Dell Pro 14 (AMD Ryzen AI 7 Pro 350) Review: The Sensible Choice for Everyday Office Work

If you go purely by how it looks, the Dell Pro 14 doesn’t exactly scream new laptop energy. My first reaction was honestly, “This feels like something from 2017.” But as I’ve learned the hard way over the years, looks can be wildly misleading in the laptop world.

Because once you get past the very safe, corporate design, it’s clear this machine is built with working professionals in mind. The unit I’ve been using for a little over two months runs on the AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO 350, paired with 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM at 5600MT/s and a 512GB SSD. In daily use, it’s been exactly what a business laptop should be.

Now, the slightly annoying bit: this exact configuration isn’t officially available in India. What you do get locally is a variant with the AMD Ryzen 5 220, which is currently priced at around Rs 77,241. It’s clearly aimed at the same audience, just with more modest hardware for the market.

PROS

• Excellent battery life
• Comfortable keyboard
• Practical port selection
• Reliable everyday performance
• Sensible choice for office work

CONS

• Dated design
• Plastic lid with noticeable flex
• Average display
• Storage feels limited

Design and Display

Like I said earlier, the Dell Pro 14 isn’t winning any style awards. It’s not modern, it’s not sleek, and it’s definitely not the laptop that turns heads at a café. But that also tells you exactly who this laptop is for — people who just want their machine to work, day in and day out.

That said, I do wish Dell had used something sturdier than plastic for the lid. There’s noticeable flex if you apply even a little pressure, and that did make me a bit nervous about long-term durability. Especially when this thing lives in my backpack and gets dragged around on overcrowded local trains. Thankfully, it’s survived so far, but it’s not the most confidence-inspiring build I’ve used.

Design-wise, it comes in a platinum silver finish with a very plain Dell logo on top. Nothing fancy here. At around 1.35kg, it’s fairly easy to carry around and doesn’t feel like a chore on daily commutes. One area where Dell absolutely didn’t cheap out is ports — and thank god for that. On the right side, you get a Kensington lock, an RJ45 Ethernet port, and two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports. Flip it around to the left, and you’ll find the power connector, an LED indicator, two USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 4 support, and a 3.5mm audio jack.

You get a 14-inch IPS LCD panel, and no, it’s not a touch display, something I genuinely missed during my time with it. Brightness tops out at 300 nits, and the panel only covers 45% NTSC, which tells you everything you need to know about its priorities. This is not a laptop for photo or video work. If you’re a creator, look elsewhere. But for spreadsheets, documents, emails, and endless meetings, it does the job just fine. You can watch a movie or two while travelling, but the display colours and quality might leave you wanting more.

Speaking of meetings, the Dell Pro 14 comes with an FHD IR webcam with a physical privacy shutter up front. In decent lighting, it’s perfectly fine for work calls.

Keyboard and Touchpad

The keyboard is actually one of the nicer surprises here. The layout is well spread out, with plenty of space between the keys, and that genuinely makes a difference when you’re typing for hours. While working on articles, I made far fewer mistakes than I usually do on laptops with cramped keyboards. Key travel is decent, too, so long writing sessions or mind-numbing Excel work can be done easily without your fingers aching.

The power button pulls double duty as a fingerprint sensor with Windows Hello, which is exactly how it should be. A quick tap and you’re in. It’s fast, reliable, and I didn’t run into any hiccups during my time with it.

The touchpad is comfortably large, leaving enough room for all your thumb acrobatics. Clicks are subtle and quiet, not the loud thunk you get on some laptops, but there’s still enough feedback to know you’ve actually pressed it. Overall, it’s a very comfortable setup for everyday work.

Performance and Battery Life

At the heart of the Dell Pro 14 is AMD’s Ryzen AI 7 PRO 350, and it’s very much a sensible choice. You’re getting an 8-core, 16-thread chip that can boost up to 5GHz, with 16MB of L3 cache to back it up. The default TDP sits at 28W, which pretty much tells you everything abou its efficiency priorties.

For graphics, you’re relying on the integrated Radeon 860M, clocked at up to 3.0GHz. And since “AI” is literally in the chip’s name, you also get an NPU rated at up to 50 TOPS. That’s more about future-proofing right now, but as Windows and productivity apps start leaning harder into on-device AI, it should actually come in handy later.

The unit I’ve been using comes with 32GB of RAM, which is good for multitasking. It can handle dozens of Chrome tabs, heavy docs, Slack with ease. Storage, though, is where I’m a bit less impressed. The 512GB SSD feels stingy for a machine like this; a 1TB option would’ve made far more sense. That said, the SSD itself is a Micron 2500, and it’s fast enough that you won’t be complaining about load times or system responsiveness. I just wish Dell gave you more space to actually use that speed.

In synthetic benchmarks, the Dell Pro 14 puts up numbers that are… pretty much what you’d expect from this kind of machine. In our tests, it scored 529 points in multi-core and 80 points in single-core. That single-core figure is noticeably lower than what you get on the Dell XPS 13 powered by Intel’s Core Ultra 7 258V, which does have an edge when it comes to bursty, single-threaded tasks.

The Dell Pro 14 posts a max thread score of 4462 in the 3D Mark CPU Profile test, which actually puts it ahead of the Core Ultra 7 258V found in the Zenbook S14 OLED. That said, it still trails the higher-power Core Ultra 7 155H on the Dell Inspiron 14 Plus, which is built more for performance than efficiency.

Geekbench 6 doesn’t do the Dell Pro 14 any favours either. Both the single-core and multi-core scores come in lower than all the laptops mentioned earlier. The same trend continues with the iGPU results.

In 3DMark Time Spy, the Radeon 860M scores around 1766, which is noticeably behind Intel’s Core Ultra Series 2 chips. It makes one thing clear: this isn’t a laptop built for GPU-heavy workloads or benchmark bragging rights.

That said, context really matters here. The Dell Pro 14 is putting up these numbers while running at around 28W, compared to roughly 37W on the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V. So while the Ryzen chip isn’t topping charts, it’s actually being far more efficient with its power, managing to stay reasonably close to its competitors without drawing as much juice. And that efficiency shows up in the battery life. In real-world use, the Dell Pro 14 comfortably lasts an entire office day, with enough charge left to squeeze in a few TV episodes after work. You genuinely don’t have to think about keeping it plugged in during the day, which is exactly what you want from a work laptop.

Dell ships it with a 65W proprietary barrel charger, and it takes about 1 hour and 25 minutes to go from zero to full. The upside of using a barrel charger is that it leaves a USB-C port free. And if you don’t want to carry Dell’s charger around, you can also top it up using a standard 65W USB-C PD charger, which makes things a lot more convenient.

Verdict

The Dell Pro 14 makes its intentions very clear the moment you start using it. This isn’t a laptop built to impress in a showroom or dominate benchmark charts. It’s built for people who spend long hours working, typing, jumping between apps, sitting through meetings, and carrying their laptop around every single day.

Yes, the design feels dated and the plastic lid doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. Performance-wise, it won’t beat newer Intel Core Ultra machines in raw numbers, especially on the GPU side. But what it does exceptionally well is balance. Running at lower power, it delivers consistent, reliable performance, excellent battery life that genuinely lasts a full workday and more, and a comfortable typing experience that matters far more in daily use than a few extra benchmark points.

If you’re a creator, a gamer, or someone who wants a flashy, premium-looking machine, this clearly isn’t for you. But if your priority is a dependable work laptop that you can trust through long office days, frequent travel, the Dell Pro 14 quietly makes a strong case for itself.