most important metric, at least for some, and what we have below is one example of a worst case scenario.

Battery Life Test
Heavy and Light Workloads



With the brightness set at 50 percent, we fired up BatteryEater Pro and let the brutal benchmark do its thing. When it was finished, the Inspiron 14z slid into the upper echelon of average performers, offering comparable battery life to Dell's own XPS 13 and Lenovo's U300s, but well below the two top performers, the Zenbook by Asus and Toshiba's Z835.

Real-world battery life will depend on how you utilize the 14z. For basic tasks like Web surfing and word processing, you should be able to squeeze five our six hours of uptime before hunting down a wall socket. If you're going play a lot of games and tax the discrete GPU, however, you can expect far less.
 

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