Dell Precision 5470 Review | PCMag

When you need more power than an ordinary business laptop has to offer, a mobile workstation is the answer, pairing a potent processor and ample RAM with a professional GPU with independent software vendor (ISV) certification for specialized apps like computer-aided design (CAD), engineering, or CGI rendering and content creation. The Dell Precision 5470 (starts at $1,929; $3,378 as tested) packs workstation power into a 14-inch design that's far more portable than most rivals. It doesn't have all the muscle of the most elite systems, but it's the smartest 14-inch machine we've seen, giving you a workstation that's almost an ultraportable.

The Littlest Heavyweight

Technically, the $1,929 base model doesn't meet our definition of a workstation, as it uses its Intel Core i5-12500H CPU's integrated graphics instead of a discrete GPU. The most affordable Precision 5470 that qualifies is $2,272 with a Core i7-12700H, a 4GB Nvidia RTX A1000 graphics accelerator, 16GB of memory, and a 256GB solid-state drive plus a 1,920-by-1,200-pixel non-touch display.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Our $3,378 test unit raises the stakes with a Core i9-12900H processor (six Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 20 threads), 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD as well as the RTX A1000 and a sharper 2,560-by-1,600-pixel touch screen. Memory can be expanded to 32GB (Dell says 64GB configurations are coming soon) and storage to 4TB, though the latter upgrade costs a painful $1,724.

The 5470 is not only one of the smallest workstations you'll find, but it's surprisingly thin and light considering the amount of power it offers. The aluminum chassis measures 0.74 by 12.2 by 8.3 inches and weighs 3.26 pounds, a quarter-pound over our cutoff for an ultraportable but as close as we've seen a workstation get. It has a few 14-inch competitors—HP's ZBook Firefly G9 starts at 3.17 pounds—but compared to most mobile workstations, 15-inch desktop replacements that weigh four pounds or more, the Precision is a go-to model for anyone needing professional apps on the go.

A Dell Family Resemblance

The Precision 5470 shares the DNA of Dell's XPS premium consumer line, from the laptop's overall profile to the semi-transparent, fiber-reinforced keyboard deck. The glowing power button incorporates a fingerprint reader for secure logins, and speaker grilles flank the full-size keyboard. The top-firing speakers are matched to a pair of downward-firing subwoofers on the Dell's bottom that give the sound a little more heft.

The display also takes advantage of Dell's InfinityEdge micro-bezel design to fit a 14-inch panel into a compact chassis. The screen's 16:10 aspect ratio gives a bit more vertical space than the standard 16:9 widescreen profile, and the skinny top bezel still makes room for a 1080p webcam with IR face recognition capability for Windows Hello sign-ons.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

The lid of our review unit was brushed metal with a gray finish, but Dell also offers the Precision 5470 with a special blue finish to commemorate the company's 25th anniversary. The system has passed MIL-STD 810H torture tests for travel hazards such as shock, vibration, and temperature extremes, so it's tougher than the average laptop (though naturally no match for a truly rugged model).

Set in the carbon fiber deck is the keyboard, which has a fairly standard layout with tiled keys. It offers a good typing feel, with decent key travel and resistance, as well as a backlight for boosting legibility in dim rooms. The only quibble you could make about the keyboard would be the compact cursor-arrow cluster, which uses half-sized up and down arrows to squeeze four keys into the space of three, but I didn't find it particularly hard to adapt to in actual use.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

The touchpad is similarly capable, with a generously wide design and smooth, comfortable surface for both pointing and gesture controls alike. The clickable pad proved accurate and error-free in all of my testing, though some users may prefer a design with discrete buttons instead of using the lower corners, or rely on CAD software that uses a middle mouse button.

The Precision offers a decent port selection, provided you pack an adapter or dongle. On the laptop's left side are two USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 ports, an audio jack, and a SmartCard reader. On the right, you'll find two more Thunderbolt 4 ports for a total of four (all with power delivery and DisplayPort functionality), a microSD card slot, and a security lock slot. Dell provides a USB-C to USB-A 3.2 and HDMI adapter, but for other ports, you'll need a desktop docking station.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

The workstation's wireless connectivity has no such limitations, with Wi-Fi 6E providing the fastest, most reliable Ethernet alternative yet and Bluetooth 5.2 offering seamless pairing with peripherals such as headphones and speakers.

Testing the Precision 5470: Portable Workstation Power

While we've reviewed several mobile workstations in the past year, the 5470 is the only 14-inch example, so it enters our benchmark comparisons at a disadvantage against larger, more powerful models like the 15.6-inch Dell Precision 5560, HP ZBook Studio G8, and HP ZBook Fury 15 G8 and the 16-inch Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 4—all Editors' Choice award winners. The compact Dell's Core i9 CPU should be able to hold its own, but its RTX A1000 is several steps below Nvidia's top of the line.

Productivity Tests

Our primary performance benchmark is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure a system's suitability for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's boot drive.

We then stress the CPU with a trio of processor-intensive, multithreaded tests. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses the Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene over and over in a 10-minute test run. Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates real-world apps like PDF rendering, speech recognition, and machine learning. We also use HandBrake 1.4 to transcode a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution, comparing how quickly systems handle this demanding media task.

Our final productivity test is workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

Its 12th Generation Intel Core i9 CPU led the way in multi-core benchmarks such as Cinebench and Geekbench, but the Precision 5470 trailed slightly in other tests such as PCMark 10 (though all five systems obliterated the 4,000-point score that indicates excellent productivity for everyday office apps). Impressively, it took the silver medal in our HandBrake video editing event, just behind HP's flagship ZBook Fury.

Graphics Tests 

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). 

We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

As we said, the 5470's Nvidia RTX A1000 isn't the fastest professional GPU—it offers graphics processing power roughly on par with Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3050—so while it's ISV-certified for professional apps, it doesn't challenge the other mobile workstations' more potent graphics silicon.

Workstation-Specific Tests 

We also ran the Precision 5470 through our workstation-only benchmarks. The first is Blender, an open-source 3D suite for modeling, animation, simulation, and compositing. We record the time it takes for its built-in Cycles path tracer to render two photo-realistic scenes of BMW cars, one using the system's CPU and one the GPU (lower times are better). BMW artist Mike Pan has said he considers the scenes too fast for rigorous testing, but they're a popular benchmark. 

Perhaps our most important workstation test, SPECviewperf 2020, renders, rotates, and zooms in and out of solid and wireframe models using viewsets from popular ISV apps. We run the 1080p resolution tests based on PTC's Creo CAD platform; Autodesk's Maya modeling and simulation software for film, TV, and games; and Dassault Systemes' SolidWorks 3D rendering package. The more frames per second, the better.

Its relatively modest GPU hurt the Precision 5470 here. The compact Dell placed last in both our Blender and SPECviewperf trials, showing that it'll get the job done but requires extra patience in exchange for its greater portability. Like all mobile workstations, it's overkill for the likes of Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, but it's not your best choice for crunching massive datasets or performing Hollywood-level CGI rendering. It's more suited to 2D than 3D design work.

Battery and Display Tests 

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite colorimeter to measure the screen's coverage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 palettes or color gamuts and its brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

The Precision 5470 excels in battery life, lasting nearly 15 hours in our video rundown. The 14-inch system actually has less room for a bulky battery, but its 72WHr power pack showed twice the stamina of the 80WHr and 94WHr batteries in the ThinkPad P1 and ZBook Fury 15 respectively. Blame those systems' more power-hungry components.

The Dell's display looks good, with ample brightness and vivid colors, though its 86% coverage of the DCI-P3 gamut isn't quite as rich as that of higher-end mobile workstations. It's no match for, say, HP's top-of-the-line DreamColor panels, but definitely as impressive as any 14-inch screen you'll see.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Verdict: When Mobility Matters

The Dell Precision 5470 is a mobile workstation that's far more portable than most alternatives. Between its slim 14-inch design and top-quality MIL-STD 810H build, it's one of the best options around for taking professional-grade performance on the road or to the job site. There are tradeoffs for its portability, and users of the most demanding, graphics-intensive applications will need to carry something heavier. But the Dell's exceptional battery life underscores its desirability as the most portable workstation we've seen.