Quick look at Dell Vostro 14 5459 – portable and rigid budget business solution

LaptopMedia.com Highlights Quick look at Dell Vostro 14 5459 - portable and rigid budget business solution

From: Rossen Pandev 18 August 2016 / 08:58 | 0

The 14-inch form factor isn’t the most sought after but it makes a compelling case against the 15-inch and 13-inch devices – it’s considerably more portable than the conventional 15.6-inch laptops making it closer to the 13.3-inch notebooks while offering a slightly bigger screen. It’s the perfect sweet spot. However, there aren’t many of those in the budget segment of the market or at least not as notorious as HP’s ProBook 440 G3, for example. So here are the Vostro 14 5000 series offering an alternative to the ProBook lineup.

You can find some of the available configurations here: http://amzn.to/2bkxq6N

Design

The Vostro 5459 is mostly design-centric with great choice of materials for better rigidity and portability. It’s relatively light – 1.7 kg and quite thin – 18 mm while offering the usual set of connectivity options and refreshing color palettes, although they are only two. We got the gold version, which in our opinion looks much better and stands out from the rest.

Aluminum is used for the most part – the lid and interior. They feature brushed aluminum plates that feel pretty solid and nice while the bottom piece is still made of plastic. Nonetheless, this has not affected the device’s stability at all.

As far as the input devices are concerned, they are mostly comfortable and accurate. This is of a great importance for a business machine and the Vostro 5459 partially delivers. The touchpad is light, doesn’t wobble and it’s extra accurate but the keyboard tends to be on the “mushy” side. Probably because of the plastic keyboard tray, the keys near the edges feel a bit strange and lack the long travel. HP’s ProBook 440 G3 actually excelled in both areas.

Hardware

The hardware options are typical for this kind of device, although the added discrete GeForce 930M GPU may help with some more graphically intensive tasks and for general multimedia purposes. And as for the CPUs, you’ve got a choice between Core i3-6100U, Core i5-6200U and Core i7-6500U, all of which can be selected without the discrete GPU if you don’t need it. The paired RAM with the CPU is either 4GB of 8GB of DDR3L-1600.

The display variants are scarce – only HD (1366×768) TN with touch-enabled panels, which is optional. Still, if you don’t need the touchscreen we suggest keeping the price low and invest in an SSD instead of the touch HD screen. Speaking of storage options, Dell has listed only 500GB and 1TB HDDs, so no SSD configurations as well. And finally, the battery is 44Wh and should be enough to power up the energy-efficient CPU and the not so demanding 14-inch HD display. We will check the runtimes in our full review, though.

Specs sheet

The specs provided below may differ depending on your region.

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Processor	Intel Core i3-6100U (2-core, 2.30 GHz, 3MB cache) / Intel Core i5-6200U (2-core, 2.30 – 2.80 GHz, 3MB cache) / Intel Core i7-6500U (2-core, 2.50 – 3.50 GHz, 4MB cache)
RAM	up to 8GB (1x 8096MB) – DDR3L, 1600 MHz
Graphics card	Intel HD Graphics 520 / NVIDIA GeForce 930M (2GB DDR3)
HDD/SSD	500GB HDD / 1TB HDD
Display	14.0-inch HD (1366×768) TN, matte
Optical drive	–
Connectivity	LAN 10/100/1000 Mbps, Wi-Fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.0
Other features	2x USB 3.0 1x USB 2.0 HD webcam microphone 3.5 mm audio jack RJ-45 HDMI SD card reader fingerprint reader Kensington lock
Battery	3-cell, 44Wh
Thickness	18.5 mm (0.73″)
Weight	1.7 kg (3.75 lbs)