Few deskbound PCs, and certainly few business desktops as opposed to serious gaming rigs, can keep up with the Dell Latitude 5591 (starts at $1,069; $2,412 as tested) and its six-core, 12-thread Intel Core i7 processor.
The 15.6-inch Latitude isn't a graphics or gaming ace, with its modest Nvidia GeForce MX130 graphics, but its "Coffee Lake" CPU powers it to near-workstation levels of productivity performance—too much performance for mere spreadsheets or emails.
It's a little too specialized to unseat our Editors' Choices, the Microsoft Surface Book 2 among desktop-replacements and the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon among business laptops, but it's well worth a look from users who need extraordinary number-crunching power.
Honest, Objective Reviews
Daxdi.com is a leading authority on technology, delivering Labs-based, independent reviews of the latest products and services.
Our expert industry analysis and practical solutions help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology.
Fine Fit and Finish
The big-screen sibling of the Latitude 5491($1,069.00 at Dell Technologies), the 5591 starts at $1,069 with an eighth-generation Core i5 chip, a skimpy 4GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive, and a pitiful screen—1,366 by 768 pixels, too low resolution for 11.6 inches, let alone 15.6 inches nowadays.
The $2,412 configuration seen here is amply endowed with the 2.6GHz Core i7-8850H with Intel's vPro management technologies, 16GB of fast DDR4, a 512GB Toshiba NVMe solid-state drive, and a 1,920-by-1,080 IPS touch display.
Bland basic black is the hallmark of Dell's design, broken only by the company logo centered in the carbon fiber-reinforced polymer lid.
The Latitude has passed MIL-STD tests against shock, vibration, and other road hazards; there's hardly any flex when you grasp the screen corners and none in the center of the keyboard deck.
Even with a beefy 92-watt-hour battery, the laptop is not ponderously heavy at 4.6 pounds (compare the Acer Aspire E 15 at 5.3 pounds), though it outweighs most of the competition (and is a positive anvil next to the 2.4-pound LG gram 15).
The Dell measures 0.9 by 14.8 by 9.9 inches, just a tenth of an inch trimmer than the Lenovo ThinkPad L580 and considerably larger than the LG (0.7 by 14.1 by 9 inches).
Ports are plentiful.
Along the left edge are a Thunderbolt 3 port, a USB 3.0 port, and SD and SmartCard slots.
The right edge holds an old-school VGA port, another USB 3.0 port, an audio jack, a SIM slot for mobile broadband configurations, and a Noble lock slot.
Finally, around the back, you'll find HDMI and Ethernet ports and a third USB 3.0 port, as well as the socket for the somewhat bulky 130-watt AC adapter.
Bluetooth and 802.11ac wireless are joined by an NFC hotspot on the palm rest.
Sharp Focus
Windows Hello users can eschew typed passwords via either a fingerprint reader in the palm rest or a face-recognition camera centered above the display (the Latitude shuns today's thin-bezel fashion for thick strips on all four sides).
The webcam captures above-averagely bright and detailed images.
The screen is attractive, too—though rated at only 220 nits, it's still bright enough to use even with the backlight dialed down several notches to save battery power, and its contrast and viewing angles are good.
Colors are clear, though they don't quite pop like poster paints, and details are as distinct as 1080p resolution can make them.
My only gripe with the screen is a common one—though touch operations are smooth and sure, the glass overlay that enables them makes the panel distractingly reflective or mirror-like in dark areas.
Considering it's a business laptop, I'm not sure why the 5591 has media playback (play/pause and next/previous track) keys instead of Home and End keys.
(The latter are doubled up with the Fn key and cursor arrows.) But otherwise, the keyboard earns points for combining a virtually silent, soft touch with more than adequate travel and feedback.
I reached 90 words per minute in an online typing test without hurrying too much.
Cursor captains can choose from a blue-ringed pointing stick embedded in the keyboard or a midsized touchpad below it.
The stick took more finger pressure than I expected, but both worked well, with easy-to-click if slightly rubbery buttons.
Speakers beneath the front edge of the machine produce perfectly pleasant sound at moderate levels, with crisp highs and even a bit of bass, but audio is too soft below, say, 50 percent volume and too rough and ragged when turned up above 80 percent to fill a room.
Dell backs the Latitude with three years of on-site service and preloads security software that offers to encrypt the SSD, saving a key to a network or removable drive, while Microsoft does its part for office productivity with Candy Crush Soda Saga, Hidden City, and Disney Magic Kingdoms.
Crushing the Competition
The Latitude 5591 flexed its six-core muscle against a squad of quad-core competitors in our performance benchmarks, and basically cruised to victory in all the productivity and multimedia events (although its winning margin was only a little more than one second apiece for the 11 filters and effects we apply in our Adobe Photoshop workload).
Particularly impressive results included its score of almost 800 points more than the 3,000 we consider excellent in the PCMark 8 office productivity test and a rare sub-one-minute time in our Handbrake video editing exercise, a full 18 seconds ahead of the next fastest laptop, the Surface Book 2.
See How We Test Laptops
The Microsoft laptop got its revenge, however, in our graphics and gaming tests, where its Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 simply outclassed the Dell's GeForce MX130.
While the latter did outperform the systems with Intel integrated graphics, it came only about halfway to the 30 frames per second we consider playable in our Heaven and Valley gaming simulations at high image-quality settings.
As I said at the beginning, the 5591 is strictly for casual as opposed to hardcore gaming.
Not helped by its 45- rather than 15-watt processor, the 5591 finished near the back of the pack in battery life.
But its time of 11 hours and 43 minutes in our video playback test is eminently respectable, certainly enough to get you through a full work day plus an evening's web surfing or video streaming.
A Desktop-Replacement Dynamo
Like the Latitude 5491, the 5591 is a niche product—a laptop that's arguably overkill, if not overpriced, for humdrum office work, but lacks the graphics muscle of a mobile workstation.
It'll delight users who simply hate to wait for applications, but is a bit hefty next to the elegantly light Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon($1,281.75 at Lenovo) and the LG gram 15 and lacks the dazzling screen and detachable design of the Microsoft Surface Book 2.
But if this Dell misses Editor's Choice kudos, it's not by much—it's a well-built, well-equipped, blazing-fast alternative to a powerful desktop PC.
The Bottom Line
Impatient (and deep-pocketed) business pros will thrill to the Dell Latitude 5591, a speedy six-core productivity powerhouse that outruns most 15.6-inch laptop competitors.
