Dell Inspiron 14 5482 Review: An Affordable, Portable Laptop

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Dell Inspiron 14 5482: At First Glance

Mid-year 2018, Dell announced the launch of a new addition to its Inspirion 14 5000 series. This addition is the Dell Inspiron 14 5482.

The Dell Inspiron 14 5482 is a decent-looking convertible laptop that offers great value for your money. Although the laptop may have some disappointing specs, there are some other impressive features that sweeten the deal.

Talking about how much you will be spending on this laptop, when I wrote this review in November 2021, the Inspiron 14 5482 had an $889.00 starting price. This price may seem much to some folks but considering the laptop’s features, I believe it is worth it.

However, what are these features that make the Inspiron 14 5482 worth that price? Read on to satisfy your curiosity as I review this model.

Dell Inspiron 14 5482: Design, Dimension and Weight

Most mainstream laptops can be thick and weighty, but that’s not the case with the Dell Inspiron 14 5482. Although the laptop isn’t the thinnest or lightest 14-inch laptop out there, you will have no difficulty sliding it into a shoulder bag or backpack.

The weight and thinness of the Dell Inspiron 14 5482 is perhaps the first thing anyone would notice about it. Specifically, Dell did a nice job by keeping the weight decent at 1860 g.

As a result, one could easily pick the Inspiron 14 5482 up with one hand. Therefore, carrying it around a trade show or around the office between briefings won’t be a big deal.

In addition to that, the laptop will not feel like a drag in your backpack or briefcase due to its lightweight.

Impressively, the Dell Inspiron 14 5482 is not only has a lightweight, but it also feels reassuringly solid and reliable. To be more specific, the laptop has just a little flex when you grasp the screen corners.

However, despite having such lightweight, the Dell Inspiron 14 5482 weighs more than the Lenovo Yoga C930-13IKB. While the Inspiron weighs 1860 g, Lenovo Yoga C930 weighs 1400 g.

On a positive note, the Inspiron is lighter than the Acer Spin 3 which weighs 1920 g.

For the dimensions, the Inspiron 14 5482 measures 328 x 232.8 x 19.95 mm (W x D x H). In comparison, Lenovo Yoga C930-13IKB measures 226 x 323 x 14 mm (W x D x H), making it a tad smaller than the Inspiron 14 5482.

For build material and quality, the Dell Inspiron 14 5482 has a smooth matte silver chassis. Unlike the carbon and magnesium fiber chassis of the higher-end XPS series, the laptop’s silver chassis is made of a combination of plastic and aluminum.

Furthermore, you can’t knock the laptop off because of the metal featured in its build – it is very solid. However, you might be a bit disappointed that the hinges of the laptop tend to creak when you open or close the lid.

This gives a poor impression of the laptop, particularly since the 360-degree hinges fairly define the capabilities of the laptop. Moreover, the hinges’ creaking sounds strange and this is because the hinges are stiff.

Additionally, the 360-degree hinges possessed by the Inspiron 14 5482 is responsible for the laptop’s convertible feature. Being convertible means that you can use the Inspiron 14-5482 in laptop, tablet, or tent mode.

Beyond the hinges, the lid is quite firm and unyielding to side-to-side twisting. However, the base of the laptop flexes a bit when you attempt to open the lid but this is very common on slim laptops.

Therefore, for the laptop’s durability, the stiff hinges of this laptop require that you use both hands to open the laptop’s lid.

Equally important, the chassis of Inspiron 14 5482 can not be said to be better or worse than its competitors. For example, the hinges of the Yoga 530 and Vivobook flip 14 also creak.

Moving on to the keyboard, the keyboard is a bit of a weak point on the design of the Inspiron 14-5482. Although the keyboard is spill-resistant which is a standard feature, there is a fair amount of flex in the keyboard.

In addition to the flex keys, the key travel is quite shallow, feedback is soft, and the keys are very thin. For better understanding, key travel is the whole distance from the key at rest to full sink until it hits bottom.

Moreso, the keys have a bit of a spongy feel, this could be as a result of what makes it spill-resistant. Nevertheless, you won’t have a bad typing experience because they are decently spaced and there are no odd placements of keys.

Specifically, the control and delete keys are positioned in their proper corners while Shift and Backspace keys are generously sized also.

To be more clear, a spill-resistant keyboard has an underlining material between the keyboard layout and the motherboard. This material prevents liquid from causing damage to the motherboard by absorbing the liquid.

Other positive attributes of the Inspiron 14 5482 keyboard are its three-level white backlight and its quietness while typing. Moreover, the backlit attribute of this laptop makes typing experience in low-light situations still enjoyable.

For the touchpad, the Inspiron 14 5482 comes with a decent touchpad that is placed directly below the keyboard area. This touchpad is fairly large and supports multitouch gestures of up to four fingers.

However, you will have to enable the multitouch support yourself.

On the contrary, the buttonless, finely textured touchpad taps and slides easily. Additionally, it is also very sensitive.

Therefore, if you are someone who types with your hands on the palm rests, you’ll have to activate the palm-rejection setting. To clarify, palm rejection is a technology that if you rest your hand on a touchpad when typing it won’t respond to all parts of your palm.

Moving on, not only is the Inspiron 14 5482 a convertible laptop, but it also features a 10-point multi-touch touchscreen display. Featuring a 10-point multi-touch screen implies that the touchscreen allows you to perform different gestures using up to ten fingers on the screen simultaneously.

Moreover, this touchscreen display is a 14″ inch IPS display. In addition to that, this display features an FHD (1920 x 1080) resolution.

As a result of the IPS (In-plane switching) display, the laptop can maintain a sharp display even when viewing from different angles. Without a doubt, IPS displays are important in convertible devices since you’ll have them in different modes.

As for the brightness of this display, the display has the average 250 nits of brightness we often see in laptops of this category.

Moving on to the ports, on both sides of the Inspiron 14 5482, you’ll find a decent amount of ports, as expected.

On the left, you will see one USB Type-C port, two USB 3.1 ports, as well as an HDMI port. Moreover, the power connector and an audio jack are also decorated at the laptop’s left edge.

Unfortunately, there is no Thunderbolt 3 port as one would have expected. However, it would have been nice to have a Thunderbolt 3 and also a volume rocker for the multimedia function.

Notwithstanding, the available ports can serve you. Still on ports, you will find a USB 2.0 port, an SD card slot, and a cable-lockdown security notch on the right edge of the laptop.

Overall, the design section of this Dell Inspiron 14 5482 review has a lot of impressive features to love about it. Therefore, it will be fair to rate the Dell Inspiron 14 5482 an eight out of ten in this review section.

Dell Inspiron 14 5482: Processor (CPU) Performance

The Dell Inspiron 14 5482 comes with an Intel Core i7-8565U processor. This processor has four cores, a base frequency of 1.80 GHz and a maximum frequency of 4.60 GHz.

Additionally, the processor also has a cache memory of 8 MB.

Now for a little bit of history on this processor. Intel released the Core i7-8565U processor on the 21st of August 2018.

Furthermore, the processor is basically for mobile computers and is based on Intel’s Whiskey Lake microarchitecture. Therefore, it is ideal to see the Intel Core i7-8565U processor in the Inspiron 14 5482.

Moreover, with this processor, we can expect the Inspiron laptop to perform well in terms of multi-tasking.

To establish this claim using a real-world test, Inspiron 14 5482 was able to function well with 20 chrome tabs opened. Also, three YouTube videos were running while these tabs were opened.

To further verify the performance of the Dell Inspiron 14 5482’s processor, I would present the performance of this laptop based on a CineBench R15 benchmark test.

The CineBench R15 is a test tool that analyses the CPU’s performance on a laptop. It tells you just how fast or how slow the processor handles tasks.

Moreover, a low score CineBench R15 score tells you the laptop is slow while a high score means it is fast.

In the benchmark test mentioned above, the Inspiron 14 5482 scored 158 points.

Comparatively, the Dell Inspiron 14 5482 was some points behind the XPS13 9310 which scored 165 points on the same benchmark test. On a positive note, the Inspiron 14 5482 scored above the Lenovo Yoga 530-14IKB which deliver a score of 144 points

Based on the performance results above, the Dell Inspiron 14 5482 performed above the category average of 154 points. Not only that, but it also performs around the same range as its competitors.

As a result, nine is an ideal score to rate the Dell Inspiron 14 5482 in the review section.

Dell Inspiron 14 5482: Memory (RAM) Performance

The Dell Inspiron 14 5482 convertible laptop comes with 16 GB DDR4-2666 MHz RAM. However, this RAM is on the laptop’s single memory slot and it is onboard.

In case you’re wondering, an onboard memory means the memory is soldered to the motherboard of the laptop. Therefore, restricting the laptop’s ability to upgrade RAM.

As a result, if you are someone who would want to upgrade the memory of your laptop, this might be a bit of a deal-breaker for you. It is worth mentioning that 16 GB is also the maximum memory that the Dell Inspiron 14 5482 supports.

Nevertheless, if you won’t run massive memory-demanding tasks on this laptop, then the memory of the Inspiron 14 5482 should be decent enough for you.

Moreover, since this is a DDR4-2666 MHz RAM, the laptop should be fast enough for most tasks.

That said, it would be good if we establish just how much of a task this laptop can handle. To achieve that, I’ll provide information about the multi-tasking abilities of the laptop with 16 GB DDR4-2666 MHz RAM.

In the first instance, you should be able to open 25 – 30 browser tabs simultaneously on the laptop. These tabs should respond at a good pace and you should not experience any lag.

However, if you try to increase the number of tabs above 30, then you might notice the laptop slowing down.

So, we can say that multitasking or running multiple programs even while running a video conference is not a problem for this device. Although, if you push it too far, you won’t get so much of a good experience from this laptop.

To further determine the performance of the laptop, a PCMark 10 benchmark test was carried out. A PCMark 10 benchmark test provides data about the memory performance of a laptop.

Moreover, for this benchmark test, the higher the points, the better the performance of the device. Thankfully, the Inspiron 14 548 achieved a high score on the test, with a score of 4069 points.

In comparison, the Inspiron performed better than Lenovo Yoga C930-13IKB and ASUS VivoBook Flip 14. Specifically, the Lenovo Yoga C930-13IKB and ASUS VivoBook Flip 14 got a score of 2603 points and 3564 points respectively.

In conclusion, the Dell Inspiron 14 5482 performs brilliantly, as expected. With that in mind, I will rate the Dell Inspiron 14 5482 an eight in this memory review section.

Dell Inspiron 14 5482: Storage Options & Performance

In this model of the Dell Inspiron 5000 series, Dell impressively offers two accessible storage options which are uncommon for a 14-inch convertible.

Specifically, the Inspiron 14 5482 comes with either a 2 TB SATA AHCI 2.5″ HDD or a 512 GB M.2 2280 PCIe NVMe SSD.

The choice of which configuration you would want to buy is totally dependent on the kind of tasks you wish to carry out with the laptop. The two storage options perform differently.

To help you make a choice, let me briefly highlight their differences.

A Solid State Drive is a newer and faster storage technology that stores data on instantly-accessible memory chips. Hard Disk Drive (HDD), on the other hand, is the typical and older storage system that has slow speed and supports larger storage space.

Therefore, if your major requirement is large storage space for a lesser amount then the Inspiron 14 5482 with an HDD storage drive is the way to go. Hence, HDDs are good for storing lots of large files, this makes them a better choice for holding photos, videos, and games.

However, if speed is your primary point of consideration then, I suggest that you should opt for the Inspiron 14 5482 with an SSD storage drive type. SSDs are popular for their faster speed performance.

Now that have the information to decide the best storage option, I will provide you with information about the storage performance of Dell Inspiron 14 5482. To do this, I will give you information about the file transfer test result.

In addition to the file transfer test, I’ll also share information about a storage benchmark test for this laptop.

In a real-life file transfer test, using the Inspiron 14 5842 with an SSD storage option, 20 video files were able to be transferred in just 2 minutes. Similarly, 40 audio files were also transferred in two minutes too.

To further confirm the SSD performance of this laptop, the Crystaldiskmark benchmark test was used. To understand better, the Crystaldiskmark benchmark test is a test used to determine the speed of a device’s storage system.

Moreover, the higher the points of the read and write speed, the better the performance of the system. In this test, the Inspiron 14 5482 had a sequential write speed of 576.2 MB/s and a sequential read speed of 471.64 MB/s.

When compared to the ASUS VivoBook Flip 14, the Inspiron performed better. Specifically, the ASUS VivoBook Flip 14 registered a read speed of 437.85 MB/s and a write speed of 350.31 MB/s on the same Crystaldiskmark benchmark test.

Lastly, I will rate the Dell Inspiron 14 5482 an eight out of ten in this storage performance review.

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Dell Inspiron 14 5482: Graphics Card Performance

The graphic card featured in the Inspiron 14 5482 is an Integrated Intel UHD 620 Graphics card. As an integrated graphics card, this graphics card depends on the CPU to perform.

Moreover, the Intel UHD Graphics series has slightly evolved over the years and is usually featured in the Whiskey Lake-U laptop series. Therefore, seeing it featured on the Inspiron wasn’t surprising at all since the laptop has a Whiskey Lake processor.

Performance-wise, this integrated Intel UHD 620 graphics card is suitable for light gaming and viewing HD videos. However, you can’t play high-end games on the Inspiron 14 5482 with this graphics card.

So if you are a high-end game lover, this laptop will not give you a good gaming experience.

To give you an insight on the graphics card performance, on a gaming test, the Dell Inspiron performed poorly even on low settings when playing F1 2021. Specifically, while playing this game, the maximum frame per second the laptop could offer is 32 fps.

Moreover, the laptop was also used to play Cyberpunk 2077 and it delivered 0 fps (frame per second). This confirms that Dell Inspiron 14 5482 is the wrong laptop for high-end games.

To clarify, the 0 fps specified for Cyberpunk 2077 means that the laptop could not play the game at all.

Less I forget, the Intel UHD 620 graphics card has a 300 MHz base frequency and 1150 MHz boost frequency. The base and boost frequencies represent the speed of the graphics card,

Moving on, a 3DMARK GPU benchmark test was also carried out to further determine the graphics performance of the Inspiron 14 5482. Essentially, this benchmark test works by rendering 2D and 3D graphics so users can know how this laptop handles overall graphics performance.

In the 3DMARK benchmark test, the Inspiron 14- 5482 scored 1741 points. In comparison, the laptop performed better than the Acer Aspire Switch 12s which scored 730 points.

Therefore, the Dell Inspiron 14-5482 deserves nothing less than a seven out of ten in this graphics review section.

Dell Inspiron 14 5482: Battery life and Performance

When it comes to battery, a 3-cell Primus 42Wh battery powers the Inspiron 14 5482. In our research, we did not find any information about the battery life of this laptop on Dell’s website.

However, in a real-world battery runtime test, using a video playback test, the laptop lasted 7 hours and 4 minutes. That’s really good considering the size of this laptop.

Comparatively, on the same video playback test, the Lenovo Yoga C930-13IKB lasted 9 hours and 45 minutes.

Therefore, the Lenovo Yoga C930-13IKB has a better battery runtime compared to the Dell Inspiron 14 5482. However, with less demanding tasks you’ll be able to use the Inspiron 14 5482 for a whole day without the need to charge.

Speaking of charging, you will need a lot of patience if you are charging this laptop. To be more specific, it takes the laptop about 3-3.5 hours to charge from zero to 100 percent.

However, considering the battery life, I believe waiting that long for the laptop to charge is totally worth it. Therefore, I will be rating the Dell Inspiron 14 5482 an eight in this battery review section.

Frequently Asked Question

Conclusion

The Dell Inspiron 14 5482 is an impressive laptop with a good processor, storage, fair graphics, and a moderate battery. It is a great mix of performance, portability, and durability.

To add to that, this device is also suitable for frequent travelers who need an affordable laptop. Also, it is a great choice for business people who need a laptop to carry around for their business meetings.

Not forgetting its affordability, this laptop is budget-friendly for those with a low budget. Despite being affordable, it has a rugged build that will survive road trips and has average performance for basic tasks.

However, the absence of Thunderbolt 3 is a flaw in this laptop. Regardless, if this single limitation should not be a big deal for you, the Dell Inspiron 14 5482 is good to pick.

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