Introduction

It has been just over a year since we first looked at Dell's XPS M1710 notebook. When we initially reviewed it, it sported the fastest currently available Intel mobile processor, the Core Duo T2600 (2.16 GHz). It also included NVIDIA's at the time sparkling new GeForce Go 7900 GTX graphics chip. Naturally, the result was some of the fastest performance we had ever seen from a gaming notebook. One downside was that the price was equally high, but when you look at the various gaming oriented notebooks that are available the XPS M1710 remains competitive.


Since the initial review, a few new products have launched. On the graphics side of the equation, NVIDIA now offers their GeForce Go 7950 GTX (600/1150 MHz Core/RAM), which offers slightly improved core clock speeds relative to the original GeForce Go 7900 GTX (500/1200 MHz Core/RAM). There has been a minor drop in GPU memory speed, but the increased core speed more than makes up for this. The far bigger product launch that has occurred is of course Intel's Core 2 Duo line, which addressed pretty much all of the shortcomings of the original Core Duo as well as providing higher clock speeds in the mobile market.

We have looked at several Core 2 Duo equipped laptops, including laptops from ABS Computers and ASUS; the ABS Mayhem Z5 even competes as a gaming notebook and it included a GeForce Go 7900 GTX (and is now available with a 7950 GTX). The difference and the point of this article, as you have likely guessed, is that Dell's XPS M1710 also gives customers the option of purchasing a Core 2 Duo T7600G. The T7600G is something like the Core 2 Extreme for laptops, in that the multiplier is unlocked. Ever since the launch, enthusiasts have found the Core 2 Duo chips to be highly overclockable, at least on desktop computers. There are few laptop manufacturers that offer any such capabilities, so this is the first chance we've had to try mobile overclocking.

Besides faster graphics cards and processors, a few new storage options are also available, as well as the Windows Vista operating system. We won't go into a lot of detail about the construction and design of the XPS M1710, as the external appearance hasn't changed at all since our initial review. We refer back to that along with the follow-up article for those interested in additional details, but we will still start with a brief look at the features of the system we were sent for review.



System Features

When looking at configuring an XPS M1710 notebook, there are four starting points. Depending on which price bracket you select, certain upgrades and/or downgrades are eliminated. The more economical configurations start with slightly lower performance parts by default, while the high-end configurations max out nearly everything and only need a few minor tweaks before you're ready to purchase. For example, the $2300 model starts with a T7200 processor, 1GB of RAM, a GeForce Go 7900 GS, and a DVD/CD-RW combo drive; in contrast the $3700 configuration starts with a T7600 processor, 1GB of RAM, a GeForce Go 7950 GTX, and a Blu-ray optical drive. We were sent a higher spec system for testing with a price that starts at around $4600 with a one-year warranty, configured as follows.

Dell XPS M1710 Specifications
Processor	Intel Core 2 Duo T7600G (2.33 GHz, 4MB shared L2, multiplier unlocked)
Chipset	Intel 945PM 64-bit Dual-Channel
Memory	Samsung 2x1024MB DDR2-667 5-5-5-13-21
Graphics	NVIDIA GeForce Go 7950 GTX 512MB GDDR3 (600/1150 Core/RAM clocks)
Display	17" WUXGA (1920x1200) UltraSharp with TrueLife
Expansion Slots	One ExpressCard 54mm slot supporting 1.5V and 3.3V, ExpressCard/34 and ExpressCard/54, 26 pins
Hard Drive	Seagate ST9160823AS 160GB SATA 3.0Gbps 7200 RPM
Optical Drive	Matshita Blu-ray BF-RE UJ-210
USB2.0	(6) USB2.0 ports (four rear ports, two ports on left)
Networking/Communications	Integrated 10/100/1000 PCIe Gigabit Ethernet and 56K Modem Intel Pro/Wireless 3945 802.11a/b/g Mini Card
Audio	24-bit High Definition Audio with 2.1 Speakers Sound Blaster Audigy HD Software Edition
Firewire	4-pin Unpowered IEEE 1394A (right side)
Back I/O Ports	1 x RJ45 LAN 4 x USB 2.0 1 x RJ11 Modem 1 x DVI-D 1 x VGA 1 x S-VIDEO Out
Keyboard	87 Key QWERTY (US)
Battery	9-Cell 80WHr Smart Lithium Ion
Dimensions	1.7"x15.5"x11.3" (HxWxD) 8.8 lbs. (Display, 9-Cell battery, DVD-Combo drive)
Power Adapter	130W 1.42"x2.56"x6.67" (HxWxD), 1.68 lbs. with cables
Chassis	Metallic Black Dell XPS M1710 or Special Edition Formula Red Dell XPS M1710
Other Features	5-in-1 Flash Reader (MS, MS Pro, SSD/SDIO, MMC, xD Headphone and Microphone connectors (or 4 channel audio) XPS 16 Color Configurable Accent Lighting Trackpad with scroll bars

If you start with the $2300 model, the upgrade from a T7200 (2.0 GHz) to the T7600G (2.33 GHz unlocked) adds $700 to the price - and getting the unlocked T7600G adds $275 over the cost of the T7600! While that might seem like a big jump in price for a small increase in performance, the T7600 is also $250 more than the T7400 (2.16 GHz), so if you're really after maximum CPU performance in a notebook being able to easily overclock your processor to well beyond the fastest official speed from Intel might be worthwhile. For most people, we feel that the T7200 still offers the best overall choice, as it's more than fast enough for just about any application.

Other major costs include the Blu-ray drive (about $475 more than the 8X DVD+RW), Windows Vista Ultimate ($200 extra relative to Vista Home Premium), and the 7950 GTX ($400 more than the 7900 GS). How important these upgrades are is up for personal interpretation, and of course end-users are free to select components as they see fit. Worth noting is that Blu-ray is only an option with Windows Vista, and it's also only available on the most expensive XPS M1710 build, the "Hi-def Viewing" configuration. The Blu-ray playback certainly works, but we're still hesitant to recommend investing in such a system.

When we first received the notebook, Dell had sent us what amounts to their maximum performance configuration. Shortly after the notebook arrived, however, Dell (and Alienware) became the first notebook manufacturer to offer Seagate's newest 250 GB 5400 RPM 2.5" hard drives. We expect performance of the larger hard drive to actually be lower than the 160 GB 7200 RPM drive in our test system, but users that need increased storage capacity might be interested in the updated hard drive offering. Of course, if you just need a lot of storage space for your notebook but you don't always require it, purchasing an external hard drive would allow you to store for more data with a lower total cost; unfortunately, that's just one more piece of equipment to tote around when you're on the road.

Despite all of the high-end options, it should come as little surprise that in gaming situations even the mighty GeForce Go 7950 GTX is going to be the limiting factor at most resolutions and detail settings likely to be used with this sort of notebook. If you are after maximum mobile gaming performance, would consider looking at getting a Core 2 Duo SLI notebook. While prices for such systems start at over $4000, the XPS M1710 really isn't much cheaper. We hope to have a review of Alienware's m7950 in the near future, which is one such notebook. For those who tend to run CPU limited applications more, however, the M1710 might be the better choice.



Mobile Overclocking

Anyone familiar with overclocking desktop systems probably has certain preconceived notions about how overclocking will affect a laptop. We certainly had our fair share, but the requirements of the platform as well as Dell's take on mobile overclocking make things a bit more complex, at least in terms of the performance offered. With a desktop system, there are all sorts of BIOS options that can be tweaked in order to maximize your system overclock and improve performance. Overclocking of the M1710 is also accomplished via the BIOS, and there's only a single setting to change. This is simplicity in overclocking at its finest, but the results may not be what you expect.

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There's no need to worry about voltages, memory speeds or timings, or anything else. Basically, you just set the appropriate CPU speed within the BIOS, reboot, and you're off and running. There are six overclock settings available, with clock speeds ranging from the default 2.33 GHz up to the maximum 3.16 GHz in 166 MHz increments. We will refer to these overclock settings as Bin-0 through Bin-5. Amazingly, system stability was absolutely never a problem in well over a month of strenuous testing. Regardless of what setting we chose, we didn't have a single crash or lockup of the XPS M1710. Considering we were setting the CPU to run at as high as 37% over factory default (the maximum 19X CPU multiplier the BIOS allows) and were dealing with a CPU running in the cramped confines of a notebook, we were more than just a little pleased with how easy it was to improve system performance via overclocking. However, as we mentioned, the end results are a little bit more complex than simply choosing a setting and forgetting about anything else.

Unlike on desktop systems, where you can basically force the CPU to always run at a specific speed, laptops usually enable power saving features that allow the processor to run at slower speeds. Core 2 Duo mobile processors can run at 1.0 GHz in their low-power state, and this doesn't change with overclocking on the M1710. When the system is idle, regardless of what Core 2 Duo processor you're using, the M1710 will run at 1.0 GHz. That's not really a problem, since if the system is idle it doesn't need to run any faster. Once you start doing some work that requires more processing power, Intel's SpeedStep will increase processor speed to deal with the demands of whatever applications are running. If you disable SpeedStep within the BIOS on the XPS M1710, the CPU will always run at 1.0 GHz.

Once a load is placed on the processor and the CPU speed begins running at the maximum clock speed you've selected within the BIOS, temperature comes into play. If the processor becomes too hot, clock speeds can be temporarily reduced to a lower value, and once temperatures have dropped back to acceptable levels the clock speed will increase again. Being a dual core processor, we found that the CPU throttling only occurred when both cores had a significant load, and even then throttling only occurred at the two highest overclock settings during our testing. However, the test environment will certainly play a role in how hot the system gets, and if you're actually daring enough to run CPU intensive applications with the notebook sitting in your lap with your legs potentially restricting airflow into the bottom vents, throttling may occur more frequently.

It's difficult to say exactly how often the CPU will throttle back, but we did some basic testing of performance using the Windows SMP version of Folding@Home. This allowed us to look at performance with the CPU under load for long periods of time, and what we found is that performance increases tapered off beyond the Bin-3 setting. At the stock Bin-0 setting, Folding Project 2610 averaged around 16:30 (minutes:seconds) per segment while at Bin-3 folding times dropped to around 14:25. Bin-4 and Bin-5 were both about the same as Bin-3, but there was greater variance in segment times. It could be as low as 13:50 and as high as 14:30 per segment with the average being roughly 14:15 and the theoretically slower Bin-4 usually averaged fractionally (i.e. a few seconds faster per segment) better times than Bin-5. We loaded up CPU-Z while Folding@Home was running and found that Bin-0 through Bin-3 never experienced any CPU throttling; at Bin-4, CPU-Z would show a clock speed of 3.0 GHz for about 15 seconds followed by a clock speed of 2.67 GHz for seven or eight seconds; and at Bin-5 the CPU throttling was much more rapid, usually running at 3.16 GHz for a few seconds followed by 2.67 GHz for a few seconds, and sometimes even 2.33 GHz for brief periods of time.

After discovering this behavior, we determined we needed to investigate the performance situation further to establish the optimal overclock setting, if such a thing existed. We ended up running all of our benchmarks at every overclock setting, with somewhat interesting results. In some applications, the higher overclock settings were always faster; in others, the CPU wasn't the bottleneck and all of the scores were nearly equal; in still others, performance was actually lower at the top two overclock settings. Performance variations were also quite a bit larger, particularly at the maximum Bin-5 setting, most likely due to variations in how much CPU throttling occurred during the benchmark run.



Overclocking Performance - General Applications

We wanted to focus on the benefits of overclocking with the XPS M1710, so we'll start our performance results there. One of the first things we did when we received the notebook was to set the maximum overclock and begin stress testing, and after discovering that the system ran stable we didn't think there would be much need to test any of the other options. However, due to increased noise levels, temperatures, and periodic CPU throttling we decided it was necessary to test all six clock speed settings. We used a variety of commonly available benchmarks which we won't bother to describe here. If you need one more details about the benchmarks, feel free to ask in the comments section. Test settings for the games were generally maximum detail with 0xAA/8xAF and 4xAF where noted.






Starting with the general system performance benchmarks, we immediately get some interesting results. SYSmark 2004 appears to benefit at every clock speed increase up to the maximum, although the relative increase is less at the top two settings. Looking at the separate Internet Content Creation and Office Productivity results, the Internet Content Creation test suite hardly benefits at all with the final speed bump, whereas the Office Productivity results continue to scale well all the way through Bin-5. PCMark05 achieves its best performance at the Bin-3 setting, but MobileMark 2005 shows a serious drop off in performance at the maximum clock speed. We actually ran the MobileMark 2005 Productivity test several times at the Bin-5 setting just to verify the results, and we reported the best score out of the three individual test runs. The other two scores were 272 and 284.

The severe drop in performance in MobileMark 2005 may be a result of running on battery power, as it's possible the battery couldn't handle the load and the system was forced to reduce processor speed. This particular test represents the most severe drop in performance we measured at the maximum setting, and given the requirement that MobileMark run on battery power our conclusion for now is that users shouldn't overclock - especially to the maximum setting - if they aren't going to be plugged in. We would generally recommend that anyway, as the overclock settings are simply going to further reduce battery life and the system as it stands already has a relatively short mobile lifespan.



Overclocking Performance - 3D and Multimedia

After looking at the results from our benchmark suites, we were interested to see what would happen in more real-world test scenarios. We were particularly interested in multimedia performance, as that's one of the areas where increased processor speeds can be useful. We also wanted to see if CPU throttling would come into play at the higher overclock settings like it did in Folding@Home comparisons. Here are the results from Cinebench 9.5 along with several encoding tests.







Interestingly enough, nearly all of these tests continue to scale up through the highest clock speeds, although in QuickTime H.264 and Windows Media Encoder tests the difference between Bin-5 and Bin-4 is very small. We expected the single core Cinebench results to scale almost linearly with clock speed increases, but with the higher demands of two CPU cores we thought CPU throttling might become an issue on the multi-core Cinebench test. That wasn't the case, but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll always get higher performance at Bin-5 in 3D rendering applications. The multi-core Cinebench test only takes about half a minute to finish, so it could simply be that there wasn't enough time for the CPU to get warm enough that throttling was necessary. The results from the video encoding tests seem to support that theory, as the two tests that take the longest to run (Windows Media Encoder and especially QuickTime H.264) start to show smaller improvements beyond the Bin-3 setting.



Overclocking Performance - 3DMark

Everyone is basically familiar with the 3DMark benchmarks, and while they aren't games per se, they provide a relatively consistent way of comparing system performance. They are also useful in that they run some CPU tests that tend to put a heavy load on the processor for a relatively long period of time. On the later versions of 3DMark, the CPU tests are also multithreaded, so they can utilize 100% of a dual core processor. After the QuickTime H.264 results, we wanted to see if other lengthier CPU stress tests would show similar behavior.









The GPU oriented tests all demonstrate the same thing: 3DMark is a great way of seeing just how fast your graphics card is. None of the graphics tests show anything more than a very slight increase in performance from the increased processor speed. If these results correlate to actual gaming performance, we shouldn't expect to see much difference in performance at the various CPU overclock settings.

On the other hand, the CPU tests show exactly the sort of behavior we expected based on the QuickTime results. In all three CPU tests, Bin-5 scores lower than Bin-4, and in 3DMark05 and 3DMark06 Bin-3 is the best setting for maximum CPU performance. If our testing with Folding@Home holds true for all situations, users shouldn't experience CPU throttling at any of the overclock settings up through Bin-3, and it appears that some of the more CPU intensive applications may actually result in enough thermal throttling that Bin-4 and Bin-5 end up running slower than Bin-3. However, this appears to only hold true when both CPU cores are placed under 100% load for an extended period of time.



Overclocking Performance - Games

The 3DMark results were certainly interesting, and they showed a couple of things. First, extremely CPU intensive applications may not benefit beyond the Bin-3 overclock setting. Second and more pertinent to our actual gaming tests is that the 3DMark results indicate there's a good chance we will be GPU limited in many gaming benchmarks. Of course, the only way to really find out how games will perform at the various settings is to benchmark those games. All tests were run without antialiasing except where indicated. As the XPS M1710 (and most other new laptops) features a widescreen LCD, we restricted our test resolutions to widescreen settings.














As expected, at the higher quality settings and particularly at the native 1920x1200 resolution, increasing CPU performance does virtually nothing for gaming performance. Battlefield 2 shows the best performance scaling from overclocking, but only without antialiasing. Considering you can average over 60 frames per second even with 4xAA, we don't see any reason to disable it on this particular notebook. In those instances where we do see a slight separation among the various processor speeds, Bin-3 and Bin-4 usually end up as the highest performing settings, although Quake 4 without antialiasing seems to favor Bin-2 at lower resolutions for whatever reason. Given the margin of error and the tightly clustered scores on these benchmarks, however, it is doubtful you would actually notice the difference in performance when playing games. For gaming purposes, users should probably just stick with the stock CPU setting as anything more won't really help much. Still, there doesn't appear to be any harm in running up to a Bin-3 setting other than slightly higher noise levels from the system fans.



Comparison Test Setup

So far we've only compared the XPS M1710 performance against itself at the various overclock settings. Based on the results, we recommend a Bin-3 setting as the best overclock setting for the majority of applications. We compared performance results of the XPS M1710 at stock and Bin-3 overclock settings against previously reviewed notebooks. Here are the configurations used on the four notebooks being compared.

Tested Configurations
ASUS A8JS
Processor	Core 2 Duo T7200 2.0 GHz 4MB L2 667FSB
Memory	2x1024MB Infineon DDR2-667 5-5-5-15-21 Timings
Graphics	NVIDIA GeForce Go 7700 512MB 3D Clocks: 450/800
Hard Drive	Hitachi 100GB 7200 RPM SATA
Optical Drive	8X DVD+/-RW
Battery	6-Cell 53WHr/4800 mAHr
Operating System	Windows XP Pro SP2
ASUS G2P
Processor	Core 2 Duo T7200 2.0 GHz 4MB L2 667FSB
Memory	2x1024MB Infineon DDR2-667 5-5-5-15-21 Timings
Graphics	ATI Mobility Radeon X1700 512MB 3D Clocks: 459/990
Hard Drive	Hitachi 160GB 5400 RPM
Optical Drive	8X DVD+/-RW
Battery	8-Cell 71WHr/4800 mAHr
Operating System	Windows XP Pro SP2
ABS Mayhem Z5
Processor	Core 2 Duo T7200 2.0 GHz 4MB L2 667FSB
Memory	2x1024MB Corsair DDR2-667 5-5-5-15-21 Timings
Graphics	NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GTX 512MB 3D Clocks: 500/1200
Hard Drive	Hitachi 100GB 5400 RPM SATA
Optical Drive	8X DVD+/-RW
Battery	8-Cell 65WHr/4400 mAHr
Operating System	Windows XP Pro SP2
Dell XPS M1710
Processor	Core 2 Duo T7600G 2.33 GHz 4MB L2 667FSB (Unlocked)
Memory	2x1024MB Samsung DDR2-667 5-5-5-13-21 Timings
Graphics	NVIDIA GeForce Go 7950 GTX 512MB 3D Clocks: 600/1150
Hard Drive	Hitachi 100GB 5400 RPM SATA
Optical Drive	8X DVD+/-RW
Battery	9-Cell 80WHr/7200 mAHr
Operating System	Windows XP Pro SP2

Obviously, we're not dealing in apples-to-apples comparisons. While Dell gives users plenty of customization options, the same is not always true of other notebooks. Given the price and features, we can of course expect the Dell XPS M1710 to come out on top in all of our benchmarks. The ABS Mayhem Z5 should place second, and it should be somewhat interesting to see how the GeForce Go 7900 GTX compares to the GeForce Go 7950 GTX. The Mayhem Z5 was also equipped with a slower processor, so we're not able to directly compare GPU performance, but at a higher detail settings and resolutions the CPU shouldn't be the bottleneck so we'll be able to see whether the higher core speeds of the 7950 are truly more useful than the slightly higher memory bandwidth of the 7900.



Comparative Performance - General, 3D and Multimedia

Starting out with a look at general application performance, we can expect the primary factor to be the processor speed in most of these tests. A few might tax the graphics card a bit (PCMark05) and hard drive performance can also play a factor, but the processor is going to be doing the lion's share of the work.











As expected, the Dell XPS M1710 comes out on top in all of these benchmarks. It has the fastest processor, graphics card, and hard drive so we would have been shocked if the results had been other than what we see here. The 21% Bin-3 overclock setting merely increases the performance gap. Plenty of other companies should be able to match the performance of the XPS M1710 by offering similar configurations, but unless they also offer overclock options they won't be able to match the maximum performance that Dell currently offers. Of course, Dell offers no guarantee that you can actually run their laptop with full stability at the various overclock settings, but as stated during testing we never encountered any difficulties even when running our most strenuous test scenarios.



Comparative Performance - 3DMark and Games

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. It's not likely our opinions would have been changed at all by running any other gaming benchmarks, however, as the pattern is pretty clear.





















A faster graphics card and a faster processor lead to higher benchmark results. No surprise there, although the margin of victory of the Dell M1710 over the ABS Mayhem Z5 is at times larger than we would have expected. Obviously, the 20% higher GPU core speed of the GeForce Go 7950 GTX helped out quite a bit relative to the older GeForce Go 7900 GTX.



Comparative Performance - Battery Life

Long battery life is obviously not the main goal of the XPS M1710. However, we were still curious to see how it would compare to the other laptops. One of the interesting aspects is that because SpeedStep is always enabled even with overclocking, battery life isn't severely impacted by running the processor at higher performance settings. We limited our battery testing to best and worst case scenarios, in this case Bin-0 and Bin-5 overclock settings. While we've already explained that Bin-5 is generally not the best setting for optimal performance, we did run MobileMark 2005 Productivity at all of the various overclock settings and battery life was lower with Bin-5 than any of the others (despite the much lower performance score).







Somewhat surprisingly, the higher performance XPS M1710 does manage to offer longer battery life than the ABS Mayhem Z5. Even in the worst-case maximum overclock configuration the M1710 still outlasts the Mayhem. Of course, that's not saying much when compared with the battery life the ASUS A8JS offers, and if you don't need gaming performance and value mobility there are other laptops that can easily surpass any of the laptops tested here. The longer battery life can also be attributed to a larger battery capacity, as the M1710 comes with an 80 WHr battery in comparison to the 65 WHr battery of the Mayhem Z5.

You can see the test results for our simulated mobile gaming as well, but you'll have to take those with a grain of salt. We looped 3DMark06 continuously until the battery ran out and recorded how long the system was active. While that should provide the information we need, the one fly in the ointment is that when running on battery the GeForce Go 7950 GTX was always running at lower clock speeds. We thought this might be a driver problem at first, but after speaking with Dell we were informed that the battery cannot deliver enough power to run the GPU at maximum clock speed. In order to avoid causing problems with the battery, GPU performance is reduced in mobile mode. Various benchmarks indicate that the GPU is roughly one third as fast as normal when the power cord is unplugged.



Closing Thoughts

As we mentioned at the outset, it's been over a year since we first looked at Dell's XPS M1710. While plenty of things have changed during the past year, our overall impression of the notebook hasn't been altered much. Maximum performance is now better than ever, and the notebook certainly has an eye-catching design. By no means is it an inexpensive notebook, but for those looking to get maximum performance while maintaining mobility Dell's XPS notebook line certainly warrants a closer look.

About the biggest fault that we can find with the XPS M1710 is something that's out of Dell's hands. The GeForce Go 7900 GTX launched over a year ago, and more than six months ago the GeForce Go 7950 GTX improved performance. In the desktop market, however, GeForce 7 series hardware is now old news. If you like to stay abreast of the latest technology news, you probably already know that NVIDIA's going to be launching their mobile GeForce 8000 GPUs very shortly. Unfortunately, as yet there is no successor to the GeForce Go 7950 GTX performance crown. Soon you will be able to get DirectX 10 equipped laptops, but at best we expect the graphics performance to match or slightly surpass that of the GeForce Go 7900 GS - just like the desktop 8600 GTS isn't always faster than the 7900 GS, we expect the mobile equivalents will trade blows up with no clear winner. We still don't have any DirectX 10 games to play, but every day that passes brings such games nearer to release and we would be very hesitant to lay down a lot of money right now on a gaming laptop that won't be able to run those games in all their glory once they become available.

With Dell able to offer an overclocking capable Core 2 Duo laptop, we also have to wonder when Core 2 Quad chips will begin showing up in a mobile form factor. Obviously, we're not going to see 2.93 GHz QX6800 equivalents anytime soon, but some users would certainly be willing to give up a few hundred megahertz in clock speed in order to add more processor cores. Perhaps when Intel begins shipping 45 nm processors we will start to see quad core notebooks. Just like quad core desktops, however, that sort of performance isn't something that many people need right now.

Since the overclocked M1710 that we tested today has been available for a while, it stands to reason that if you didn't want to buy it when it was first launched you probably still aren't interested. You can now get a larger hard drive, Windows Vista, Blu-ray, and who knows what Dell will add in the near future; however, at its core the M1710 remains largely unchanged. It is an attractive, fast, and expensive laptop; the only tests where it didn't come out on the top of our charts are the battery life results, which is a sacrifice that typically has to be made when looking at gaming laptops. If you're in the market for just such a laptop, give the XPS M1710 a look. As usual, however, if you're in no hurry to purchase something right now we would recommend waiting to see what the future holds. Whenever you finally decide it's time to buy, there's certain to be some worthwhile solutions available.