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Sometimes when you're getting a laptop, the laptop that makes the most sense to get is a business class laptop. And we have a lot of folks in our community that order Dell laptops. I myself order a lot of Dell laptops. What are the two laptops that I would actually order and buy or have ordered and bought in the past? These two from Dell marketing, the Pro Precision. We have one AMD version and one Intel version. These are all Panther Lake because Intel has done a miracle with Panther Lake in terms of head and shoulders performance over the years. So I've got two reviews of Dell laptops. This one is about the Intel-based Panther Lake Precision Pro
laptop. And I can't wait to get into it, but there's also a second one. So if you're looking for an AMD-based laptop, AMD also has Pro Precision. This is These are aimed at uh professional students or students that are working in like the hard sciences, computer science. Uh I mean, maybe some of the artistic degrees where you're using computer software. You're leaning into technology. These are powerful machines. They're not designed for light-duty email-type workloads. They are designed to get work done. Aluminum construction, there's a lot of new stuff in the chassis beyond uh Intel Panther Lake and beyond what AMD is offering in
theirs. So for this review, I'm going to focus on the Intel Panther Lake, but also look for our review of the Pro Precision AMD version, the other one. One of the biggest improvements this generation is the power bricks are tiny. Although this is only a 100-W power brick. This is a Core Ultra 9 3888H with 64 gigs of memory installed and a 1 TB drive as configured when it was This is from a little earlier this year, but shipping dates and everything like that. As configured, this was like 2899 at the time that I looked at it, which was like Computex, it's more now. Sometimes you can find these through a supplier, like a
third-party Dell supplier or a volume supplier, and you can get a really good deal, way better deal than you can through dell.com. But, if you are doing corporate purchasing and you go through your corporate purchasing office, you generally can beat the price on dell.com. Just be aware. Be a smart shopper. Metal. Easy maintenance, Phillips head screws on the bottom. You know, corporate fleet customers, that sort of stuff. Also, continuous rubber feet are less likely to delaminate or come off as business users move them around. The foot in the back is a little taller so that you get a little bit more breathability along here, but this being a 100-W laptop, how much heat is it really going to generate? The 16-in
version of the laptop has a numeric keypad, which is going to be incredibly important to some of your users, and there is also a built-in fingerprint reader with the dedicated power button, which does require more force to push than the other keys on the keyboard. I don't really like the keyboards where the power key is built in, and it feels like a normal key on the keyboard. I don't think that's particularly good. Even with the giant number pad though, you still got the split up and down arrow key. I know a lot of you feel strongly about the half-and-half up and down arrow key, but you get used to it.
For the port configuration, we have a full-size Ethernet jack on the side. It's got a clever little mechanical mechanism for getting out of the way when you're not using it. A full-size type A USB port, and it is capable of 35-W charging other devices. We also have a physical lock port in the corner here. You got a head combination headphone microphone jack. On the other side, you got you two USB type C, another full-size type A, and a full-size HDMI port. This one also features a smart card reader on the side. Nice if you are using physical security like that, and these are also optionally available with built-in cellular. It's the business-class laptops. Dell has a lot of options around that kind of stuff because of the business fleet. And let
me tell you the built-in cellular is always worth it. The built-in SSD is a self-encrypting drive. It's from SK Hynix. It's the PCB01 1 TB. The built-in NIC is an Intel i219LM. So, it's a low-power wired Ethernet. The wireless is an Intel BE211. So, I can get a faster wireless connection than I can wired right now on this laptop, which seems like it's out of the time. Also, this display 120 Hz. 120 Hz is available as an option on this, and it really does feel like an incredible display. The 388H is uh is no slouch. Even though this is a 16-in laptop with a bright beautiful 16-in screen, the battery life here is
sort of nuts. You run it at the screen at about 40% brightness, you're going to get about 11 hours of power out of it. And that was using it for uh web browsing and light coding tasks where I wasn't really stressing the system continuously. Uh but even if I'm playing a game on this, the battery lasts almost 2 hours. So, Panther Lake is uh well, it's not just Panther Lake, it's also the screen and everything else has been optimized for power efficiency. Now, in terms of fit and finish, the touchpad is an exceedingly nice touchpad. It's a very nice touchpad for uh PCs. Like, how do you Okay, how do you qualify that? It's very sensitive.
Uh it's very large. It is uh on a hinge. So, when you press down, if you want the tactile feedback of pressing down on the touchpad to get a click, you're really going to want to click in the lower half of the touchpad because you're not going to get a click on the top because the top is mechanically fastened. It's sort of a, you know, that kind of thing. Some people really want the touchpad to be clickable everywhere. Um I would suggest you learn the taps because you can just tap the touchpad cuz it takes a fair amount of force to push down on the touchpad. The keyboard also on this
model is delightful, as you would expect. I mean, the precision the pro line from Dell generally they are made for touch typists, people that are over 100 WPM. It's not always a guarantee on laptops, this especially not always a guarantee on less expensive laptops. This is a premium laptop. It has a premium price tag. The build quality is premium here and so expect nothing less from your touchpad and your keyboard experience. The fingerprint reader I found to be a little bit fiddly for fingerprint recognition. This may have just been my own enrollment. It's not the worst, but it's definitely not the best in terms of fingerprint enrollment and fingerprint
recognition. That's probably going to get fixed with a software update or something like that. And curiously Now before we get to the Linux section I will say as a little aside the fingerprint reader on Linux works better on Windows. Maybe it's just cuz there's a hardware component there. I had to wipe and reload it, so I re-enrolled my fingers. Maybe something went wrong on the Windows side. Uh but the Linux fingerprint experience Ubuntu latest kernel not bad. Better than Windows.
This is what you get from the built-in webcam. It does have an indicator and it also has a mechanical shutter that will disable the camera, but as you can hear the audio still there. It's a pretty nice stereo microphone, so you're going to sound pretty good on conference calls and the camera looks pretty good quality too in my opinion. OBS is giving me a 2560 by 1440 capture option, but I think it looks much worse than the 1080p capture option. So this is what it looks like in 1080p capturing in OBS capturing at 2560 by 1440. Or no, yeah. Uh 2560 by 1600.
I don't know. It's It's pretty good. It's time for a teardown. And this is another time where I say, you know, it's like when you vote with your wallet to change does happen. It might take a few generations, but it does happen. The screws on the bottom they're captured. So maintenance is easier on these. It's fantastic. Does help if you have a spudger tool. Maintenance and maintainability. 70 watt hour modular battery, easy replacement, no glue. You get your LPDDR5 CAMM2 module, so it is modular replaceable memory. You get your 2280 M.2 with cooling, or at least with a small
heatsink. And then you've got your E-key M.2 for Wi-Fi. So, if you wanted to swap out the Wi-Fi module, you could at some point in the future. Wi-Fi 27 is invented and we're all still using this in 18 years because it's post-apocalyptic, no problem. Giant cooling fan, heat pipe. This is how it gets it done. It's a huge fan. It's a larger fan, really, than Intel had when the uh power delivery of their CPUs was considerably higher, which is why this runs at a lower temperature in your lap cuz it can dissipate heat better. And it draws air in from the bottom. Notice that the area that the vent actually uses is really just over the fan, and they've covered the vent on the other side. This is modular design for, you know, other
layouts and other configurations. Looks like they had a little bit of a manufacturing snafu with the thermal paste. The thermal paste is non-conductive and this is not a problem. Also, when we did our thermal testing, our thermal torture testing for this device, the uh surface temperature of the laptop barely exceeded 100° Fahrenheit. And so, uh this does not have any cooling issues at all. Even running full tilt AIDA64 torture test for over an hour, no throttling. Other things to look for in terms of repairability is how modular are the ports. Can the PCB be replaced? So, your motherboard over here with the ports on this side, it does look like they are on a separate module. Some of them, not all of them.
You can also see the hinge machinery here. You've got plenty of metal for your hinge and because the bottom is metal and the rest of the chassis is metal. This is built for durability. This module over here is the more replaceable one for parts. So the side that has your RJ45 connection and your USB type A. Your USB type C ports over here are built into the motherboard, I think and so you'd have a little bit of a hard time if somebody broke one of your USB C ports. That's probably going to be a motherboard repair whereas if your RJ45 connection is broken or your USB type A on this port, this part's going to be a lot cheaper. Some motherboard and laptop designs go full modular where the thing like the motherboard doesn't have any
ports on it to break. So if you break a port, you're just replacing a little add-in daughter card or something like that. This is partially that design. Also like there are helpful notes on the silk screen like here are the assembly and disassembly steps. It's nice for your service techs. Other than that, I really can't find any fault with this design at all. This is a well-designed, well-laid-out chassis designed for ample cooling and a long lifetime, obviously. All right, let's talk about the benchmarks. And that Core Ultra 9 1388H, that is a four performance core, eight efficiency core and four low-power efficiency core
configuration. 16 cores, 16 threads and four of them are insanely high performance. This is a CPU that is its TDP design is 25 watts. So it's not surprising that the power brick is only 100 watts. It can turbo to a fair bit more than that and you know, with the power brick plugged in, we can see that it nears the 100 watt power draw at the wall when it's running full tilt, basically. Our LPDDR5 configuration is a base frequency of 1.2 GHz but the overall latency and performance in Aida64 is pretty awesome which we'll take a look at in the benchmarks. And of course being a 388H paired with LPDDR5, you get better GPU performance.
Not just for the that I mentioned but also gaming and everything else. This is a B390 GPU. As a quick performance preview, our built-in CPU-Z benchmarks, it's like 800 plus for the single core score and almost 10,000 for the multi-core score. Gameplay is not unreasonable. The performance is pretty good across modern AAA titles and older AAA titles as well. Again, LPDDR5, the 388H Panther Lake, Intel's done some good engineering there on that platform. Even in this configuration, running the game, it's only using 57 watts. And we haven't pulled out all the stops. Intel with their performance optimization stuff, if you look at LEGO Batman, you know, shader downloads, multi-frame generation, well, frame generation, and
then upscaling, and those kinds of technologies can get you over 60 FPS. Now, those technologies are not going to bring you to like 100 FPS because you're still fundamentally dealing with LPDDR and not memory that's fast enough for graphics, like graphics memory. But, that's pretty respectable for a laptop. And that is absurdly respectable for a laptop that is currently idling at 72 watts. Okay, it's an all-business laptop that you can also game on. How fun is that? All right, let's run through the benchmarks, take a look at the numbers.
First, memory benchmark. This is, again, 107 GB per second, almost 108 GB per second with a latency of 101.9 nanoseconds. Somebody has done the work to tune this platform. We've seen latencies on LPDDR platforms as bad as 200 nanoseconds. 101.9 nanoseconds, as reported by AIDA64, which has its own set of flaws. This is really good. 572 GB per second for our L1 cache. Overall, this platform, again, this is sort of the shape of Panther Lake when we're talking about LPDDR. It looks pretty good. Cinebench, 2168 for our single core, 18780 for our multi-core. Geekbench 6, 2803 and 16561. These are very strong scores for a mobile platform. Again, under 100 watts.
Intel's not doing the stuff that they used to do in the past where when it's plugged in, it's just suddenly 250 watts. Those days are gone. Nobody wants to buy a laptop like that. Nobody wants to buy a laptop that's going to get super hot in your lap. And the cooling solution on this is very effective and you can get reasonable performance out of it down, you know, 25 watts and under because of the platform. It's really not overselling it to tell you that this is probably the best mobile CPU that Intel has ever done. Probably ever, but certainly the last 5-6 years. And just cuz I'm curious, some quick gaming benchmarks. Borderlands 4 very high 1080p 42 FPS with 32 FPS for our 1% lows. Use frame generation and some
upscaling technologies and you can get over 60 FPS. Not a lot over 60 FPS, but over 60 FPS. Ultra 1080p 46 FPS in Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty 31 FPS for the 1% lows. This one again, you probably want to use some frame gen technology. Maybe you want to turn it down from ultra to a more medium setting. You can get something more towards 60 FPS. Deus Ex Mankind Divided 55 FPS and 39 and that is at ultra. Pretty awesome. Uh you know, I was curious in this older title stepping it up to 1440p 38 FPS. Yeah, 1440p. Uh you know, I don't know. And keep in mind this screen is 2560 by 1600. You've got a little extra vertical space. It's really nice. Final Fantasy Dawntrail
maximum 1080p 65 FPS, but 26 FPS for our 1% lows. You will have to adjust your graphic settings. And of course Shadow of the Tomb Raider 78 FPS and 54 for our 1% lows. It's basically fine at the highest 1080p setting and it's built-in laptop graphics. You can see there's not a lot of performance difference between 1080p and 1440p. It's just it's the round trip time for completing a frame. The graphics quality, you know, if you turn it to very low, it's not going to be double the speed because it's the round trip latency from the system memory to the CPU that's really the bottleneck. It's just the latency more than the bandwidth.
I mean, okay, bandwidth has to do with it, too, but the latency is what hurts you for the FPS. So, reducing the amount of bandwidth that's required to as little as possible by lowering graphic settings doesn't help you a lot in these scenarios. That's all I'm trying to say. Now, because this has 64 gigs of memory, you've got some options for running local AI the H processor LPDDR much higher than normal memory bandwidth. So, these are things we need to take a look at in this setup. So, for the AI side of things, you got a ton of options. The NPU is its own separate thing, and the NPU in this system is pretty strong as NPUs go. The deal with the NPU though is that Copilot sort of
it's reserved, you know, like that 40 tops of the capacity that you have there to be able to run local Copilot models. And so, what we're doing actually here with LM Studio is just running it directly on the Arc Pro B390. And the reason that it performs as well as it does is the LPDDR5. If you aren't going to play games or run AI stuff, you really don't need the LPDDR5, and it can be a significant cost savings to get the other versions of this laptop from Dell that don't use the LPDDR5. That's the non-H version of the CPU, but in this case having this kind of functionality available locally is pretty strong. You can see that we're using 62 of our 63.5 GB of memory, but you can also see how quickly is like I told it to write an
efficient program for searching for perfect numbers in Python. It thought for 2 minutes and 17 seconds, but the output speed is pretty impressive. 31.49 tokens per second average on this particular 4-bit quant of Qwen 3.6 35B A3B 3 billion parameters active at given time. If you need a little bit more intelligence, there's Qwen 3.8 27B. This is what's called a dense model. And so, the dense model, uh you know, it's not 3 billion active parameters all at once. It's 27 billion parameters active all at once. It's going to be a little slower, but it will still run locally. And having that much intelligence available locally for a less than 100 W power envelope is hugely impressive. We're currently consuming about 40 W, give or take. Now, the 27B model, that's
on the order of like 10 tokens per second. So, you can see how having the 3 billion parameter active at any given time model is a little bit more efficient. Qwen 3.6 is a little older than Qwen 3.8. And there's other models you can run locally here as well. But, this is a lot of intelligence to surface on a laptop like this that's just on your desk that you can just carry around with you. Now, power utilization when we're doing inferencing on a dense model like this peaks around 85 W, give or take. On the A3B model, it's floating between 40 and 85 W. So, it's much less stress on the system. This is really using all of the available memory bandwidth. And you can see that the GPU utilization
is 92% running this model. This one shipped with Windows. Don't worry, I took Linux for a spin as well. And uh the system loadout does not disappoint. What's the Linux experience? It's breathtakingly bananas. It's It's Panther Lake. It's mostly Panther Lake. The only gotcha is you really need to be running a newer Linux kernel, like kernel 7.2 or newer, because otherwise you're going to have sound problems. The sound control does actually work from the keyboards the keyboard sound control, so like the keys are recognized, but the actual audio device, you'll need to jump through a couple hoops um to get that working. But, uh, know, there's there's a come to the Level One Techs forum. We
can we can try it through all of that. In normal usage, like word processor usage, with the screen at 25% brightness, it's about 9 and 1/2 hours, give or take. If you use power top, and you really manage your power carefully, and you keep it in, uh, you know, lower power performance mode, basically it's not using the P cores at all, you could stretch toward 11 hours-ish of power. But, like real world, it's more than a work day, no matter what you do, pretty much. And that's the 64 gigs of LPDDR5. If you get less memory, that's going to be a little bit less power with a little bit more run time.
It really is impressive what you're able to get out of the, I think, 70 watt-hour battery in this thing. Otherwise, Linux support for the peripherals is pretty good, as you would expect. The wireless and wired network card, Bluetooth, uh, Bluetooth. The Bluetooth earbuds also worked fine under Linux, because, you know, uh, they're they're detected as uh, Dell earbuds. Uh, one little quirk is that it shows up as two devices. There's like a management device, as well as an audio device. And, when you enroll, you do the Bluetooth pairing, you get both, and both of them will show up as audio devices, but you want the one that looks like headphones for the good quality audio. Oh, you can also extend the battery life a little bit more by not
running the display at 120 hertz, but you even enjoy the 120 hertz. It's worth 30 minutes or so it takes off the life of your battery over the course of an entire day. Bottom line, power management in Linux, not quite as good as Windows, unless you do the thing where you basically don't ever use your P cores, and then Linux will be Windows. But, I think overall, the driver optimization is a little bit more. Like, Dell's put a lot of work into what they're offering on Windows, with their update utility and all of that stuff, versus what's in the kernel and what you get um, from Linux out of the box. If you're using this for dev and AI stuff, the 388H,
the AI stuff runs faster in Linux as well. It just depends on what you're doing. If you're going to pick this up as a developer, like a high-end developer laptop where you're crunching a lot of repositories, you use like a compressed XFS file system on this, and you have a local AI model that's around about, you know, 25 to 35 billion parameters, you'll have a very good experience with this laptop in all of those sort of use cases. Just for fun. The BIOS does have options like resize bar, so if you're going to run an external GPU with something like this, you have some control over that. The hardware did also honor PCIE equal real alloc if you have to, you know, do Sometimes you're doing off-label stuff,
I know, it's what we do. You know, in Linux PCIE real alloc ordering, messing with the bar space manually for Linux at boot time. All of that works as long as you've enabled those options in the BIOS. You've got to toggle on advanced mode in the BIOS, but other than that, you're good to go. There's not really any other Linux testing notes that I have with this. It basically works as advertised, except for having to jump through a couple hoops with your audio. This 1080p is what you get from the webcam. It is very good quality. Dell does not mess around with webcam quality, or at least this. There's a little bit of hazing because there's a really bright light over my head. Don't
read too much into that, but this is a webcam now It lets me pick 4K. Like I can run 4K capture. This is a 1080p capture. Cuz the 4K, well, it's not really 4K. Like that's kind of an upscaling thing, but you get a little bit of, you know, background blur. Not really. Yeah, I don't know. This is a pretty good webcam quality and it works out of the box as long as you've got a reasonably recent Linux kernel. This one shipped with Windows. Don't worry, I took Linux for a spin as well. And the system loadout does not disappoint. What's the Linux experience?
It's breathtakingly bananas. It's It's Panther Lake. It's mostly Panther Lake. The only gotcha. Now, if you're interested in picking up one of these, I have good news for you. You're going to experience another mini game. Look through your university or business purchasing department. And then maybe also check like Newegg, CDW, some other outlets before going direct through Dell. And then if you need to go direct through Dell, a corporate or purchasing account cuz the price you'd be surprised how much the price can fluctuate. And the price on the website is definitely never the best price for corporate purchasing and that kind of thing. There are some exceptions for that where sometimes there's like a
coupon like something that has been advertised somewhere and then that deal is usually pretty good. You got to watch for those. But there are deal websites and there are places where Dell will partner with and give you a special discount link or discount coupon or a code like that. But contact your purchasing department or the places like your Dell reseller because chances are your Dell reseller is going to get a better deal than what you see at the Dell website. So it's like a little bit of a mini game, but this is where we are in 2026. And the lead time that I'm experiencing buying these, months. But if you are not going to do the gaming or AI thing, definitely don't splurge for
the LPDDR. Just regular DDR5 will be fine. Panther Lake configurations are available in both. And also check out the other review, the AMD configuration of the Pro Precision. Depending on what you buy and your options and things like that, it can be a better deal, more bang for your buck. It just depends on what you're looking for. The gaming results and the AI results from this are going to be stronger because of the architecture of the system. If you switch to an you know not an LPDDR5 system that might not necessarily be true, but you know, I don't know. Engagement challenge, you have questions, you want to hang out, you're a developer using this, or you just want to share your experiences with this,
come to the Level One Tech forum. The community aspect is what this is all about. And also let us in on the good deals. If you find a link for a good deal. I'm Wendell this is Level One, I'm signing out, and you can find me in the Level One forums. Working on more Dell laptops.
