Refurbished Latitude 11'' Inch 3180/3190 Review

Long-lasting. The 11.6-inch Latitude comes with a fast SSD , silently running system, and long battery life. Dell demands quite a high price for the laptop

Case and Connectivity

Dell installs the Latitude's components into a casing made of matte, black plastic. The surfaces have been roughened slightly. A rubber frame that should protect the device against bumps surrounds the base unit. The build does not give reason for criticism, but the stability has room for improvement. The base unit warps a bit too strongly in our opinion. Furthermore, the screen displays image distortions when only pressing the lid's back lightly. The laptop does not have a maintenance hatch and the battery cannot be removed.

The Latitude only sports the most necessary interfaces. The two Type-A USB ports support USB 3.1 Gen. 1 standard. A video-out (HDMI) is present. The interface positioning is unfavorable as they are on level with the wrist rest. Thus, the space beside these areas will not remain free of cables.

A Wi-Fi module that carries a chip by Intel (7265) is inside the laptop. In addition to the 802.11 a/b/g/h/n Wi-Fi standards, it also supports the fast ac-standard. The transmission rates that we measured under ideal conditions (no other Wi-Fi devices in the vicinity, short distance between laptop and server PC) were very good.

Input Devices

The Latitude comes with an unlit chiclet keyboard. The keys are slightly concave and have a lightly roughened surface. They feature a short drop and clear pressure point. The center yields a bit when typing on the keyboard, but that was not distracting in the test. The keyboard makes an overall very decent impression and is even suitable for frequent typing. The multi touch Click Pad has a surface area of approximately 10x5.6 cm, and thus it provides plenty of room for gestures. The pad's sleek surface does not stop the fingers from gliding over it. The pad responds to inputs even in its corners. It has a short drop and clear pressure point.

Processor

Intel's (Apollo Lake) quad-core processor is inside the Latitude. The CPU's low TDP of 6 watts allows passive cooling, and that is also implemented here. The processor operates at a base speed , which can be boosted up to 2.5 GHz via Turbo. Turbo is utilized in both AC and battery modes. The processor achieved much better results than the direct Braswell predecessors (N3700/N3710) in our CPU tests. Intel has managed to increase the performance per MHz considerably. The new architecture delivers as much as 30% more power.

We check whether the Turbo can be utilized permanently by looping the multi-thread test of Cinebench R15 for approximately 30 minutes. The Latitude's scores are largely constant, and thus performance loss was not an issue.

System Performance

The system runs smoothly, and we did not encounter any problems. The computing performance of the SoC installed here is sufficient for the demands of office and Internet applications. The PCMark benchmark scores are very good to good. The much higher performance of both the CPU and GPU become evident here.

Key Features