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The XPS 14 starts at $1,099 with a 1.7GHz Core i5-3317U processor, 4GB of memory, a 500GB 5400RPM hard drive and a 32GB solid state cache, as well as dual-band 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi... but only integrated Intel HD graphics. For $1,199, you can add a switchable 28nm Nvidia GeForce GT 630M GPU with 1GB of GDDR5 memory, or for $1,399, a 1.9GHz Core i7-3517U processor and 8GB of RAM. I tested the $1,499 configuration, which has all of the above, and despite one major glaring issue which Dell hopes to fix soon (more on that below), it was a fairly snappy experience.
Running my typical load of several push email with battery like Acer PA1650 Ac Adapter , Acer ADP-65DB Ac Adapter , Acer ACC10H Ac Adapter , Acer Aspire 5600 Ac Adapter , Acer Aspire 1680 Ac Adapter , Acer Aspire 1690 Ac Adapter , Acer Aspire 1410 Ac Adapter , Acer Extensa 3000 Ac Adapter , Acer TravelMate 4060 Ac Adapter , Acer TravelMate 6000 Ac Adapter , Acer TravelMate 520 Ac Adapter , Acer TravelMate 4000 Ac Adapter accounts, a series of auto-refreshing browser tabs and a couple of high-def 1080p videos simultaneously, I didn't feel any noticible drag on the system. A lack of bloatware might have helped that, too: while there's a copy of McAfee SecurityCenter that will ask you to renew your subscription, and the Bing Bar, too, it's a pretty clean Windows 7 install all told.
You'd never expect a 5400RPM hard drive to hold its own with the solid state drives in most ultrabooks, but it actually comes pretty close in some tasks. That 32GB cache made the system extremely responsive whether I was opening programs or flipping through images. Booting was slow: It took my review unit about 35 seconds to boot into Windows and 42 seconds to finish loading startup programs, but only about two seconds to wake from sleep. Oddly, it takes a moment longer to wake if you do so by opening the lid (the screen doesn't actually fire up by the time you've lifted it to eye level), but that's a minor nitpick at best.
What's not really a nitpick is the exceptionally problematic gaming performance on the XPS 14 I tested. Though the $100 28nm Nvidia GeForce GT 630M upgrade should provide enough muscle for low settings on the latest games and power through older titles (though not nearly as much as the GT 640M in the XPS 15), my results didn't bear that out. The system wheezed and chugged even on titles as old as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, to say nothing of our Just Cause 2, The Witcher 2 and Battlefield 3 real-world benchmarks. When I took a closer look, though, I realized there was some funny business going on: when the framerate was low, the CPU always seemed to be running at an abnormally low 800MHz, as if it were throttling itself, and yet when the CPU jumped back up to 2.7GHz or 3.0GHz on occasion, the framerate instantly jumped up as well.