Dell Latitude 9510 review

Willing to sell your soul to the devil for the longest-lasting laptop ever? Forget about it, this product is real and purchasable. The Dell Latitude 9510 comes with battery life that’ll last you two work days, a bright 15-inch screen and solid performance packed in a super slim design.

However, at a whopping $2,713, it might just be cheaper to sell your soul. And for the price, it doesn’t come with a 4K screen or discrete graphics, and the keyboard will take some time to adjust to.

If you have money to blow and don’t care about display resolution or discrete graphics, the Latitude 9510 is for you, and certainly makes its mark as one of the best business laptops and laptops with best battery life.

Dell Latitude 9510 price and configuration options

The Latitude 9510 that I tested cost a whopping $2,937 and comes with an Intel Core i7-10810 vPro processor, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB M.2 PCIe NVMe Class 35 SSD, a 1920 x 1080 touchscreen display with an anti-reflective and anti-smudge coating as well as an IR camera.

At $1,848, you can pick up the base model of the Latitude 9510, which comes with an Intel Core i5-10210U CPU, 8GB of RAM, a 128GB SSD and a non-touch 1080p display with an anti-glare coating. For the components, this price is straight up highway robbery. For reference, you can buy a 13-inch MacBook Pro for $1,799 and it’ll come with a 10th Gen Core i5 CPU, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD and a 2560 x 1600 display. When Apple one ups you on price and components, there’s a problem.

When looking at the stupidly expensive version of the Latitude 9510, you get everything that comes with our review unit, except it ups the storage to a 1TB SSD and nets you a privacy display on top of that all for $3,129.

Dell Latitude 9510 design

I was blown away when I realized this slim, sleek machine was a 15-inch laptop. Laptops continue to get smaller, while their screen sizes remain large, and the Latitude 9510 is a great example of that.

When it comes to the actual design, the Latitude 9510 is pretty tame, as it nonchalantly flaunts its dark gray hood accompanied by a glossy Dell logo. You’ll notice that it’s incredibly wide at first glance, but that’s because the depth of the machine is so slim that it only seems that way.

The interior of the machine reveals an equally dark gray interior, but it still has a hint of elegance to it, especially as it contrasts against the black-gray keys and incredibly large, near bezel-less display. Surrounding the keyboard, there’s two long top-firing speakers, and you’ll find the power button embedded in the keyboard (which is a no no from us).

The Latitude 9510 is a 2-in-1 laptop, so you can flip this machine into tent mode or tablet mode with a decent bit of resistance, ensuring the stability of each form it takes. In tablet mode, the hinge puts pressure on the lid to stay against the underside of the laptop, which is nice because it ensures that it won’t move out of place when you’re in tablet mode.

At 3.7 pounds and 13.4 x 8.5 x 0.3~0.6 inches, the Latitude 9510 is incredibly slim for a 15-inch laptop. Of course, it’s not as light as the 14-inch Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (8th Gen) (2.4 pounds, 12.7 x 8.5 x 0.6 inches) and the Asus ExpertBook B9450 (2.2 pounds, 12.6 x 8 x 0.6 inches), but the Latitude 9510 is just as thin as its competitors.

Dell Latitude 9510 ports

The Latitude 9510 comes with a decent number of ports considering its slim stature.

On the left, there’s an HDMI 2.0 port, two Thunderbolt 3 ports, a microSD card clot and an optional SmartCard reader (which isn’t featured on our device). Meanwhile, the right side sports one USB Type-A port, a headphone jack and a wedge lock slot.

If you’re in need of more ports, check out our best USB Type-C hubs and best laptop docking stations pages.

Dell Latitude 9510 security and durability

In terms of security features, the Latitude 9510 is outfitted with vPro for remote management and a TPM security chip, but you can also configure it with a Smart Card, a fingerprint reader and an IR camera for Windows Hello.

The Latitude 9510 passed 17 MIL-STD 810G tests, which means that it withstood the test of extreme temperatures, altitudes, shock, sand and dust, vibrations and drops. So, feel confident when things get back to normal, you can travel with this machine pretty much anywhere.

Dell Latitude 9510 display

The Latitude 9510’s 15-inch (that’s right, drop the 0.6), 1920 x 1080 display is relatively bright and colorful, but for costing nearly $3,000, it should be a 4K screen.

In the trailer for The Silencing, actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau’s red jacket popped against the creepy green trees around him. The panel was bright enough for me to catch the outline of the staircase behind him as he stood in an incredibly dim room. I also noticed how sharp his beard hair was on the panel, but it could have been sharper in 4K (just saying).

According to our colorimeter, the Latitude 9510 covered 115% of the sRGB color gamut, which isn’t far off from the 120% premium laptop average. It landed near the ExpertBook B9450 (117%), but was crushed by the ThinkPad X1 Carbon’s 4K screen, which hit 135%

At 308 nits of brightness, the Latitude 9510 is acceptably bright, but couldn’t match up against the 378-nit category average. It was brighter than the ExpertBook B9450 (302 nits), but couldn’t come close to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, which nailed 498 nits (even its 1080p model hit 364 nits).

Dell Latitude 9510 keyboard, touchpad and stylus

Dell shoved a compact keyboard into this slim design, which took a bit to get used to, but overall felt comfortable. However, I did have an issue with the first product I received as the left and right end of the spacebar didn’t seem to register clicks unless there was an annoying amount of pressure used. The replacement I received, however, worked perfectly fine.

I managed only 70 words per minute on the 10fastfingers.com typing test, which is below my usual 78 wpm average. I couldn’t keep up with my average because I was still just barely getting used to the keyboard. Imagine if your current keyboard just slightly shifted to the left. That’s what the Dell keyboard feels like, causing me to hit the wrong keys. The keys themselves are clicky and satisfying to depress, so the keyboard feels good to use, it’s just weird at first.

As an accessory, you can pick up the Dell Active Pen PN579X, which costs $99. The pen features AES 2.0’s 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity, 240Hz report rate and tilt support on the Latitude 9510 with Wacom AES 2.0 technology. However, I didn’t notice the pressure sensitivity change when I first drew a shoddy-looking house. I discovered it was because I used the Paint app, which apparently isn’t compatible with it. When I tested it in the Snip & Sketch app, it worked smoothly and the pen was super accurate.

The 4.5 x 2.6-inch touchpad is silky smooth and offers a pleasantly thick click with each of its buttons. In terms of touchpads, this is the high-class stuff that I love. Windows 10 gestures like two-finger scrolling and three-finger tabbing worked well thanks to the Windows Precision drivers.

Dell Latitude 9510 audio

I am impressed, and that rarely ever happens with laptop speakers. The Latitude 9510’s top-firing speakers were loud, full and offered decent bass. I can only fault it for sounding a bit congested at times.

In Thousand Foot Krutch’s “Be Somebody,” the opening guitar riffs were incredibly bright, nearly overshadowing the vocals at times, which was crisp, but not as full as it could have been. The cymbals and the drums were clean and bassy, properly reenforcing the rest of the song. The electric guitar power chords were a little noisy when the chorus came together, but overall, each instrument was clear and loud.

The Latitude 9510’s speakers benefit from the Dell Optimizer, which has an audio feature that “optimizes and enhances the speaker for clearer, louder and fuller sound.” Unfortunately, the audio section of the app doesn’t have any customizable features apart from being able to enable the optimizer.

Dell Latitude 9510 performance

Packed underneath the Latitude 9510’s hood is an Intel Core i7-10810U vPro processor with 16GB of RAM. It juggled 40 Google Chrome tabs and five 1080p YouTube videos without flinching while Spotify ran in the background.

On the Geekbench 4.3 overall performance benchmark, the Latitude 9510 scored 21,462, surpassing the premium laptop average (17,091). The Core i7-10610U in the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (16,958) and the Core i7-10510U in the ExpertBook B9450 (13,653) didn’t come close.

The Latitude 9510 took 20 minutes and 33 seconds to transcode a 4K video to 1080p on our HandBrake benchmark, which is slightly longer than the category average (18:38). The ThinkPad X1 Carbon completed it in a speedy 18:29, while the ExpertBook B9450 slowed down to a crawl, finishing it in 28:24.

Dell’s 512GB SSD copied 4.97GB of data in 10.3 seconds, translating to 494 megabytes per second, which is slower than the 682-MBps premium laptop average. Meanwhile, the SSDs in the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (998 MBps) and ExpertBook B9450 (771 MBps) excelled in comparison.

Dell Latitude 9510 graphics

The Latitude 9510’s Intel UHD Graphics managed to score 1,068 on the 3DMark Fire Strike synthetic graphics benchmark. With the same GPUs, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon hit a higher 1,219, while the ExpertBook B9450 landed in the measly triple digits, at 734.

On the Sid Meier's Civilization VI: Gathering Storm benchmark (Medium, 1080p), the Latitude 9510 matched the ThinkPad X1 Carbon with a whole 8 frames per second, far below the 25-fps premium laptop average.

Dell Latitude 9510 battery life

Somehow Dell nailed its battery life once again. The Latitude 9510 continuously surfed the web over Wi-Fi at 150 nits of brightness for a whopping 18 hours and 17 before it inevitably tapped out. That is almost double the 9:37 premium laptop average. The ThinkPad X1 Carbon (7:23) didn’t come close, and even with ExpertBook B9450’s wild 16:42, it couldn’t keep up with the Dell.

Dell Latitude 9510 webcam

To my surprise, and I’m not kidding when I say this, Dell’s 720p shooter developed some blurry, blotchy photos. At the very least, I hoped that the Latitude 9510 would have a 1080p webcam for video conferencing.

My hair amalgamated into one giant floof with little to no detail whatsoever. My shirt with 3 tones of green on it messed into one giant green shirt with no patterns. To top that off, the window behind me was just a pure white box due to the poorly balanced contrast. Check out our best webcams page to pick up something better for video conferencing.

Dell Latitude 9510 heat

The Latitude 9510 didn’t have any problems when it came to heat. We put it up against a 15-minute, 1080p YouTube video and the underside reached 96 degrees Fahrenheit, which is just above the 95-degree comfort threshold. The center of the keyboard and touchpad hit 90 degrees and 80 degrees, respectively. Meanwhile, the hottest it got was 101 degrees past the vents on the underside, toward the hinge.

Dell Latitude 9510 software and warranty

As per usual, Dell includes a ton of software with Latitude 9510. There’s the Dell Optimizer app, which lets you speed up the performance of specific apps, customize the audio for better conference calls and improve your battery runtime with its ExpressCharge settings. There’s also the Dell Command app (checks for software updates), Dell Digital Delivery app (delivers software purchases from Dell), Dell Power Manager app (customize the laptop’s battery) and Dell SupportAssist (runs hardware diagnostics, tunes performance and optimizes your network).

There are Windows 10 apps preinstalled, like Office, Word and Excel, but there aren’t any bloatware games that you’d usually see on consumer laptops.

The Latitude 9510 comes with a three-year limited warranty. See how Dell performed on our Tech Support Showdown and Best and Worst Brands special reports.

Bottom line

The Latitude 9510 pulled off an impressive feat with its battery life, not to mention its super-slim size. The solid performance and decently bright display are also nice touches. However, the pricing is absurd, especially since you don’t get a 4K display or a discrete graphics card. Make no mistake, this is a laptop for companies with money to spend, not for your average consumer or mid-range business owner, which is nonsense, because this is a promising laptop and it shouldn’t be overpriced because of its intended user base.

If you’re not a multi-million dollar company with money to blow, just buy the Asus ExpertBook B9450. It has battery life that’s nearly on-par with the Dell and it’s cheaper by over $1,000.

However, if you are a manager eyeing this laptop because you want to equip your employees with a top-of-the-line laptop, then you’ve found it.