Dell XPS M1710 - Overclocked

by Jarred Walton on 5/8/2007 12:00 PM EST
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  • Tommyguns - Friday, May 11, 2007 - link

    $4000 for a laptop to play games on?!
    Not trying to bash the artical, but whats the point of testing products if the actual market niche for such products is sooooo freaking small!?

    $2000, on a laptop is a lot of money. adding in the fact it needs to play games, do that many people really spend past 3k on one? let alone 4k+?

    If 10-20total fps in DX9 games is worth $2000, then someone let me know...

    Dell inspiron E1705 with a C2D T7200, 7900GS vid card, gig of ram, 9cell + 6cell battery, DVDRW, vista home pre., 17 inch UltraSharp Wide Screen UXGA Display, wireless N card,and a few other odds and ends can be had for $1875. Toss in one of the coupons available online, like the $500 off and its just shy of $1400 for a decently effective gaming laptop. is it the best buy? idont know, but the best well rounded one. also, the XPS 17inch laptop on dells site, with the same parts, retails for around $2500....wtf? yes, no coupon...but still.... I like dell, yet dislike them equaly as much.

    Thus, review a 7900gs dell offering so us poor people can see what an additional $1200+, really can do...Thanks... I would buy tommorow if i knew what all these machines did in terms of gpu power
  • JarredWalton - Friday, May 11, 2007 - link

    Part of the point of the article was to show that the added CPU speed did little to nothing for gaming, so if you're interested in a gaming laptop I'd recommend getting something like the XPS M1710 but sticking with a T7200 and just maxing out the GPU. You can do that for under $3000. Also remember that the configuration as tested has a $500 Blu-ray drive thrown in that many won't care about. So, cut down the CPU ($700) and the BRD ($500) and it's a lot more reasonable.
  • ziddey - Wednesday, May 9, 2007 - link

    Hi, this is definitely an interesting article, but I was a little disappointed in how it was presented and the testing done on it. I hope to not offend, but if you still have the ability to retest further, here's some ideas.

    So we're talking about throttling. If that's the case, how hot is it getting? You can track coretemps of meroms. The popular rmclock can also show any form of throttling in log form as well, and also shows it in graphical format as well. It also features ability to manipulate some finer features of it, although of course, at your own risk.

    Further, I'm assuming this is only possible on upwards unlocked cpu's. In that event, could you just use something like crystal cpuid to change the multiplier?

    Most significantly, how about this: If temperatures are still in line (and based on the track record of conroes, I see no reason they shouldn't, as long as vcore is as low as merom's are), can you set to maximum overclock in bios, and then use rmclock to force maximum multiplier while on AC
  • Deusfaux - Wednesday, May 9, 2007 - link

    either you're homeless or you have an excessive amount of money and a butler or i dont know what

    but for all the reasons that make a laptop advantageous over a desktop, you strip them all away by attempting to make it one of the gaming variety.

    ridiculous cost
    battery life
    size
    weight
    hardly upgradeable

    I feel bad for the continual string of people who are convinced they can get all the benefits of a powerful desktop in a portable package (and not end up being inferior in every aspect)

    Get a laptop that has good portability, get a powerful desktop for gaming. dont try to do both in one.
  • araczynski - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link

    sounds like its a nice laptop for 1280x800 gaming. curious what the screen looks like at that resolution, in comparison to the native resolution 'sharpness'. Does it scale very well or look as crappy as you'd expect the desktop to look at that resolution?
  • suryad - Thursday, May 10, 2007 - link

    More like 1920 x 1200 gaming all except for Stalker which I dont care for much anyway. I am getting this bad boy tomorrow or next week Monday. Can't wait. Worst part is the wait to receive it in your hands...hope i can last the weekend. Also the 3dmark scores area bit low...ntoebooforums people are reporting slightly higher scores...but anywho...super speed here I come!
  • kalrith - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link

    The spec page on page 2 shows *q* every place that quotation marks should be.
  • Gary Key - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link

    Fixed, sorry about that, we are on a new engine now, bugs still seem to pop up. ;)
  • JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link

    Heh... Gary's being nice to me. I screwed up my own table by reusing parts of an old article and forgetting to properly "convert" the generated HTML file into a clean format. That's what sleep deprivation will get you.
  • redfirebird15 - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link

    Is it really possible to get thousands of FPS on Supreme Commander? I've never actually played it, but that looks like a typo. If that is correct, what is the difference between getting 500 FPS and 1000 FPS? I thought it was and RTS anyway.

    It must be a typo.
  • Gary Key - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link

    quote:

    Is it really possible to get thousands of FPS on Supreme Commander? I've never actually played it, but that looks like a typo. If that is correct, what is the difference between getting 500 FPS and 1000 FPS? I thought it was and RTS anyway.


    It is a typo on the chart. The numbers reflected are the total score, not the individual break out on FPS.
  • JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link

    Fixed. SupCom is a generated score from the perftest map (with an edited benchmark script). Sorry about that.
  • yacoub - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link

    what?

    Article says:
    "We weren't able to run our latest gaming benchmarks (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Supreme Commander) on all of the laptops, so performance results for those games won't be included here."
  • JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link

    The XPS M1710 OC scaling charts included SupCom and STALKER results. Just not the other laptops (although I might be able to run the benchmarks on a couple laptops still).
  • yacoub - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link

    I gave up on waiting for laptops to reach reasonable prices. Ordered a nice c2d setup to replace my aging A64 rig and did it for under $425. CPU, RAM, and Mobo. My 7900GT is still enough for now, but when the 8800GTS 640MB hits $350 without rebates I'll probably scoop one of those up too. So still under $800 for a full system upgrade.

    And since I can remote in to my home machine from work and my work machine from home, I really have little need for a laptop, though I do have a company-provided laptop for travel if I really needed to use it. On that flash games (tower defense, etc) are enough to keep me entertained if I'm that desperate to sit in a hotel room(?!). Most likely an mp3 player or a book is all I need in-flight and I'll be out doing things (business or tourist related) when I'm traveling so uber high-end gaming laptops at exorbitant prices just don't really have a use for me, or I'd imagine for most folks.
  • Ender17 - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link

    The graphs would be a lot easier to read if they were labeled with the actual CPU speed instead of Bin 1, Bin 2...
  • redbone75 - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link

    Agreed. Just as easy to put 2.33 - 3.16 as it is to do Bin-0 - Bin-5. Actually, you save a character :)
  • JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link

    Given that the clock speeds are more of a request than an actual result, I didn't want to use those. I couldn't actually see if throttling was occurring during the game benchmarks, but the scores seem to indicate that the CPU was throttling at the Bin-4 and Bin-5 results on some games.

    The names I used came from discussions with Dell, where they referred to the clock speeds as "Bin + 3", but I used a plus sign instead. Given that the scores are all pretty close on many benchmarks, I didn't think too much about it.
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