Dell Latitude 9440 Review: 14-Inch 2-In-1 Laptop Superiority

ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO disk benchmark is a fairly quick and dirty test that measures sequential read/write bandwidth across a range of different data sizes. While we don't typically compare these results across multiple machines, it's useful to gauge whether a particular notebook's storage subsystem is up to snuff for the use case scenarios that the machine will be tasked with. 


Here, the Dell Latitude's 512GB PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive only delivers PCIe 3-class speeds with 3GB/s read and 2.7GB/s write throughput. We'll unfortunately have to call this a miss for team Dell, as the opportunity was there for decidedly better storage subsystem throughput, at perhaps just a slightly higher cost, if any.

Like other newer thin-and-light laptops we've tested recently, even a midrange PCIe 4 SSD can deliver at least 2X the throughput. That said, the average user may not feel a perceptible difference in day-to-day tasks, though heavy workloads like video production or image manipulation might be met with more of a bottleneck.

Speedometer 2.0 Browser Benchmark

We use BrowserBench.org's Speedometer test to gauge mixed internet usage experience, which takes a holistic look at web application performance. This test automatically loads and runs several sample web apps from ToDoMVC.com using the most popular web development frameworks around, including React, Angular, Ember.js, and vanilla JavaScript. This test is a better example of how systems cope with real web applications, as opposed to a pure JavaScript compute test like JetStream.


In this web workload responsiveness benchmark, the Dell Latitude 9440 puts up a first place victory, which frankly is not aligned with the machine's middling storage performance above, but also a hallmark of Intel's 13th Gen Raptor Lake platform. In this case, the high boost clocks and snappy P-Core performance equates to the best scores we've ever pulled from a 3lb laptop in this test.

Cinebench R23 Rendering Benchmark

This is the latest 3D rendering benchmark from Maxon, based on the Cinema 4D R23 rendering engine. We tested both single-threaded and multi-threaded tests on all of the notebooks represented here...


In the heavier-duty Cinebench multi-threaded test, Dell's Latitude 9440 and its 15 Watt Core i7-1365U process sags to the middle of the pack. In its Ultra Performance mode, which doesn't have much of a noise tradeoff, it's able to best Samsung's Intel 12th Gen powered Galaxy Book. However, it can't quite catch the Core i7-1360P powered version of it or Lenovo's Yoga 9i. This is likely due to the Core i7-1365U's lower 15 Watt power envelope.

Geekbench 5 Benchmarks

Geekbench is a cross-platform benchmark that simulates real world processing workloads in image processing and particle physics scenarios. We tested the notebooks featured here in Geekbench's single and multi-core workloads. It measures single-threaded performance allowing a single core to stretch its legs, and multi-threaded throughput to put all cores under a heavy load. 


In GeekBench 5, the tables turn, with Intel's 13th Gen performance ranking higher, though the Ryzen 7 7736U-powered Dragonfly Pro is able to chalk up an impressive score with a third place finish in the multicore test, though Dell's Latitude 9440 runs away with the fastest single core well ahead of HP's machine.

PCMark 10 Productivity And Content Creation Benchmarks

PCMark 10 uses a mix of real-world applications and simulated workloads to establish how well a given system performs productivity tasks, including image and video editing, web browsing, and OpenOffice document editing. While these scores appear to be all over the place, the systems are sorted by their overall PCMark score, which is the third (gray) bar in each cluster.

Here's Dell's Latitude 9440 moves back up the stack, with Intel's 13th Gen Core platform offering better overall system responsiveness in the productivity and content creation workloads of PCMark 10. Note the Latitude 9440's especially strong Essentials score, which is comprised of workloads like Web Browsing, Video Conferencing, and App Start-up times.

3DMark Graphics And GPU Tests

3DMark has several different graphics tests which focus on different types of systems. We tested here with Night Raid, which is 3DMark's targeted benchmark for laptops with integrated graphics. This test presents a solid challenge for the system's CPU and GPU engines using DirectX 12's API.


In these quick-take graphics and gaming synthetic benchmarks, it becomes obvious that this is not a gaming-oriented machine. With its integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics, you can expect an entry level playability of light duty games but that's about it. 99% of the users looking at a machine like the Latitude 9440 won't be considering it as a gaming device.

In-Game Graphics Tests

Middle Earth: Shadow of War is a fun and beautiful title set in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings universe. To test the game's performance relative to other systems, we set the resolution to 1920x1080 and turned the visuals up to the High preset. For Gears Tactics, we used a similar resolution, but tested the game with its Low, Medium, and High presets to see how it scales. The frame rates here are the averages reported by each game's built-in benchmark utilities. 

In these in-game tests, the scores once again illustrate this laptop's place in the market. The Dell Latitude 9440 is a productivity, light content creation and consumption laptop. Some of its scores are actually respectable, relatively speaking. In fact, how it was able to beat out last year's Ryzen Pro platform with essentially the same graphics core that Intel has been integrating in mobile platforms for a few generations now, is likely a testament to Intel's graphics and gaming driver team delivering optimization gains, as well as the additional bandwidth afforded by the Latitude 9440's faster DDR5 memory.