Contrary to appearances, the Dell Latitude 7424 Rugged Extreme (starts at $3,499; $5,124 as tested) is not bulletproof. It won't shrug off lightning strikes. A jackhammer will send it to the scratch-and-dent pile. But for other risks of the road and use in the field, from keyboard water spills to six-foot drops, the Latitude 7424 is a death-defying laptop, justifying its steep price with stupendously sturdy design. Only a balky touchpad keeps it from claiming an Editors' Choice among notebooks meant for construction sites, factory floors, police-car dashboards, and other tough environments. It's otherwise a rugged action hero among business and commercial laptops.
No Thin Bezels...or Thin Anything
Clad in matte-black magnesium alloy and plastic (plus some steel reinforcement on things like the security-lock slot), this Latitude is a 14-inch laptop that's the antithesis of ultraportable—the system measures 2.02 by 14 by 10 inches and weighs 8.5 pounds. Fortunately, its front edge offers a full-width handle for hauling the Latitude from place to place, though you'll still need a briefcase or at least a coat pocket for its AC adapter.
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The $3,499 base model relies on a 7th Generation Intel Core i3 processor, 8GB of memory, a 128GB solid-state drive, and a full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) touch screen. My decked-out $5,124 test unit flaunted an 8th Generation, 1.9GHz (4.2GHz turbo) Core i7-8650U chip, AMD Radeon RX 540 discrete graphics, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB NVMe SSD, and frills ranging from a second, swappable battery to a Blu-ray drive. Dell's online configurator lets you specify up to 32GB of RAM and 3TB of storage, so my tester wasn't actually close to the config ceiling.
Dell Latitude 7424 Rugged Extreme Review
With rubbery bumpers on every corner and lockable doors over every port, the Latitude 7424 is a formidable-looking slab. Pressing a front latch lets you lift the lid to reveal the display, surrounded by broad bezels. A sliding privacy shutter hides the 720p face-recognition webcam centered above the screen, which captures relatively clear and well-lit but slightly noisy images. Windows Hello users can choose between the camera and a fingerprint reader on the palm rest.
Ports are plentiful (and customizable at ordering time), although there is no Thunderbolt 3 port, an omission we criticize on any laptop over $1,000, let alone five times that. Instead, there's one USB 3.0 Type-C port on the left side, along with two USB 3.0 Type-A ports and a headphone jack.
On the right side are a third USB 3.0 Type-A port, an SD card slot, a SmartCard reader, the BD-RE optical drive, removable PCI Express and SATA storage bays, and a hole or niche for the tethered stylus. A SIM card, for optional mobile broadband, also goes here.
Around the back, you'll find two Ethernet ports, an HDMI port, a DisplayPort (or optional VGA port), a serial port, and the lock slot and power connector. A plate on the bottom accommodates desktop and dashboard docks.
Look on the Bright Side
The Latitude 7424's touch screen isn't the most precise I've tried, because it's a resistive panel designed to work even if you're wearing gloves. Applying enough pressure is the key input factor with such screens. It often took a couple of attempts to close a window or to double-tap an icon to launch an app. I had better luck using the passive stylus.
The screen's visual quality, on the other hand, is exceptional. Fine details look as sharp as on any 1080p display I've seen (though naturally 4K screens look finer still). Viewing angles are wide, and contrast is colossal, with washday whites and inky blacks. Colors are rich and deep.
Most of all, the outdoors-friendly display is stunningly bright (Dell claims 1,000 nits), outshining the MacBook Pros and HP workstations I've previously considered the sunniest laptops you can buy. It's a joy to sit in front of this screen with the backlight turned up, and almost as pleasant with brightness turned down to save battery power, though white backgrounds turn a bit grayish when you do that.
The jutting handle, added to the depth of the palm rest, makes getting to the keyboard a bit of a stretch, but once your hands are on the home row you'll find it comfortable, with adequate travel and a snappy typing feel. The layout is trouble-free, with dedicated Page Up and Page Down keys (quibble time: Home and End are combinations with the Fn key and left and right cursor arrows), and the key backlighting is bright.
The two-button touchpad, however, is awful. It ignores attempts at small movements, only to send the cursor lurching drunkenly across the screen with large ones, and is unresponsive to taps. The click buttons feel all right, but clicking on or selecting items is erratic. I soon grew so frustrated that I plugged in an external mouse, which I haven't done while testing a laptop in years. [Editors' Note: Dell representatives pointed out after this review posted that this is a resistive-surface touchpad; the idea is that it should be usable with the user wearing gloves or with hands otherwise protected from the elements, with the pad able to track if wet (or under other adverse conditions). The surfaces of the touchpad are constructed with metal layers that make contact when pressed, rather than the usual capacitive design. That said, even using a firm press with bare fingers, it proved difficult to make the cursor track as we liked.]
Sound from the Rugged Extreme's mono speaker is muted, with bass tracks swallowed up, but it suffices to fill a small room. Dell bundles the Windows 10 Pro system with a few utilities, including a handy Rugged Control Center that governs everything from brightness and volume to wireless, and backs it with a three-year mail-in warranty.
With the words "You break it, you bought it" haunting my head, I didn't try to duplicate every ordeal that Dell says the Latitude can survive, from a six-foot non-operating to a three-foot operating drop; IP65 ingress protection against dust and pressurized water (even without the optional rubberized keyboard); operating temperatures from 20 below to 145 above Fahrenheit; and proof against vibration, thermal shock, and an explosive atmosphere. (See our primer on what IP ratings mean.)
I can tell you that repeatedly knocking the open and operating system from my lap to a carpeted floor had no effect on it whatsoever, so I shut down and closed the laptop before dropping it from six feet onto the same floor. Nothing happened except that one of the port doors popped open; the Latitude 7424 booted and ran fine. Even the optical drive, a component I would have thought madness to include in a rugged system, spun up and played a DVD movie.
From Torture Tests to Speed Tests
No other rugged notebooks have completed our recently refreshed benchmark suite, so I compared the Latitude's performance to that of four other 14-inch business laptops, led by the HP EliteBook 840 G5 and Lenovo ThinkPad T480. The LG Gram 14 2-in-1 stands out for being a convertible; the Dell Latitude 5491 for having a six-core versus the others' quad-core processors. You can see the contenders' specs in the comparison table below.
The Rugged Extreme did very well indeed in our productivity and battery-life tests, though its graphics performance keeps it from playing demanding games. It didn't excel in every benchmark, but considering its Sherman-tank toughness, its performance was a bonus.
Productivity, Storage, and Media Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, browsing, and videoconferencing. The test generates a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.
PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a Storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the drive subsystem. The result is also a proprietary numeric score; again, higher numbers are better.
The Latitude 7424 absolutely crushed PCMark 10's office-productivity measurement, finishing more than 500 points above the 4,000 level that we consider excellent. It joined its SSD-equipped competitors in making short work of PCMark 8's storage exercise.
Next is Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
While the six-core Latitude 5491 cruised to victory, the Rugged Extreme landed near the back of the pack. It's perfectly competent for spreadsheet or database work, but you won't mistake it for a CAD or video-editing workstation.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and, at the end, add up the total execution time. (Lower times are better.) The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost.
The chart makes the Latitude 7424's last-place finish look worse than it was. Subtract one second from the time it took to process each filter or effect, and it would have been in the thick of things.
Graphics Tests
3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff. The results are proprietary scores.
The hefty Dell won this contest, but its scores were well short of gaming-laptop territory. Its Radeon RX 540 graphics are roughly in the ballpark with Nvidia's GeForce MX150, if you're familiar with that low-end discrete, better-than-integrated-graphics GPU—in other words, nowhere near the GeForce GTX and RTX parts.
Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes. In this case, it's done in the company's eponymous Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload scenario than 3DMark, for a second opinion on the machine's graphical prowess. We present two Superposition results, run at the 720p Low and 1080p High presets.
Again, the Rugged Extreme outran its non-armored GeForce MX130-based Latitude 5491 stablemate and the laptops with Intel integrated graphics, but it's still only suitable for casual or browser-based games rather than top-notch titles.
Video Playback Battery Rundown Test
After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop into airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the open-source Blender demo movie Tears of Steel—with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system conks out.
The Rugged Extreme's dual 51Whr batteries provided almost 14 hours of unplugged runtime, good enough for second place behind the LG. You can take it into the field without fretting about the lack of an AC outlet.
Ain't That Tough Enough
Obviously, the Latitude 7424 Rugged Extreme is a specialized or niche product for field-work businesses, military and police applications, and commercial use, so it's hard to complain about its price. You can spend less than half as much if you plan to coddle your laptop in a briefcase. It's also hard to complain about its missing Thunderbolt 3 port—desktop docking, storage, and video solutions don't mean much for a system destined to roam far from a desktop.
That just leaves its touchpad for me to gripe about, which I do, yet its fantastically bright screen and sturdy build outweigh that. If your work conditions are less Dilbert and more Dante, this Dell should be on your short list.
Dell's ultra-tough flagship, the Latitude 7424 Rugged Extreme, has highs (an extra-bright screen) and lows (an unusable touchpad), but it sails through abuse that would turn lesser laptops to shrapnel. Expensive but awesome.
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