The Latitude series of notebooks from Dell has been very popular among professionals. And the company has strengthened the series by adding an ultrabook to it. The Dell Latitude 6430u has one thing on its mind – business performance.
The black, well-designed ultrabook is very slim, although at 1.64 kg, it is not the lightest ultrabook on the block. Users get a large 14-inch(non-touch) display of 1366 x 768 resolution, and a fairly large keyboard in which the keys have a slight indent adding to comfort. The trackpad is big too and does not come in the way when one is typing. While many others are offering one in their slim collections, there is no optical drive in this ultrabook, although this one has two full-time USB ports with a third one that doubles up as an eSATA port. Users get the latest 64 bit Windows 8 Enterprise Edition operating system which runs just fine on it, thanks to a fast Intel Core i5 1.8 GHz processor with 4GB RAM, and graphics powered by an Intel HD 4000 graphics processor.
As far as the storage is concerned the laptop has a 128GB SSD drive, which does not seem enough for enterprise use, but does manage to speed things up. We ran 3D mark 11 on it and it managed to score a decent 1, 150 marks at the entry level. On PC Mark 7 it scored 4, 356 marks. This indicates it really not built for graphical performance but for enterprise use. To sum it up, this laptop is great for business performance. However, we would have really loved it if it had touch screen and an optical drive – this is a Windows 8 device, after all. Even though I love the performance of it.