We already mentioned that the case of the Dell Latitude E6440 is not going to win any design awards, but it will definitely work well in the workspace in return. Open the simple silver lid and you can see the black interior, which is just complemented by a silver strip at the outside that also works as a bumper at the same time. The mixture of an angular touchpad and the rounded shape of the keyboard and the case is also restrained, but appealing.

Dell uses a combination of magnesium, aluminum and plastic in terms of materials. The cover is made of anodized aluminum, the bottom is powder-coated and the palm rest is rubberized. Everything feels very sturdy, even though the Latitude E6440 is not very light at 2.1 kilograms (~4.6 pounds).

The stability of the base unit does not leave anything to be desired: Nothing can be pushed in or twisted; only the area of the right palm rest can be slightly pushed in with a lot of force. The sturdy impression is supported by the solid locking mechanism that keeps the lid in position. The steel hinges appear to be very solid and keep the display well in position almost without any bouncing, but you can still open the lid with one hand – great.

You can somewhat easily twist the cover despite the aluminum lid and produce white veils on the picture. The cover is very pressure resistant, but force on the inner frame creates visible picture interferences.

All in all Dell”s Latitude E6440 is visually restrained, has convenient haptics and a good chassis, which is also very sturdy. If you prefer the weight and dimensions of an ultrabook, you should have a look at the Latitude 7-series. The 14-inch version is one centimeter thinner and 500 grams lighter (~1.1 pounds).

Maintenance

Perhaps a system administrator wants to replace a defective hard drive within the lifetime of the notebook, upgrade the memory or install a WWAN card. It is therefore an advantage if the system can easily be opened and all components are easily accessible.

Dell”s notebook is exemplary: The manual has a whole chapter with detailed instructions to remove the bottom cover or even the keyboard to access all the components. The hard drive can be pulled out from the side so the case does not require dismantling.

However, even that is not very complicated: Just remove the battery, loosen four screws and you can remove the bottom cover. You then gain access to the memory modules, WLAN and WWAN cards, the BIOS battery and the fan. The memory modules can easily be replaced or upgraded. Dell really deserves praise for the maintainability.

Warranty

Dell grants a generous warranty period of 36 months for the Latitude E6440, and that also meets the depreciation period for business laptops. You also get an on-site service at the next business day. This support can be extended for another year for 29.99 Euros or two years for 59.80 Euros (~$40 and $82 respectively). You can also upgrade to Dell”s Pro-Support, which includes three years of additional technical support around the clock, premium support for hardware and software as well as a central contact point. This service can also be extended to four or five years.

Still, this is not all: Dell offers protection against theft and self-inflicted damage, for instance drops, damage caused by liquid or the like, for an additional charge between 32.50 Euros and 104 Euros (~$45 and $142).

The contrast is just mediocre with 389:1, which is a result of the relatively high black value of 0.87 cd/m² and black areas appear dark-grayish. Some competitors are again worse, for instance, the HP ProBook 650 or Fujitsu LifeBook A544, but both the Toshiba Tecra A50 and the MacBook Pro 13 are once again better with a contrast of around 900:1.

The display of the Latitude E6440 can only cover 37.7% of the AdobeRGB color space. Dell”s laptop is not the only device with a bad result, but Toshiba”s Tecra A50 manages much more with almost 54%. Basically, all devices here have one thing in common: You will need an external display if you require a high color accuracy.

We use the software CalMAN and a colorimeter for the further color analysis. The results are once again sobering: Not one single color manages to stay below the green line that indicates a deviation of 3. The average DeltaE2000 deviation is rather high at 8.19 and the grayscale presentation shows a high deviation from the ideal value of the reference color space as well as a strong blue cast. This supports the results of the saturation sweeps: Blue colors are too saturated. The MacBook Pro 13 performs better and has very few deviations from the ideal values ex-works.

The advantage in the synthetic benchmarks is also perceptible in practice: The Radeon HD 8690M with 1024 MB memory can usually provide smooth frame rates with medium details and reduced resolutions. You will obviously need a more powerful system if you want to play Crysis 3, but it is sufficient for Diablo III or Tomb Raider with medium settings. Not bad for a business notebook.

Stress Test

We use a stress test running FurMark and Prime95 simultaneously for a couple of hours to torture the system. We monitor the clocks and the temperatures of the CPU and GPU at the same time. While the processor runs with a constant clock of 2.7 GHz for both cores and therefore not the maximum Turbo clock, we can see a fluctuating GPU clock between the maximum clock and 750 MHz. This affects the GPU performance under maximum load.

Temperatures on the other hand are more worrying: Up to 96 °C (204.8 °F) for the Core i5-4300M. Should this temperature be real and not caused by a faulty sensor it is not alarming right now – but the performance will be decreased when the cooling performance gets worse in the future (dirt, fluff).

A 3DMark run after the stress test shows a slightly reduced result of 8,439 points compared to a run after an idle period. This will not have a huge effect on the gaming performance since maximum load for the processor and the graphics card is rare.

Dell equips the Latitude E6440 with a reasonably large battery: It has a capacity of 66.6 Wh. Only the ThinkPad L440 with 100 Wh and the MacBook Pro 13 with 71.4 Wh have even bigger batteries.

The runtimes are still pretty average because of the high power consumption and can only surpass the Lenovo B5400 with a smaller battery while the HP ProBook 650 is on a similar level.

The train ride should not take more than five hours if you cannot charge the notebook: Using the Internet via smartphone or any other WLAN connection is not possible for a longer period. You can stretch the runtime to almost 7.5 hours if you really reduce the workload to a minimum. Using the full CPU and GPU performance results in a runtime of 1:19 hours.

Overall, we are a bit disappointed by the runtimes. At least most environments for business users have sockets nowadays. Still, you get around 50% longer runtimes with the ThinkPad L440 at the same weight if runtimes are important to you.