Dell XPS 1710 Gaming Laptop Review

Dell XPS 1710 Gaming Laptop Review

It happened just the other day. That nauseating feeling you get when your laptop will no longer play the games you want. My Alienware held up well. Two and a half years for any laptop is admirable. The inevitable occurred, while playing Guild Wars, the laptop overheated 3 times. The kiss of gaming death! The Alienware will now find a place at my office running my business software and typing letters. Time to buy a new laptop! This time it’s a Dell XPS 1710.

I’m going to compare my experiences with both Dell and Alienware since many consumers consider the Alienware one of the best gaming laptops in the marketplace.

DISCLAIMER!!! My decision is based on a two year old experience and may not reflect the Alienware Company today. I have recently heard that Dell has bought Alienware so perhaps these issues no longer occur. Two years ago, when I bought my Alienware, I wanted a new laptop to play games on during the Christmas Holidays. I ordered my laptop from Alienware by the cut off date for shipment before Christmas only to be disappointed when it showed up almost a month later. Also the model was touted to have an upgradeable video board, which is extremely desirable with new games pushing your video board’s limits, only for me to find that a year later when I wanted to upgrade they were “no longer supporting the laptop model” and had no upgrades for it. I would think that a year isn’t an unreasonable amount of time to wait but they were very short with me when I confronted them with that. Also on delivery many of us had horrible range with internal WiFi. So bad, that I ended up buying a WiFi card to compensate. Prices on the new Dell and Alienware’s Laptops are comparable with the exception that Dell offered the new 512 MB nVidia GeForce Go where Alienware offered the 256 MB version.

The Dell experience was different from the start. I have ordered many computers both for home and work through Dell and they have been consistent with service. I went to the website (www.dell.com) and clicked on the home and home office section and headed over to the gaming laptop section. I applied for Dell credit and in 30 seconds I was approved and I qualified for 18 months no interest financing. Then I picked the Dell XPS 1710 with a 100 GB drive with the Intel duo core T2500 processor running at 2.0 GHZ. I thought the extra 400 – 500 bucks for a 2.16GHZ wasn’t worth it at this time. Ordered up spare battery and checked out. At checkout, the expected ship date was in 9 days. As contrasted to Alienware’s 6 week wait my Dell XPS arrived at my front door exactly 7 days from ordering. This isn’t unusual for orders from Dell.

17 inch UltraSharp TrueLife Wide-screen WUXGA with Red LCDCover

Optical Drive: 8x CD/DVD burner (DVD+/-RW/+R) with Dual-Layer

Battery: 9-cell lithium ion rechargeable battery

Ports / Slots: 5-in-1 Memory Card Reader, DVI-D, VGA video output, S-Video, IEEE 1394 (Firewire), 6 USB 2.0, Express Card slot, Modem, Ethernet/LAN, Microphone in, Headphone out

Taking it out of the box, the first thing I thought was “Wow this thing looks like a Ferrari”. From the polished sliver with the red top, this is the nicest Laptop I have seen. The case is incredibly sturdy. I feels rock solid and the keyboard is the best I have ever seen on a laptop. The keys have just enough spring and a slight click. The support areas for your hands on the unit while you type are much better than on my previous laptops letting you type more comfortably. The accent lighting is cool. Lights come out from speaker and vent ports. The XPS under the touch pad is lit as is the cover. You are able to change the color of the lights through the software if you feel you must. It’s a fine looking laptop and a pleasure to type on.

Tests have shown that the dual processor architecture will make your overall system performance 27% faster and multimedia 49% faster. My experience is that this laptop is extremely fast. With multiple windows open and downloads running in the background I noticed a speed increase over my other computers, including my Athlon 64 desktops.

7200 RPM 100GB Hard Drive Speeds up this System

It really doesn’t matter how fast your processor or video card is when you have wait for the dang hard drive to load the game, level, or graphics. The hard drive is a common bottle neck in laptop system performance. The Dell’s 7200 RPM SATA hard drive zips along at a nice pace eliminating that long wait at boot up or load. The Hard Drive is mounted on an internal shock absorber as part of Dell’s “RoadReady” technology.

Dell Says “The WUXGA display supports an ultra-high resolution of 1920x1200 and features TrueLifeTM technology, promising rich, vibrant color with crisp clear text and up to a 10% higher contrast ratio versus the same display with an anti-glare coating. The M1710 also boasts a maximum brightness of 250 nits, making it 30% brighter than the previous generation XPS gaming notebook.” . Right out of the box I was considering decreasing the brightness. The display reminds me of the beautiful widescreens you see with the new Apple Macintoshes. The larger viewing area gives you a cinematic feeling when playing games.

nVidia GeForce™ Go 7900 GTX with 512 MB of Video Memory

My Alienware ran on an ATI mobile with 128 megs of memory and it did an admirable job of running games up until recently. The nVidia is truly a mobile gamer’s dream video card. Heck, none of my desktops have that much video memory. The speed rivals SLI systems. Go here - http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=2887&review=Dell+XPS+M1710 for another review and benchmarks on this video and system performance.

Since my Alienware was overheating running Guild Wars on minimal graphics I thought I would try Guild Wars on the new Laptop to see how it runs. After installing I set the resolution to 1900 x 1200, all video settings on the highest quality, with anti-aliasing turned on. I was blown away by how great the graphics were. As I said before, the widescreen gives you the feel you are in a movie. After 2 hours of playing I found no visible slowdown in the graphics engine. Only and occasional hiccup now and then occurred most likely a lag issue.

My desktop here at work and my Alienware laptop both kick in a noisy fan when you start running any graphics intensive application. The bottom of the Alienware actually gets hot enough to burn your legs when playing a modern video game. I purchased a laptop fan to protect the components for that excessive heat. After my two hour session with the Dell XPS 1710 the bottom back was warm but not near enough to be uncomfortable. The fans were whisper quiet. I had to feel the vents to know that they were working. Dell has put a lot of thought into the cooling systems on their new laptops.

I mentioned before that the range on the wireless in the Alienware was so bad that I had to purchase an add-on card. In the XPS the wireless performs great. I have not seen any dropped connections or reduction in connection strength anywhere in the house. However, speed tests run from DSL Reports (www.dslreports.com), show a reduction in throughput with XPS over the Alienware with its PCMIA card. I’ll need to check drivers and run a tweak test to see if the XPS is properly set up to for broadband. Speed reduction, although significant, is not enough to affect game play.

Another innovation that Dell has placed in the XPS is the Media Direct Button. This button above the keyboard has a dual function. If Windows is running it launches the Media center application from the Windows Media Center Edition. This is nice but real surprise comes if you hit the Media Direct Button instead of powering up the XPS with the power button. Hitting the Media Direct Button without power boots Dell’s Media center, a Linux application. In a few seconds you can play your music, watch videos, or watch DVDs avoiding the wait for windows and then media center to boot. DVDs and video look great in both Window’s Media Center and Dell’s media center. Handy controls on the front edge of the XPS allow you to do the usual play, FF, Rewind, Next Chapter, Mute, Pause and Adjust Volume. You can also use the mouse if you wish for play back control.

Most of us don’t expect good sound from our laptop speakers. The XPS, once again surprised me with its sound. Dell has placed a subwoofer on the bottom of the unit and with a little tweaking of speaker settings I am quite satisfied with the sound. The surround sound works well in games. It sounds so good that I am considering not hooking up my USB 5.1 surrounds that I used on the Alienware Laptop.

• 4-pin IEEE 1394 integrated port (1394 cable and software sold separately)
• 6-USB 2.0 (Universal Serial Bus) compliant 4-pin connectors
• Express Card Slot
• RJ11 Modem port
• Video: Digital Video Interface (DVI)
• Video: 15-pin monitor connector
• S-Video: 7-pin mini-DIN connector
• Component Video and S/PDIF digital audio out
• 5-in-1 removable memory card reader
• Audio jacks: Stereo headphones/speakers miniconnector (same as line-out), microphone miniconnector

The Express Card slot is a new design so your old PCMIA cards will not work in the XPS.

Before I purchased the Dell I read the reviews and I agree. Dell has made a great gaming laptop. That coupled with Dell’s service makes this purchase well worth it. As for price expect to pay around $4,000 for the latest, fastest processors. By dropping down one level in processor from 2.16GHz to the 2.00 I was able to save about $400. If you drop processors even further you should be able get an XPS in the $2,000 range. The comparable Alienware laptop did not have the new 512 nVidia board available at the time of ordering. That along with my previous experiences with the Alienware Company swayed my decision firmly to the XPS. However, if Alienware would like to send me their latest laptop to test – I would certainly give an up to date review of their product J.

Alienware just released its new dual SLI 256 GeForce systems. Benchmarks on desktop systems show the 2 - 256 MB SLI cards slightly out perform the single 512MB card (http://www.bjorn3d.com/read_pf.php?cID=855). Whether this is true in with the mobility laptop cards is undetermined. I guess the race never ends!