I Thought the Dell 16 Premium Was a Dazzler, But It Loses Its Luster Up Close

Our primary overall benchmark, UL’s PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC’s storage throughput. 

Three more tests are CPU-centric or processor-intensive: Maxon’s Cinebench 2024 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs’ Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution. 

Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Creators rates a PC’s image editing prowess with a variety of automated operations in Adobe Photoshop 25.

Save for a narrow loss in PCMark 10, the Dell 16 Premium fought hard with its Windows-based competition on all of our benchmarks, but it couldn’t quite catch up to the MacBook Pro. Meanwhile, Dell’s high-end desktop replacement traded blows with our top-pick Framework model throughout the benchmark gauntlet. If you’re looking at the Dell 16 Premium for some serious content creation, the MacBook Pro is simply better, as we had it configured at least: It aced our Photoshop and DaVinci Resolve tests without issue. Likewise, the Framework appeared to have the edge in that department.

However, keep in mind that the MacBook Pro costs even more to achieve that. A fairer comparison would be the Asus ProArt P16, which has been our favorite content creation machine for a while, and the Dell 16 Premium traded quite a few blows with it; they racked up wins and losses on both sides.