Dell Inspiron 14z Ultrabook

Inspiron 14z Ultrabook

Give credit to Intel for recognizing the notebook market needed a swift kick in the pants, and for putting a noose around the necks of netbooks, which have all but been eliminated from the market place. Sure, a few straggling netbooks remain, but by and large, Intel is now heavily invested (both literally and figuratively) in the Ultrabook platform. These thin and light machines represent the natural evolution of laptops, and the form factor continues to evolve right before our eyes, which is something that's underscored by the likes of Dell's Inspiron 14z Ultrabook.
 When man discovered fire, everything was different from that point forward. Ribeye, Filet, and the Weber -- how did we survive without these bare essentials?  By that same token, Dell seems to have discovered that it's possible to mate a discrete GPU with an Ultrabook form factor, giving birth to one of the first Ultrabooks capable of slicing through games. We're not talking about titles like Peggle and Angry Birds, but bona fide titles that previously had no business being installed on a thin and light machine, and certainly wouldn't have been allowed to come within 100 feet of a netbook.
The configuration Dell sent us to examine sports an AMD Radeon HD 7570M GPU with 1GB of onboard memory, a mid-class graphics chip with the chops to handle DirectX 11 visuals. It also has an Ivy Bridge processor, 8GB of fast DDR3-1600 memory, and an optical drive, still somewhat of a rarity in this form factor. It has the foundation of a premium notebook, but at $900 retail (as configured), it's priced several hundred dollars below the going rate of a high-end Ultrabook.
 If you don't care about having a discrete GPU, Dell sells a pair of less expensive baseline configurations starting at $700 and $800, which boast Intel HD 3000 and 4000 Graphics, respectively. The $900 configuration we tested is similar to the $800 model, but with a Radeon GPU and a bit more RAM (8GB versus 6GB). As you'll discover on the following pages, it's a $100 premium well worth considering if you like to game on the go occasionally.