Pros & Cons
Dell's Pro Max Plus portable workstations offer maximum performance but not the top build quality—the Pro Max Premium line is the one you want for peak design. In practice, that means the Plus models, like the Pro Max 16 Plus reviewed here, don't offer zero-lattice keyboards or haptic touchpads, but they do come packed with powerful components.
How does the Pro Max 16 Plus fit into that formula? On the positive side of the ledger, it delivers top-end performance for demanding workflows, making it a solid choice for businesses to snap up at bulk prices. But its individual sale price (starting at $2,847; $11,063 as tested) is on the exorbitant side—which is bad news for independent contractors who are buying one machine at a time. The 2026 M5 Max version of the Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch is a more well-rounded laptop in its class for a lot less cash, and Dell's own 18-inch Pro Max Plus laptop delivers a better deal among big-screen PC laptop workstations. Both are Editors' Choice award winners.
Configurations: All About Options and Maximum Power
As with most professional-grade laptops, you can configure the Dell Pro Max 16 Plus to create the perfect performance machine for you. Of course, all those top-end components quickly push up the price—bad news if you aren't a business with a bulk sales arrangement.
At the time of publishing, the least you'll pay for a Pro Max 16 Plus is $2,847, with an Intel Core Ultra 5 245HX vPro, 16GB of 6,400MHz DDR5 memory (on a single SO-DIMM, which will dampen performance by limiting the system to single-channel memory transfers), a 512GB solid-state drive, integrated Intel graphics, and a 16-inch 1200p (1,920 by 1,200) IPS non-touch display. That's a steep price on its own. But now consider this: For this laptop's primary audience, the configuration we just gave you isn't potent enough to be usable. You can upgrade the processor to an Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX and the RAM (with more reliable CAMM options) up to 128GB, along with a max 4TB SSD in the primary storage slot. The laptop has three M.2 SSD slots, allowing you to configure up to 12TB of on-device storage.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Dell's discrete-graphics options include a range of Nvidia "Blackwell"-generation professional GPUs, topped by the RTX PRO 5000. Your display choices start with a variety of 1200p panels with various specifications, as well as different webcam and microphone pairings. Then comes the 4K (3,840 by 2,400) OLED touch-screen option that refreshes at up to 120Hz. (The other displays max out at 60Hz.)
My review unit is near the top end, with the Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX, 128GB of CAMM, two 1TB SSDs in a RAID array, the RTX PRO 5000 GPU, and the OLED touch screen—a whopping $11,063 at the time of publishing. Adding more storage could tack thousands more onto the price. Clearly, Dell designed this laptop to start small and scale up to tackle increasingly demanding workflows, but the memory shortage appears to have hit hard. (The upgrade from 16GB to 128GB of memory alone costs $3,100—more than the entire laptop's own starting price.)
Design: Hearty, Heavy, and Still High-Quality
The Pro Max 16 Plus is a large laptop in every sense. At its thickest point, it measures a chunky 1.22 inches, and it tips the scales at 5.63 pounds. It's also fairly wide and deep, measuring 14.2 inches by 10.2 inches. Granted, that's not unusually large compared with PC workstation laptops, but the contrast with the 16-inch MacBook Pro 16 is striking: The Apple machine measures a svelte 0.66 inch thick (and slightly shorter in length and width), and weighs 4.7 pounds.
Some of the difference comes down to power: Apple's Arm chips are built for efficiency, but the Dell's Intel and Nvidia components are much hungrier, which means they need a beefier thermal system to move a lot more air for maximum performance. And, of course, that means more parts and a larger chassis, like the Pro Max 16 Plus' three fans and a stacked vapor-chamber system. You’ll find those kinds of thermal solutions in most gaming laptops, which tend to use similarly powerful components.
In terms of its build quality, the Pro Max 16 Plus delivers the rigidity that’s expected of its high price. The chassis uses 90% recycled magnesium, which gives it stability in the lid, keyboard deck, and bottom cover. You'll feel zero bending, flexing, or twisting anywhere, and the use of magnesium helps keep the weight down. Dell also subjected the laptop to MIL-STD-810H certification, so you have reason to believe the machine will resist many of the usual bumps and scrapes.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Dell also designed the Pro Max 16 Plus with modular components—including the main board and many input interfaces—for easy access and replacement, so organizations and contractors can squeeze years of use out of the pricey machines. For instance, you can swap out its modular USB-C port on the left side if it takes damage during use, and the modular battery is easier to replace yourself. The RAM and SSDs are also upgradable via two SO-DIMMs and three M.2 slots. You’ll want to spend an extra $30 on the optional quick-access bottom door to make it as easy as possible to access the components.
Aesthetically, the laptop doesn’t stand out, and it's not supposed to. The Pro Max 16 Plus is all business, and for a color scheme, you get a single dark gray, with just a subdued logo on the lid and simple lines.
As with all of its business laptops, Dell includes a host of security and management features, such as the Dell Management Portal and the Dell Trusted Update Experience. All the chips in the Pro Max laptops are Intel vPro processors, and Dell has optimized the laptops to make full use of that platform’s added security layers.
Keyboard, Touch, and Webcam: Mundane Input Options
My biggest complaint with the keyboard on Dell's smaller Pro Max 14 Premium model was its no-lattice layout with large keycaps but zero spacing between the keys. I just never got fully comfortable with it. The Pro Max 16 Plus' keyboard has the opposite problem: Its keycaps are too small, and the keys are spaced too far apart for me. I'm constantly hunting for the home row, and that really slows me down. The laptop's key switches are light and snappy enough, but it’s not my favorite keyboard.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The Pro Max 16 Plus also doesn't have a haptic touchpad like the Pro Max 14 Premium's, ahem, premium tracking surface. The 16-incher has a large-enough mechanical trackpad with reliable responsiveness and quiet-yet-substantial clicks, but any laptop this expensive should have a high-end haptic interface. However, Dell reserves that for the Premium lineup, regardless of configuration price.
Dell provides a webcam choice between a pedestrian 1080p camera, the new minimum standard resolution, and a sharper 8-megapixel version capable of recording in 4K and using infrared biometric logins. My review unit has the higher-resolution option, which is helpful for easier logins, but it's not a standout in recording. The laptop's HX-class processor lacks a potent neural processing unit (NPU), so on-device AI processing will likely move to the integrated graphics or a discrete GPU. Dell also sells models with an optional discrete NPU, in the form of a Qualcomm AI-100 Inferencing Card, but that seems to be a custom-ordered component that’s not in the Dell configurator.
Display and Audio: Media Chops That Match the Speed
Dell's 1200p IPS screens don't cut it for a 16-incher, displaying text, graphics, and video that aren't nearly sharp enough for professional work. I reviewed the Pro Max 16 Plus with the high-end 4K (3,840 by 2,400) OLED touch screen and a faster 120Hz refresh rate. It's super-sharp (which anyone would prefer), with bright, dynamic colors and inky blacks. The faster refresh rate makes for a smoother UI and should come in handy in certain content-creation scenarios.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)As with all OLED displays, the color results are stunning. This screen will meet everyone’s needs, from basic productivity to creative work that demands access to lots of colors. It’s not quite bright enough to match a good mini-LED panel when displaying high dynamic range (HDR) content, but the perfect blacks help make up for it.
Dell's stereo speakers aren’t quite as impressive. They’re downward-firing, and as with all setups without woofers, you'll notice scarce little bass. The audio is loud enough, but you'll also get some distortion at full volume. Just reach for a pair of headphones for audio-dependent work.
Connectivity: Future-Proofed in Lots of Ways
Dell didn’t disappoint in the port department. On the left side, you'll find two Thunderbolt 5 USB-C ports, an HDMI 2.1 output, a 2.5Gbps RJ-45 Ethernet port, a full-size SD-card reader, and an optional Smart Card reader. On the right side, you get two USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports, a Thunderbolt 4 USB-C connection, and a 3.5mm audio jack.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)That pretty much covers all the wired connectivity you’ll need for many years. Dell also sells several wireless connectivity options, including various WWAN 5G always-connected eSIM cellular radios, while the basic wireless setup is nearly fully up to date at Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. (We're at Bluetooth 6 now, but it's still a niche standard.)
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(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Performance Testing: Top-End Professional Speed
We reviewed the Pro Max 16 Plus with its highest-end primary components. That includes an Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX processor with 24 cores (eight Performance cores and 16 Efficient cores) and 24 threads running at up to 5.5GHz. It’s an incredibly fast CPU, the fastest available from Intel shy of "Panther Lake."
Just as important for professional applications, the laptop includes an Nvidia RTX PRO 5000 GPU, a Blackwell part at the top of Nvidia’s professional-laptop graphics-chip stack. It sucks down a lot of power, up to 175 watts, with 24GB of GDDR7 video memory and 12,288 CUDA cores for graphics rendering. When running AI tasks, however, it's rated to hit a staggering 1,824 trillion operations per second (TOPS) as measured under INT8 operations.
For comparison, Dell's own Pro Max 18 Plus ($9,193 as tested) is the closest machine with the same components, while our $2,629 HP ZBook Power 16 G11 A review configuration housed an AMD processor. We've added the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i Gen 10 Aura Edition ($1,949.99 as tested) to represent a consumer-facing content-creation system with discrete graphics. Finally, we have the latest 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M5 Max chip and 40-core GPU onboard, a configuration costing $6,149—about $4,900 less expensive than our Dell Pro Max 16 Plus loadout. Things are about to get interesting in these charts.
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
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 subtest measures a PC's storage throughput. (Macs aren't compatible with PCMark 10, so the MacBook Pro is missing from those charts below.)
Three more tests we rely on are CPU-centric or processor-intensive: Maxon's Cinebench 2024 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Creators rates a PC's image-editing prowess through a variety of automated operations in the seminal photo editor Adobe Photoshop 25.
The two Pro Max Plus laptops were consistently tussling in these benchmarks, with the larger 18-inch version coming out a little ahead, thanks to its slightly better thermals and roomier frame. While these were the fastest laptops for demanding productivity work, the other PC workstations and creator laptops also performed well above average.
Then came the MacBook Pro, which dominated every test it participated in. With the Cinebench test, it wasn't even close; ditto for video encoding and photo editing. Apple's Mac laptop continues its reign as the ultimate content-creator device.
Graphics Tests
We challenge all systems’ graphics with a quintet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. The first two, Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K), use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. The next pair, Steel Nomad's regular and Light subtests, focuses on APIs more commonly used for game development to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. Last up, we turn to 3DMark Solar Bay to measure ray-tracing performance. (Macs are not compatible with the 3DMark Wild Life test, so that laptop is missing from the chart below.)
Don't buy the Pro Max 16 Plus if you’re a gamer looking for the fastest frame rates. (Little danger of that, of course, given the price.) The RTX PRO 5000 is a feisty GPU, and that’s reflected in these scores. However, Nvidia optimized the part for professional tasks, including specialized drivers for ISV certifications to guarantee the most reliable performance in apps for work.
Here's what's really interesting: In these tests, the Dell Pro Max 16 Plus starts to edge out the MacBook Pro. While the 40-core GPU on Apple's M5 Max fought valiantly, its 75W power draw just couldn't keep up with the 175W of power draw of Dell's discrete GPU. Of course, these are gaming-specific graphics-rendering tests, and beside the point with a five-figure workstation, but they suggest similar results in other 3D-graphics-dependent tasks.
Workstation-Specific Tests
First, we measure workstation performance with SPECviewperf 2020 (version 3.1), which renders, rotates, and zooms in and out of solid and wireframe models at 1080p resolution. The three subtests represent PTC's Creo CAD platform, Autodesk's Maya modeling and simulation software for film, TV, and games, and Dassault Systèmes' SolidWorks 3D rendering package. Next up is Blender, an open-source 3D content-creation suite for modeling, animation, simulation, and compositing. We record the time it takes for Blender 4.2 to render three distinct scenes to measure CPU and GPU rendering performance.
Then, we run an automated PugetBench for Creators extension in Adobe Premiere Pro that tests real-world video-editing tasks, including live playback, file export, high-res encoding with different codecs, processing and decoding different types of source media, and applying GPU-accelerated special effects. Finally, we also use PugetBench for Creators to test DaVinci Resolve Studio 18 video-editor performance on systems suitable for that challenging app. As with Adobe Premiere Pro, these automated tasks and features push the CPU and GPU, letting us gauge real-world media-creation speeds. (The latest MacBook Pro had trouble posting results for a few of these tests, and is incompatible with SPECviewperf, so it's missing from most charts below.)
These benchmarks help sell the Pro Max 16 Plus' price. The 16-inch Dell ran circles around the HP workstation and Lenovo creator laptop, essentially meeting the Pro Max 18 Plus blow for blow. The MacBook Pro once again flexed its creative muscles with a dominant DaVinci Resolve score.
If you work in fields like AI model development, software engineering, data science, or complex professional 3D rendering, the Pro Max 16 Plus might be worth the investment. However, Dell has the same machine with an even bigger screen for roughly the same price. Dell's 16-incher will do just fine for content-creation work, but Apple's solution is downright more potent in those areas.
Battery Life and Display Tests
We test each laptop and tablet's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
To gauge display performance, we use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor-calibration sensor and its software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
The Pro Max 16 Plus has a 96-watt-hour battery (almost the maximum of 100Whr allowed in a passenger jet carry-on), but it also has top-end silicon and a power-hungry 16-inch 4K OLED display—a combination that doesn't promote extensive battery life. The laptop shut down after less than four hours of running our simple video test, which means you’ll absolutely need to carry around the power brick when you need to get any work done. It’s not the largest adapter I’ve seen, but it still adds some weight. Meanwhile, the Apple's super-efficient M5 Max chip took the 16-inch MacBook Pro for a 27-hour ride.
Dell's OLED display mostly lived up to its potential, particularly in terms of brightness. Short of missing on Adobe RGB coverage, it was a perfect showing for this OLED panel. (Plenty of OLED panels hit 95% of Adobe RGB gamut or better.) Nonetheless, this is an excellent display for every possible use case, narrowly edging out the MacBook Pro's panel in color coverage and trouncing its max brightness.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)