In case you haven’t heard, earlier this year, Dell made a shocking announcement. It declared that the business has chosen to implement a completely new hierarchy in place of its well-known Inspiron, XPS, and Precision brands.

Laptops like the Dell 14 Plus 2-in-1 are at the bottom of this hierarchy. This would have been referred to as a Dell Inspiron 14 2-in-1 last year, but it still fulfills its function of offering a reasonably priced starting point into computers.

Specifications

With an AMD Ryzen AI 5 340 processor at its core, the Dell 14 Plus 2-in-1 that Bestcomputerfinder acquired for testing is an entry-level AMD setup. Although Dell provides a wide variety of Ryzen AI processors in addition to Intel models, this is one of the least potent setups.

CPU: AMD Ryzen AI 5 340 (up to 4.8GHz, 6 cores)
Memory: 16GB LPDDR5x AMD Radeon 840M Graphics/GPU
AMD 50 TOPs NPU

Display: 14-inch touchscreen, 1920 x 1200, 60 Hz, WVA, 300 nits
512GB of storage M.2 solid state drive with PCIe 4.0 NVMe
Webcam: 30 frames per second, 1080p

Connectivity: 1x USB-A, 2x USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 with DisplayPort and Power Delivery 3.2 Gen 1, a 3.5mm audio jack, and one HDMI 1.4
Networking: Bluetooth 5.4, Wi-Fi 7.
Biometrics: Reader of fingerprints

The battery has a 64-watt-hour capacity.
Measurements: 12.36 x 8.9 x 0.65 inches
3.51 pounds in weight

Windows 11 Home is the operating system.
Cost: $599.99 during testing, or $849.99 MSRP

The cost is in line with that. It is now selling for $599.99 on Best Buy, which is among the lowest rates you can expect for a Windows laptop with the newest AMD or Intel processor inside, even though its MSRP of $849.99 on Dell.com feels a little high. The laptop was only listed a few weeks ago, thus, even if this is a low price, I would anticipate that this “sale” would happen often.

The laptop doesn’t skimp on quality in spite of its low sale price. It still has a 512GB solid-state drive and 16GB of RAM. If you choose to purchase a Plus 14 2-in-1 from Dell’s website, you should anticipate paying more. But some of the machines on Dell.com come with a 1TB solid-state drive, and the Intel version has a display with a resolution of 2560 x 1600, which is better than the 1920 x 1200 screen of the entry-level model.

Design and build quality

The Dell 14 Plus 2-in-1 is another example of a low-cost Windows 2-in-1 that isn’t particularly renowned for its eye-catching or striking design. It is a straightforward, slender 14-inch device that is no thicker than 0.65 inches. It comes in two unimpressive colorways: silver and navy-blue. Nevertheless, in terms of construction quality, the laptop is well-executed. There is some display flex visible when the laptop lid is opened, but not enough to cause any alarm. The bottom chassis has a similar story; it creaks a little if handled roughly, but it doesn’t flex much until it is very abused.

The materials utilized appeal to me as well. The bottom chassis’s plastics, in my opinion, had a pleasing feel and weren’t made to look metallic. In contrast, the back of the display panel feels high-end and appears to be composed of aluminum.

The Dell 14 Plus 2-in-1 is, of course, a 2-in-1 device with a touchscreen, and the hinge enables the display to be turned back 360 degrees for tablet-like operation. The option is helpful if you want to take notes or sketch, but it’s too big and heavy to be used as a tablet for extended periods of time. Although an Active Pen costs around $40, Dell does not offer one with the 2-in-1. If you want to use the laptop to view Netflix or YouTube, you can use the keyboard as a kickstand by rotating the display partway back.

Connectivity

Dell is known for relying heavily on contemporary connectivity, and the 14 Plus 2-in-1 is no exception. With the accompanying USB-C power adapter, it has two USB-C ports that may be used to power the laptop and provide power delivery and DisplayPort video interface. A 3.5mm audio jack, one HDMI 1.4 port, and one USB-A port connect them.

This kind of connectivity is standard for a current Windows laptop, though I might complain about the absence of a second USB-A connector, which means you’ll need an adaptor if you happen to want to connect a wired keyboard and mouse.

Regarding wireless connectivity, the laptop is compatible with the most recent iterations of the Bluetooth 5.4 and Wi-Fi 7 wireless standards. Even while this is typical of contemporary Windows laptops, you may find yourself looking at some older machines from the 2024 or 2023 model years at this price point, and it’s likely that they won’t feature Bluetooth 5.4 or Wi-Fi 7. If wireless performance is important to you, keep that in mind.

Performance

Bestcomputerfinder received an entry-level Dell 14 Plus 2-in-1 with an AMD Ryzen AI 5 340 processor for testing. This APU features AMD Radeon 840M graphics and a 6-core CPU. The entry-level CPU and integrated GPU produce mediocre overall performance, as you might anticipate.

A comprehensive system benchmark, PCMark 10, did not give the Dell 14 Plus 2-in-1 the best start. For a low-cost laptop, the score of 5,579 isn’t awful, but it’s still far below what PCs with Ryzen AI 7/9 or Intel Core Ultra Series 2 CPUs typically do. It’s made worse by the AMD Radeon 840M, which is comparatively less powerful than many IGPs available today.

Handbrake, a heavily multi-threaded long-duration benchmark, is a bit more favorable. The Dell 14 Plus 2-in-1 churned through a transcode of a two-hour-long movie in 1,498 seconds using purely the CPU cores (i.e. without special encoding features enabled). That’s not a bad result for the price, and it places the Ryzen AI 5 340 in a similar league to the Intel Core Ultra 5 226V.

In Cinebench R23, the Ryzen AI 5 340 achieves a respectable but not very noteworthy multi-core score of 7,993. Even though it is far from the top, this is still a respectable outcome.

I believe that the absence of cores is the primary problem here. In 2025, six isn’t much, and Cinebench R23 usually makes good use of the cores that are available, regardless of what they are. The Cinebench R23 single-core score of the Ryzen AI 5 340 was 1,828, which is essentially the same as the scores of the other CPUs in the accompanying graph, which range from 1,700 to 1,900. This suggests that the available cores are quick.

Battery life and portability

The Dell 14 Plus 2-in-1 is powered by a 64-watt-hour battery. For a laptop in this class, that is an average size, and although the AMD Ryzen AI 5 340 is frugal when not overloaded, it finds it difficult to compete with the newest Intel and Qualcomm technology.

Using PC World’s typical battery test, which loops a 4K video of the short film Tears of Steel, I measured little over 15 hours of battery life. I agree if 15 hours is excessive. Many contemporary computers, however, can complete this test in 18 to 22 hours, as the graph illustrates.

My subjective experience and the test result were in agreement. I used the Dell Plus 14 2-in-1 for a while while traveling, and I discovered that it could easily last a day of writing and online browsing with sporadic pauses, with at least 40% of the battery remaining when I reached my destination.

The battery life of the Dell 14 Plus 2-in-1 is adequate, in my opinion, and definitely longer than the average user will require. However, in terms of battery life, AMD’s Ryzen AI 340 seems to lag behind Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Plus and Intel’s Core Ultra Series 2.

Conclusion

For consumers on a low budget who want a Windows tablet that can do it all, the Dell Plus 14 2-in-1 is a decent choice. It avoids a significant flaw or drawback that would eliminate it from consideration while yet providing a good keyboard, a flexible design, and well-rounded specs. At Best Buy, the Plus 14 2-in-1 is especially tempting when it’s on sale for $599.99, which is less than many similar Windows laptops and 2-in-1s. I had fun using the 2-in-1, even if I would have preferred a slightly larger touchpad or a better display.