Dell Latitude 6430u

Road warriors who prefer travelling with a light footprint will find plenty to dig about the Dell Latitude 6430u, a Windows 8-equipped business ultrabook that deftly blends style and performance. Starting at $899 (our unit as configured had a sticker price of $1,327.79 list), the Latitude 6430u's fantastic keyboard, external optical drive, and exceptional battery life make it an ultrabook worthy of serious consideration.

Design and Features
Measuring 0.82 by 13.31 by 9.04 inches (HWD), the Latitude 6430u's svelte frame weighs 3.91 pounds, landing between the former business ultrabook Editor's Choice Lenovo ThinkPad Carbon X1 (2.93 pounds) and the Asus S46CA-XH51 (4.35 pounds). While its all-black chassis suggests a strictly business affair, it's also decked out in a soft-touch paint whose smooth texture makes for a pleasant tactile sensation while setting the system apart from other business systems. The black finish is complemented by a silver-finished magnesium alloy wrapping around the system's corners, which makes for an overall elegant look.

The Latitude 6430u's 14-inch display has a maximum resolution of 1,366 by 768. While it's not quite as high as the Lenovo X1 Carbon's 1,600-by-900 resolution, it's nevertheless easy on the eyes, and the matte screen does a good job of delivering bright colors and crisp text. It's also good enough for 720p video, and since the Latitude 6430u comes bundled with a bus-powered external DVD burner that connects via eSATA cable, users can enjoy movies when they're not crunching numbers. The Latitude 6430u's built-in speakers are surprisingly loud, and despite its somewhat flat bass response, movies and music alike can easily be heard in small- to medium-size rooms. Sure, you won't be getting any noise complaints from your downstairs neighbors, but as far as ultrabooks go, the Latitude 6430u belts out decibels at admirable volume levels.

Typing on the Latitude 6430u's chiclet-style keyboard is a lovely experience, and despite the system's thin profile there's no noticeable flexing. With its spill-proof design, backlighting, and exemplary key travel, it has everything that one could want in a keyboard. As a rule of thumb, when accident-prone, coffee-drinking users who have difficulty seeing in the dark can type on an ultrabook with ease, it's generally understood that we're working with an excellent keyboard. Ditto for the trackpad, whose smooth quality and responsiveness is complemented by its full support of Windows 8 gesture controls. Two sets of right- and left-click buttons are located at the top and bottom edges of the trackpad, with the top pair designed to be used in conjunction with the black pointing stick lodged in the center of the keyboard. The pointing stick is useful for business users that prefer the traditional pointing stick and have tried and failed to retrain themselves to use a trackpad.

Port selection on the Latitude 6430u is average. The right side of the system houses a USB 3.0 port and an Ethernet port. The right side, meanwhile, sports a VGA port, another USB 3.0 port, and a combined mic/headphone jack. The rear of the system features a full-size HDMI port and a combined eSATA / USB 3.0 port on opposite ends of the system's cooling vents, the latter of which can be used with the bundled external optical drive.

The Latitude 6430u's 128GB solid-state-drive (SSD) comes with minimal bloatware, which is helpful since there's only 74GB of free space when you take it out of the box. Aside from Microsoft Office Starter 2010 and CyberLink's Media Suite burning software, not much else bogs down the system when you boot it up for the first time. It does, however, feature Intel vPro Technology, an IT-friendly set of security and manageability capabilities. The Latitude 6430u also comes with a business-class three-year warranty for basic hardware service.

Performance
The Latitude 6430u's combined 1.8GHz Intel Core i5-3427U CPU and 8GB RAM yielded solid performance on our benchmark tests. Its PCMark 7 score of 5,006 points outperformed other business-class systems, save for the Lenovo X1 Carbon (5,149 points), leaving others like the HP HP Elitebook Folio 9470m (4,699 points) in the dust. It also churned out a competitive Cinebench R11.5 score of 2.58 points, surpassing that of the Lenovo X1 Carbon (2.25 points) and nipping on the heels of the HP Folio 9470m (2.62 points) and the Lenovo ThinkPad X230t (3.09 points).

Though it's geared toward business, the Latitude 6430u also has the chops for moderate media creation. It completed our Handbrake video-encoding test in a brisk 1 minute 22 seconds, or half the time of the HP Folio 9470m (2:44). Similarly, its performance in our Photoshop CS6 test (5:08) outflanked the HP Folio 9470m (5:51) by a sizable margin. The Latitude 6430u's integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000 GPU churned out strong scores in our 3DMark 11 tests (1,254 points in Entry-level settings; 228 points in Extreme settings), once again outgunning the HP Folio 9470m (1,083 points and 211 points, respectively). Unsurprisingly, the Latitude 6430u fell in line with the rest of its class by failing to break the 30 frames-per-second (fps) playability barrier in our high-end gaming tests.

Unlike most ultrabooks, the Latitude 6430u's 60WHr battery can be popped out of the chassis. Even better, it lasted an impressive 7 hours 40 minutes on our battery rundown test, clocking in at over two hours longer than the HP Folio 9470m (5:36). If you're on the market for a system that can last an entire workday on a single charge, the Latitude 6430u is the way to go. Even better, it gives you the option of using a spare battery if you need to surpass the eight hour-mark without hovering by a power outlet.

The Dell Latitude 6430u is a great choice for those who want productivity for work without having to settle for a drab business-as-usual ultrabook. It comes with an external optical drive, sports an excellent keyboard, and boasts terrific battery life. While the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon is still a superb business ultrabook that weighs a pound less, the Latitude 6430u's extra features justify its additional bulk, and it consequently snatches the crown by virtue of its larger port selection, removable battery, and inclusion of an HDMI output, It's a very close call, but at the end of the day the Latitude 6430u rightfully earns our Editors' Choice for business ultrabooks.

BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS:

COMPARISON TABLE
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