Dell Latitude E6230 12.5 inch Premium Business Laptop Review

12.5" Dell Latitude E6230 Business Laptop
via Amazon

Dell Latitude E6230 is a robust, tough and compact 12.5 inch premium business laptop with a solid build and design, an Ivy Bridge Intel i7 processor, Windows 7 Pro operating system, hard drive at 7200rpm speed, 6-cell lithium ion battery for longer battery life as part of the Latitude E series. It offers great portability and superior performance for those professionals that are out and about a lot and is powerful enough to handle even the very demanding work.

Dell Latitude E6230 is offered with the third generation dual core Intel i7-3540M processor (3M Cache) with a Passmark score of 4627 as of now at 3.0GHz base and up to 3.7GHz frequency with turbo boost and hyper threading feature for great 4-way processing power, 8GB dual channel DDR3L SDRAM (2x4GB) at 1600MHz to multitask very smoothly, 500GB Serial ATA hard drive at 7200rpm rotating speed with rubber HDD isolation to protect from spills and bumps and Windows 7 Professional 64-bit version that you can upgrade to Windows 10 by the end of July 2015.

12.5 inch high definition anti-glare matte finish WLED-backlit display with LCD protective seal at 1366 x 768 pixel resolution opens to an angle of about 130 degrees and the image quality is quite all right for a business laptop. It has the integrated Intel HD 4000 graphics that is equal to NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M and better than Radeon HD 6620G with the very fast Intel i7-3540M processor that it is attached to and there is not much gaming performance to speak about here- only older games are fine at higher settings. It has stereo speakers for adequate sound performance (our guess is it is better than average) but no webcam so you will need to connect an external webcam to one of the USB ports if you need it for work purposes.

Sleek and modern Dell Latitude has a simplistic design with three types of solid and dense powder-coated plastic with a fibreglass feel, aluminium display lid and steel hinges. It weighs only 3.2 pounds and 12.2 x 8.9 x 0.97 inch (0.88 inch at the front and just under an inch at the rear), has a 6 Cell 65WHr lithium ion battery for decent battery life and a spill-resistant and backlit keyboard with 4-levels of brightness with spaced out, curved and bevelled keys that is very comfy to type on and multi-touch 80x40mm touchpad with left and right buttons. Connectivity options include the Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6205 802.11n 2x2 WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet with RJ-45, Fingerprint Reader, Smartcard Reader and Contactless Smartcard Reader, an HDMI port, a 15-pin VGA port, 2 x USB 3.0 ports, 1 x eSATA/USB combo port and a 3.5mm Combo Headphone/Microphone jack.

Conclusion: Dell Latitude E6230 is a great high performance laptop that is built to be quite durable and reliable with Tri-Metal casing, steel hinges, aluminium display lid, anodized aluminum screen rear, magnesium alloy corners, a powder-coated base. It is MIL-STD 810G tested, has Fast Response Free-Fall Sensor and StrikeZone shock absorber. It doesn’t include an Optical Drive or webcam and for both you’d need to use external units. All the members of Dell E series business laptop are very friendly to environment as they come in recyclable packaging, are BFR/PVC-free and have very efficient power adapters. It is lightweight and compact, boots up fast, can handle anything you throw at it on a daily basis and has a long battery life, it doesn’t overheat after hours of operation, there is no SSD on this model and 500GB may not seem a lot at first sight but it is both the faster 7200rpm variety and would actually be more than adequate space of storage for most customers. Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics card appears to be bottleneck for multimedia performance even though it comes with an Intel i7 processor so gaming is only possible with older titles as you won’t reach acceptable frame rates per second at medium or high settings on newer games but video playback is quite good for a business laptop. Good choice overall with solid specs at a reasonable price and comes with a very long 30 month warranty by the manufacturer.

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