Our primary overall benchmark, UL’s PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its full system drive substitute measures a PC’s storage throughput.
Three more tests are CPU-centric or processor-related: Maxon’s SignBench 2024 uses the company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene. Primate Labs’ Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. And we see how long Video Transcoder Handbrake 1.8 takes to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
Finally, maker of workstations for creators Puget Systems’ Puget Bench Adobe Photoshop 25 ranks the PC’s photo-editing capabilities with a number of automated actions.
Save for a narrow loss in PCMark 10, the Dell 16 Premium put up a tough fight with its Windows-based competition on all of our benchmarks, but it couldn’t quite see off the MacBook Pro. Meanwhile, Dell’s high-end desktop replacement did business with our top-pick framework model throughout the benchmark gauntlet. If you’re looking at the Dell 16 Premium for some serious content creation, the MacBook Pro is simply better, as we had it configured at least: it handled our Photoshop and Divinity tests without issue. Similarly, this framework leads in this field.
However, keep in mind that the MacBook Pro costs more to get it. A better comparison would be the ASUS Proart P16, which has been our favorite content creation machine for a while, and the Dell 16 Premium traded some bang for its buck. They have won and lost on both sides.
