Dell Latitude E5570 review – durable workforce on the go

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Dell’s refreshed Latitude lineup covers a big span of market segments but the E5570’s configurations are mostly considered as high-end, although some of the entry-level configurations are quite affordable, especially if you opt for the HDD variants. The last time we reviewed a Latitude E-series notebook was more than a year ago and we were left with a generally good impression. The build quality was excellent, input devices were comfortable and accurate while the battery life was more than satisfactory. This sums up all the important aspects of a business-centric machine and we think that the E5570 is an excellent successor to the E5550 we’ve reviewed last year.

The upgrade focuses mainly on the hardware inside without any major changes in the design department nor did Dell add any new features. We were kind of surprised not to see the new USB-C connector coming with the Skylake upgrade but we can’t really say it’s a big drawback since the standard hasn’t been adopted by the market yet. Anyway, we are curious to see how the new Core i5-6300U will perform and how the 62Wh battery will play since it’s a decent upgrade over last year’s 51Wh unit.

You can find some of the available configurations and their prices here: http://amzn.to/2cYbzEd

Contents


Retail package

The notebook comes in a standard box containing all the usual user manuals, AC cord, charging adapter and the notebook itself.

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Design and construction

Nothing has been changed in general – the same plastic construction with soft-touch finish has been used for the interior and lid. The overall height has increased to 24.6 mm from 23.45 mm but the weight has gone down from 2.14 kg to 2.09 kg. Nothing that can be noticed easily, though.


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Interestingly, the lid feels a bit too bouncy for a notebook at this price range but doesn’t cause ripples on the LCD screen so it’s safe to assume that placing heavy objects on the notebook won’t damage the screen. Also, the matte surface provides extra grip when carrying it around but it’s a fingerprint magnet at the same time. Frequent cleaning will be required. As far as the hinges go, they appear to be a bit too tight for our taste, although it’s way better this way than being too loose. Opening the laptop requires two hands but the good news is that no bouncing occurs while using the laptop. The bottom piece hasn’t gone through any changes as well – it’s basically a big maintenance hatch, which is easy to remove in order to reach the RAM chips, HDD and M.2 SSD slot.


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The sides offer the usual port setting and a good placement of the latter. And typical for a Dell Latitude machine, the not so commonly used connectors are placed on the back – HDMI, VGA, LAN, and DC adapter. You will also find the SIM card tray if your model is 4G LTE-enabled. However, there’s also one USB 3.0 port that is better off on the left or right side but that’s just a minor inconvenience. Luckily, Dell has also put two more USB 3.0 ports on the right keeping company of the SD card reader, 3.5 mm audio jack. This leaves the left side only with the contracted smart card reader and the main exhaust vent for dispersing the heat.


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It’s easy to spot the identical interior coming from the E5550 – same keyboard, same trackstick, same touchpad. We don’t mean that in a bad way, though. We are extremely happy with the keyboard’s ergonomics offering long key travel, tactile feedback, and bright enough LED backlight. We can only say the same for the trackpad and mouse buttons – accurate, responsive and great surface to work with. The only thing that we didn’t like so much is the trackpoint. It feels a bit “mushy” and not sticking out enough to feel it over the keys. The same goes for its dedicated mouse buttons located below the space bar and the trackpad area. But if you are a fan of this input method, you will probably get used to it. And finally, the fingerprint reader has been revamped and now looks like an actual fingerprint scanner and it’s much easier to find in the dark compared to the old design on the E5550.


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All in all, the notebook offers good sturdiness, portability and doesn’t have any irregularities, gaps, holes or protruding edges. Frequent cleaning will get rid of the smudges on the lid and the hinges keep the display firmly in place. And as always, input methods are flawless – comfortable and easy to use. Most of the key selling points a business laptop should have, the Latitude E5570 delivers.

Disassembly, maintenance, internals and upgrade options

The notebook doesn’t have a dedicated maintenance hatch but it’s still easy to remove the whole bottom piece to access all of the internals. Even the prying up part isn’t that hard at all.


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Storage upgrade options – M.2 slot

For storage, you will have to choose between a standard 2.5-inch drive or an M.2 SSD since one obstructs the other. Our unit came equipped with a Samsung PM871 SATA M.2 SATA SSD in a 2280 size and 256GB capacity. Some users claim that the notebook supports PCIe NVMe-enabled devices but you might also need to do some tweaking in the BIOS menu. You can look here for more information.

SlotUnitPrice
M.2 slotSamsung PM871 M.2 SATA SSDCheck Price
2.5-inch HDD


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RAM

The motherboard of the notebook supports two DDR4-2133 RAM chips and if you go with the 8GB version, you will probably have only one of the slots taken. Our unit came with an 8GB Micron MTA16ATF1G64HZ-2G1 stick.

SlotUnitUpgrade price
Slot 1Micron 8GB DDR4-2133 RAMUpgrade options
Slot 2FreeUpgrade options


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Other components

There’s no need of further disassembly to access most of the replaceable hardware.

The battery unit is rated at 62Wh an takes a good chunk of the inside space.

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The Wi-Fi module is Intel-made with model number 8260NGW.

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Cooling system

The cooling system consists of only one big heat pipe going into the fan on the left side of the notebook. It should be sufficient enough to support the ULV processor (ultra-low voltage) even during high load.

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For more information, you can visit the full disassembly guide here.

Display quality

The new Latitude E5570 uses a different IPS panel than its predecessor now adopting Samsung-made display with model number SDC894F (C1J7M-156HL). The panel features Full HD (1920×1080) resolution in a 15.6-inch diagonal leading to a pixel density of 142 ppi and 0.18 x 0.18 mm pixel pitch. The screen can be considered as “Retina” when viewed from a distance equal or greater than 60 cm.

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Here’s how the display looks under a 45-degree viewing angle.

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We were able to record a maximum brightness of 336 cd/m2 in the middle of the screen and 320 cd/m2 as average value with a maximum deviation of 16%. The color temperature is 7400K and it’s relatively close to the standard 6500K. The contrast ratio is also good – 1300:1 (after calibration at 140 cd/m2 luminance). You can see in the image below that the maximum dE2000 color deviation is exactly 4.0 while keeping in mind that values above 4.0 are unwanted. It’s an important test if you are looking for a display suitable for color-sensitive work.

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Color reproduction

To make sure we are on the same page, we would like to give you a little introduction of the sRGB color gamut and the Adobe RGB. Starting with the CIE 1976 Uniform Chromaticity Diagram that represents the visible specter of colors by the human eye giving you a better perception of the color gamut coverage and the color accuracy. Inside the black triangle, you will see the standard color gamut (sRGB) that has been used by millions of people in HDTV and on the web. As for the Adobe RGB, this is used by professional cameras, monitors and etc. for printing. Basically, colors inside the black triangle are used by everyone and this is the essential part of the color quality and color accuracy of a mainstream notebook. Still, we’ve included other color spaces like the famous DCI-P3 standard used by movie studios and the digital UHD Rec.2020 standard. Rec.2020, however, is still a thing of the future and it’s hard to be covered by today’s displays. We’ve also included the so-called Michael Pointer gamut, or Pointer’s gamut, which represents the colors that naturally occur around us every day.

In this case, the display covers about 88% of the sRGB gamut, which is suitable for general multimedia, browsing and office work, which is the main purpose of the notebook anyway.

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Below you will see practically the same image but with color circles representing the reference colors and white circles being the result. You can see main and additional colors with 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% saturation inside the sRGB gamut before and after calibration.


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We’ve created the profile at 140 cd/m2, 6500K white point and sRGB mode.

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Below you can see the results from the accuracy color checker with 24 commonly used colors like light and dark human skin, blue sky, green grass, orange etc. The results are before and after calibration and as you can see, after calibration the screen has excellent color reproduction.


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We’ve also measured how well the display is able to reproduce really dark parts of an image. It’s essential when watching movies or playing games. The left side of the image represents the display with stock settings while the right one with our custom profile for gaming and multimedia. On the horizontal axis, you will find the grayscale and on the vertical axis the luminance of the display. The display offers good visibility in dark areas of an image but it’s further improved by installing our profile.

We illustrate the first five levels of the gray (1%-5% white), right after black level, using the five boxes on the image below. Keep in mind that whether you can distinguish them or not strongly depends on the settings of your current display, the calibration, the viewing angle and the surrounding light conditions.

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Gaming capabilities (Response time

We test the reaction time of the pixels with the usual “black-to-white” and “white-to-black” method from 10% to 90% and reverse.

We recorded Fall Time + Rise Time = 24 ms.

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PWM (Screen flickering)

Fortunately, we didn’t detect any PWM across all brightness levels making the display suitable for users with sensitive eyes.

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Blue light emissions

With our Health-Guard profile installed, you can benefit from reduced blue light emissions. You can see the levels of emitted blue light on the spectral power distribution (SDP). But if any of this doesn’t make sense to you, we suggest reading our extensive article explaining the so-called blue light emissions and the SPD (http://laptopmedia.com/reviews/health-impact-of-display-blue-light-and-our-solutions-for-you/).

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Conclusions

The display at hand has little drawbacks that can be easily fixed by installing our profiles. For instance, the Latitude E5570 offers bright IPS panel with wide sRGB coverage, excellent contrast ratio and relatively accurate color reproduction out of the box. However, the slightly higher color temperature will increase the blue light emissions but here’s where our Health-Guard profile comes into play. Moreover, the Office/Design work profile brings down the average deltaE down to 1.2 indicating pretty accurate color reproduction. Still, there’s a noticeable backlight bleeding that can be easily seen on dark or black background near the bottom bezel. Some units may not have this, but ours did and the bleeding was way too obvious. The best thing about this display, though, is the absence of PWM across all brightness levels making it perfect for users with sensitive eyes or businessmen working in front of the screen around the clock.

Buy our display profiles

Since our profiles are tailored for each individual display model, this article and its respective profile package is meant for Dell Latitude E5570 configurations with 15.6″ Samsung SDC894F (C1J7M-156HL) (FHD, 1920 × 1080) IPS screen, which can be found at Amazon: http://amzn.to/2cj9DqY

*Should you have problems with downloading the purchased file, try using a different browser to open the link you’ll receive via e-mail. If the download target is a .php file instead of an archive, change the file extension to .zip or contact us at [email protected].

Read more about the profiles HERE.

[edd_item edd_id_1=’70310′ edd_id_2=’70314′ edd_id_3=’70317′ edd_id_4=’70320′]

Sound

We’ve witnessed excellent sound quality on the stereo loudspeakers.

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Specs sheet

The specs below is for the tested model only and may differ from yours.

ProcessorIntel Core i5-6300U (2-core, 2.40-3.00 GHz, 3MB cache)
RAM8GB (1x 8192MB) – DDR4, 2133 MHz
Graphics cardIntel HD Graphics 520
HDD/SSD256GB M.2 SATA SSD (2280)
Display15.6-inch (39.62 cm) – 1920 x 1080 (FHD) IPS panel, matte
Optical drive
ConnectivityLAN 10/100/1000 Mbps, Wi-Fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.0, 4G LTE and WiGig support optional
Other features
  • 3x USB 3.0
  • built-in webcam
  • built-in microphone
  • 3.5 mm audio jack for headphones and microphone
  • HDMI
  • RJ-45
  • VGA
  • fingerprint reader
  • LED-backlit keyboard
  • trackpoint with dedicated mouse buttons
  • SD card reader
Battery3-cell, 47Wh / 4-cell, 62Wh
Thickness24.6 mm (1.00″)
Weight2.09 kg (4.61 lbs)


Dell Latitude 15 E5570 configurations


Software

We used a brand new installation of Windows 10 (64-bit) for this review so if you wish to perform a clean install yourself as well, we suggest downloading the latest drivers from Dell’s official support page.

Battery

Since the Latitude E5570 holds a bigger battery than its E5550 predecessor, it’s normal to have an increased stamina but what surprised us is that the E5570 tops our battery performance list of all 15-inch notebooks we’ve tested so far. In fact, the laptop beats the likes of Acer TravelMate P658. Not only that but smaller devices like the ASUS ZenBook Flip UX360, Acer Aspire Switch Alpha 12 and HP Spectre 13 can’t hold up with the Latitude E5570. And all of this is possible due to the 62Wh battery and Core i5-6300U CPU on board.

Of course, all tests were run using the same settings as always – Wi-Fi turned on, Windows battery saving feature turned on and screen brightness set to 120 cd/m2.

Web browsing

In order to simulate real-life conditions, we used our own script for to automatically browse through over 70 websites.

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Outstanding runtime – 553 minutes (9 hours and 13 minutes).

Video playback

For every test like this, we use the same video in HD.

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Again an excellent result – 500 minutes (8 hours and 40 minutes).

Gaming

We recently started using F1 2015’s built-in benchmark on loop in order to simulate real-life gaming.

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As expected, the gaming test took a toll on the battery but still scored pretty well with 215 minutes (3 hours and 35 minutes) of play time.

CPU – Intel Core i5-6300U

Core i5Intel’s Core i5-6300U is a ULV (ultra-low voltage) processor released during September 2015 but finds its way into notebooks later on. It’s basically an updated version of the Core i5-6200U with marginally better performance and adopting the so-called vPro technology, which in practice is an umbrella marketing term for a collection of features.

The chip is manufactured by 14nm FinFET manufacturing process, it has two cores ticking at a maximum of 3.0 GHz or 2.9 GHz with two active cores while the base frequency is 2.4 GHz. The slightly improved clock rates promise better overall performance than the former Broadwell Core i7-5500U.

The power consumption is 15W like the rest of the ULV CPUs and that includes the dual-channel DDR4-2133/DDR3L-1600 memory controller and the integrated GPU. Speaking of which, it’s Intel HD Graphics 520 featuring 24 EUs (Execution Units) clocked at 300 – 1000 MHz. Moreover, the TDP can be configured by the manufacturer and can reach 7.5W.

You can browse through our top CPUs ranking: http://laptopmedia.com/top-laptop-cpu-ranking/

Here you will find other useful information and every notebook with this processor that we’ve tested: http://laptopmedia.com/processor/intel-core-i5-6300u/

Dell Latitude 15 E5570 CPU variants

Here you can see an approximate comparison between the CPUs that can be found in the Dell Latitude 15 E5570 models on the market. This way you can decide for yourself which Dell Latitude 15 E5570 model is the best bang for your buck.

Note: The chart shows the cheapest different CPU configurations so you should check what the other specifications of these laptops are by clicking on the laptop’s name / CPU.

Results are from the Cinebench 20 CPU test (the higher the score, the better)

Results are from our Photoshop benchmark test (the lower the score, the better)

Results are from the Fritz chess benchmark (the higher the score, the better)

Fritz

Fritz is a chess benchmark that tests the computing capabilities of the CPU with various chess moves. The Intel Core i5-6300U reached 5.679 million moves per second. By comparison, one of the most powerful chess computers ever, Deep(er) Blue, was able to squeeze out 200 million moves per second. In 1997 Deep(er) Blue even beat the famous Garry Kasparov with 3.5 to 2.5.

GPU – Intel HD Graphics 520

intel_hd_graphicsIntel HD Graphics or also known as GT2 is an integrated graphics processor used in ULV (Ultra-low voltage) chips from intel that are part of the Skylake generation processors. The GT2 core boasts 24 Execution Units (EUs) that are clocked up to 1050 MHz, but the latter can be changed depending on the CPU that’s used in. The graphics processor supports up to DDR3L-1600 or DDR4-2133 RAM and uses two channels for reaching maximum bandwidth.

The revised GPU now supports H.265/HEVC hardware decoding but the most notable feature here is that the chip supports DisplayPort 1.2 while the HDMI support is limited to the older 1.4a. The GPU can support up to three displays simultaneously. The power consumption of the whole chip (along with the CPU and memory controller) is 15W.

You can browse through our top GPUs ranking: http://laptopmedia.com/top-laptop-graphics-ranking/

Here you will find other useful information and every notebook with this GPU that we’ve tested: http://laptopmedia.com/video-card/intel-hd-graphics-520/

Temperatures

As we’ve already said numerous times, the usual stress tests on the CPU and GPU aren’t a good representation of real-life use since the user won’t be able to reach 100% CPU and GPU load most of the times but, on the other hand, this two-staged test gives us a valuable insight of the cooling design and how the system will fare in the long run.

We start off with a simple CPU stress test for about an hour. The system was able to utilize the full potential of all two cores of the Core i5-6300U CPU (2.8 GHz while the maximum boost frequency is 2.9 GHz for two active cores) and kept temperatures relatively high on the inside – 81 °C.

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After we turned on the GPU stress test as well, the CPU was downclocked in order to give some headroom for the iGPU to perform while maintaining the same temperature as before – between 70 and 80 °C.

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And, of course, since the machine isn’t housing any demanding hardware, temperatures on the surface remained low without affecting the user’s experience.

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Verdict

The Dell Latitude E5570 is an excellent business all-rounder leaving little room for improvement while offering even better hardware than its predecessor. In short – definitely worth the upgrade. Nonetheless, Dell has kept the main key selling points of the notebook from the last generation – excellent build quality, low weight, thin profile, comfortable keyboard and good touchpad performance making it on par Acer’s alternative – the TravelMate P658.

However, for roughly the same price, the TravelMate P658 offers a few extra features like USB-C (Gen 2), discrete GeForce 940M GPU – although this isn’t necessarily a drawback for a business machine – and much better storage options. While the Latitude makes you choose between an M.2 SATA/PCIe NVMe SSD or 2.5-inch HDD, Acer’s solution supports the M.2 + 2.5-inch combo or two M.2 SATA SSDs in RAID 0 configuration.

But as far as battery life and screen quality are concerned, both machines appear to offer similar performance with the Latitude E5570 having a slight advantage. We are talking about 6% longer battery life and no PWM across all brightness levels of the screen. The latter is really important if you have sensitive eyes.

At the end of the day, the Latitude E5570 is an excellent and reliable business solution that will fit most users on the go and thanks to the excellent IPS panel, it can be used for multimedia purposes for hours without the need of charging it or without causing any negative effects due to the lack of PWM.

You can find some of the available configurations and their prices here: http://amzn.to/2cYbzEd

Pros

  • Excellent build quality
  • Lightweight
  • Excellent input devices (keyboard, touchpad)
  • Bright IPS screen with wide sRGB coverage and high contrast
  • No PWM across all brightness levels
  • Outstanding battery life
  • Most configurations should support PCIe NVMe SSDs


Cons

  • Lacks USB-C connectivity
  • The surface is a fingerprint magnet
  • Supports either an M.2 SSD or a 2.5-inch HDD/SSD

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