Dell Latitude 5480

Built for mainstream business users, the Dell Latitude 5480 packs strong performance, and long battery life into a durable package.

The Latitude 5480’s matte-black design won’t turn heads but it feels solid, thanks to a sturdy carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer shell. Its poly-carbonate keyboard deck offers a comfortable surface to rest your wrists while typing.

The Latitude 5480 has a USB Type-C port that it can use for charging, DisplayPort video out and data transfer, a USB 3.0 port, an SD memory reader and an optional SmartCard on its left side.

The headphone jack, another USB 3.0 port, a VGA port and Noble lock slot sit on its right side. Dell tucked the notebook’s power jack, Ethernet port, SIM card tray and HDMI and yet another USB 3.0 port on the rear.

5480 security and durability

Dell designed the Latitude 5480 to survive some punishment. The company says its laptop has passed 15 MIL-SPEC tests, including those that involve extreme temperatures, crashes, shocks, vibration and high levels of dust.

Dell Latitude 5480 keyboard, pointing stick and touchpad

The Latitude 5480’s island-style keyboard offers a comfortable typing experience. When I tested it out on the 10fastfingers.com typing test, I click-clacked at a rate of 82 words per minute, beating my 80 wpm average. The keys feature an otherwise excellent 1.9 millimeters of travel and 60 grams of required actuation force (1.5 – 2.0mm and 60 grams are ideal), though the feedback isn’t as strong as we’d like.

The Latitude’s pointing stick provided very accurate navigation around the desktop, without forcing me to lift my fingers off the home row. However, Dell’s coarse concave nub isn’t as comfortable to push as the curved caps you find on Lenovo’s TrackPoints.

The Latitude 5480’s 4 x 2-inch touchpad speedily registered two-finger page scrolling swipes and three-finger app switching gestures. Its left and right buttons offered solid responses to each click, with the top pair of buttons requiring a bit more force to press than the bottom pair.

Dell Latitude 5480 audio

The Latitude’s speakers provided enough warm audio to fill a large conference room. When I listened to Queens of the Stone Age’s “Kalopsia,” the track’s bass hit hard, Josh Homme’s vocals came through clearly and the warbling guitars sounded accurate.

The preloaded Waves MaxxAudio Pro audio adjustment utility lets you tweak EQ settings and increase bass, but the notebook didn’t need such adjustment out of the box.

Dell Latitude 5480 performance

Armed with a 7th-Gen Intel Core i7-7600U, a 256GB SSD and 8GB of RAM, the Latitude 5480 is a multitasker’s best friend. I saw zero slowdown when I split my screen between a dozen Chrome tabs (including TweetDeck, Google Docs and Slack) and a 1080p YouTube video. The system retained its speedy response after I launched a full system scan in Windows Defender, started taking selfies with the camera and began a round of Candy Crush Soda Saga.

The Latitude 5480’s powerful processor enabled it to score a strong 8,530 on the GeekBench 3 general performance test. The ThinkPad T460’s (Core i5-6300U, 16GB RAM) score of 6,708 and the ProBook 440 G3’s (Core i5-6200U, 8GB RAM) score of 4,990 are predictably lower, thanks to their last-gen Core i5 CPUs. The 8,088 average for thin-and-light notebooks is also lower than the Latitude’s mark.

The 256GB M.2 SATA SSD in our Latitude 5480 took 37 seconds to duplicate 4.97GB of multimedia files. That translates to a speed of 137.6MBps, which is slow for an SSD and below the category average (184.45MBps). Still, it was enough to top the ProBook 440 G3’s score of 103.8MBps, but not the T460’s 175.5MBps.

Productivity power users should appreciate the Latitude 5480 as it needed only 3 minutes and 12 seconds to match 20,000 names to addresses in our OpenOffice Spreadsheet macro test. That’s shorter than the times posted by the ThinkPad T460 (4:13), the ProBook 440 G3 (4:55) and the 4:45 average.

Dell Latitude 5480 graphics

The Dell Latitude 5480’s integrated Intel HD 620 GPU notched a score of 73,623 on the Ice Storm Unlimited graphics test. That beats the Intel HD 520-based ThinkPad T460 (65,981) and the ProBook 440 G3 (58,077), but it’s just shy of the average (77,510).

You can game on the Latitude 5480 when you get to take a break, but you can’t push it that hard. It ran Dirt 3 (1920×1080 pixels, medium graphics) at 32 frames per second, which is just barely above our 30 fps playability threshold, but below the 42 fps average.

Dell Latitude 5480 battery life

The Latitude 5480 has enough in the tank for a full work day and several hours of overtime, lasting 11 hours and 37 minutes on the Laptop Mag Battery Test (continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi). That beats the 8:03 thin-and-light average as well as the 440 G3 (7:31) and the 3-cell battery versions of the ThinkPad T460 (8:26 with non-touch, 6:40 with a touch screen). However, with a 6-cell battery, the ThinkPad T460 put up some impressive times of its own, with 13:12 for a touch screen and 17:04 without a touch screen.

Our model features a 4-cell, 68-watt-hour battery, the largest size Dell offers. However, Dell doesn’t always offer battery options when you’re customizing your system on its site. Make sure to check the size of the battery (larger is better) when you’re constructing your system.

Dell Latitude 5480 webcam

The 0.9-megapixel webcam in the Latitude 5480 is fairly standard for what we see in most laptops. My test selfie had a grainy texture and flat colors, as the red of the wall behind me and the dark blue in my shirt both appeared muted.

Dell Latitude 5480 heat

Certain parts of this machine can spike a slight fever. After streaming 15 minutes of HD video, the underside of the laptop measured 98 degrees Fahrenheit, which is slightly higher than our 95-degree comfort threshold. The touchpad (85 degrees) and G&H keys (91 degrees) were noticeably cooler.

Dell Latitude 5480 software

Business notebooks shouldn’t come with apps that don’t help with productivity or security. Not only does the Dell Latitude 5480 include Candy Crush Soda Saga, Minecraft and Royal Revolt II, it also packs Houzz, a home-renovation tool.

Dell also includes its own tools for managing your system. For instance, Command Power Manager adds battery settings, while Command Update centralizes firmware updates from Dell. You also have SupportAssist, which houses system info and tech-support links.

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https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-za/product-support/product/latitude-14-5480-laptop/docs