Dell Pro Max 16 Plus Review – A More Mobile NVIDIA RTX Pro 5000 Blackwell

Dell’s line of laptops has had its ups and downs over the years, but one area that has been steady and strong has been their high-end workstation computers. The new Dell Pro Max line of workstations have a single mission: be big, move fast, and spare no expense.

This makes for a laptop range which, from a pure performance point of view, is Dell's flagship for professional and enterprise customers. The Dell Pro Max series is Dell’s big effort for mobile consumers. It’s available in 16-inch and 18-inch display sizes, has plenty of connections, and accelerator options ranging from NVIDIA graphics cards to Qualcomm discrete NPUs.

Today we are taking a look at the little brother. The Dell Pro Max 16 Plus. It is categorized as a desktop replacement notebook by Dell. What's the objective? Pack as much powerful technology as you can into a chassis that is yet portable enough to lug along.

With a moniker full of superlatives, the Dell Pro Max nearly promises flagship speed. And our evaluation unit does just that thanks to an Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX CPU, NVIDIA’s RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell GPU, and even PCIe Gen5 SSDs in a RAID stripe setup. That's about as high-end as you can go in a 16-inch laptop.

Key points from our study of the Dell Pro Max 16 Plus:

• Premium build quality and a decent number of ports
• Desktop-class performance in a mobile form factor
• Great for CAD, AI workloads, video editing and data science

Thus excellent heat control despite the powerful components

If you’re in the market for a real mobile workstation, the Dell Pro Max series is hard to beat. Be sure to check out our full performance benchmarks and battery life testing.