Dell Laptop Inspiron XPS M170

...what I replaced it with..........the DELL XPS M170 Gaming Laptop.




System Specs:
Dell XPS-M170
Intel® Pentium® M Processor 760 (2 GHz/2MB Cache/533MHz FSB
Genuine Windows® XP Home Edition
17 inch UltraSharp™ Wide Screen UXGA Display with TrueLife™
2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz 2 Dimm (upgraded from 1GB)
60GB 7200rpm Hard Drive
8x CD/DVD burner (DVD+/-RW) ...
...which is easily done as DELL supply an operating system disc as well as driver discs and other software. Once I finished the re-format I was pleased to see I had 93% free disc space as opposed to the 84% the laptop had when it first arrived.

Screen Resolution:
I find the screen to be very clear and the performance is everything I expected for the price. The 1920x1200 resolution took me a bit to get use to as I have been use ... more

You may have seen my review for the TOSHIBA Satellite Pro L10 only a few months back. It was a nice little laptop for £500, but it did not have the kind of power I craved for the latest gaming and multimedia applications. This is what I replaced it with..........the DELL XPS M170 Gaming Laptop.

System Specs:
Dell XPS-M170
Intel® Pentium® M Processor 760 (2 GHz/2MB Cache/533MHz FSB
Genuine Windows® XP Home Edition
17 inch UltraSharp™ Wide Screen UXGA Display with TrueLife™
2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz 2 Dimm (upgraded from 1GB)
60GB 7200rpm Hard Drive
8x CD/DVD burner (DVD+/-RW) with double-layer DVD+R write capability
Intel® PRO/Wireless 2200 Internal Wireless (802.11 b/g, 54Mbps)
256MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ Go 7800 GTX. Extreme Graphics Performance
The NVIDIA 256MB GeForceTM Go 7800 GTX and 6800 Ultra graphics cards can allow you to Play the hottest game titles that utilize Shader technology, supported in Genuine DirectX 9.0 and OpenGL. Experiencing stunning visual effects, and detailed color and image precision. The GeForce Go doesn't only help raise the quality of your notebook graphics - it brings them to a standard that can nearly match its desktop PC counterpart. Supporting Genuine DirectX® 9.0 with Shader Model 3.0, NVIDIA PureVideoTM technology and NIVIDIA UltraShadowTM II
Cost. £1700 (yeah I know....ouch)

Packaging:
The system arrived nicely boxed with nothing loose floating around in the box. Upon opening the box upon first inspection I thought the top was scratched, but luckily it was just in the protective film on the top. Once I took off the film I was pleased to find a very nicely brushed aluminum cover (scratch free)!

Initial start-up:
After going through the normal set-up prompts I finally get into Windows to see how everything looks. My only real complaint is that the system comes with too many useless programs installed (useless to a gamer at least). I decided to re-format the hard drive and get rid of the clutter (bloatware) which is easily done as DELL supply an operating system disc as well as driver discs and other software. Once I finished the re-format I was pleased to see I had 93% free disc space as opposed to the 84% the laptop had when it first arrived.

Screen Resolution:
I find the screen to be very clear and the performance is everything I expected for the price. The 1920x1200 resolution took me a bit to get use to as I have been use to a 15 inch screen running at 1024x768 so needless to say everything seemed a bit small at first.

Movie Playback:
One of the first things I did was to throw in a few movies to check the DVD playback quality. I was very pleased with the quality of the DVD playback on the 17" wide-screen; the picture quality rivaled any other LCD screen at this size including LCD TVs. The buttons on the front of the system make adjusting sound, pausing and re-starting convenient.

Gaming Performance:
The game I installed for this review was F.E.A.R. Why? Because I believe that F.E.A.R. is the most system taxing game out right now. At first set-up I became a little worried because the game set my computer at minimal during the auto-config. I initially set-up the game with max settings for both computer and graphics and returned the following tests.
Initial test at 1024x768: 24fps min, 45fps average and max of 103fps (below 25fps 1%, between 25 and 40 fps 46% and above 40fps 53%).
Lowering the resolution to 800x600: yielded a test of 36fps min, 66fps average and max of 163fps (below 25fps 0%, between 25 and 40 fps 13% and above 40fps 87%).
Raising the resolution to 1600x1200: 11fps min, 21fps average and max of 45fps (below 25fps 77%, between 25 and 40 fps 22% and above 40fps 1%).
As you can see running at 1600x1200 yielded un-acceptable results.
800x600 or 1024x768 is the way to go. Considering some desktops would be hard-pressed to get these numbers I was very pleased and I'm sure with some tweaking I can get higher numbers without giving up too much graphics quality. I really wished F.E.A.R. ran in a native wide-screen mode. Next I try Half Life 2 and Call of Duty 2....
Half Life 2 runs at maximum resolution (1920x1200) with all settings maxed out and looks unbeleivable with no severe drops in frame rate. Impressive stuff!
Call of duty 2 I also played with all the settings maxed out and was just as pleased with the performance but it ran just that little bit better at 1024x768 (especially online)

Sound:
The stock speakers and sub woofer are a nice feature, but for playing games nothing compares to a good set of headphones. I choose to use headphones mostly (sennheiser HD 650- £170) I must say that playing F.E.A.R. with headphones is bloody well scary as you can hear every little footstep and ambient noise in the game (it really adds to the experience). I also tossed on the headphones while watching Goodfellas and the sound was superb. If you prefer not to use headphones you wont be dissapointed with the intergrated stereo speakers and built in subwoofer, they do a bloody good job beleive me.

Overall Conclusion:
As a portable desktop replacement the Dell XPS M170 fits the bill perfectly, at just over 8.5lbs this user feels the portability of the system is more than one could hope for with features and power to spare. As a gaming laptop the Dell XPS M170 is an extremely capable system the only thing that might make the system better would be if Dell would experiment with using AMD CPU's. AMD still holds the edge where gaming is concerned, but these latest crops of Intel chips are closing the gap, especially where portable gaming is concerned. The standard features on the base system are probably more than enough for most users. The 2gig of ram and NVIDIA 7800 GTX video card my system has is probably overkill for the current crop of games, but this just means I will most likely be sitting well for the next couple of years with this system. Hopefully I will not need to upgrade till after Windows Vista and Vista enhanced games start to arrive. This notebook is totally packed with some of the latest technology to help you handle any application, any game or any task with confidence.

 

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