Dell Aims for Gamers with XPS M1710

Mr Tits writes "Dell moved to solidify its position in the lucrative gaming market yesterday by launching the XPS M1710, a dual-core processor system designed to let gamers simultaneously play three-dimensional games while encoding music or scanning for viruses. "

Re:What?

[the unbeliever]

An Athlon 64/FX/X2 memory controller is on the CPU, running at at least 1/2 the cpu clock speed, so it has shitloads of memory bandwidth.

Re:Marketing dual cores to windows users

[TheNetAvenger]

and even this hype has no ground under it.

3d games jam up the whole system (disk i/o, memory i/o, cpu bandwidth, graphics bandwidth that there's no damn difference how many cores you got on the cpu.


Actually, you would be surprised how little HD access there is high end games, also with faster drive. And with 2GB of RAM, there is more than plenty of room for ANY game and other processes.

As for the CPU, the Dual cores are designed to handle the bus bandwidths, or in effect Dual-Core CPUS would be worthless.

Also GPU operations that are offset to Video today are quite amazing. For example, running a high end game that stresses a high end video card, and does CPU based backends like physics and post processing, etc will consume about 60% of a normal CPU even at peaks, and with a second CPU core, this leaves a lot of room.

I agree Dell's marketing is a little strange, but they are right, with a dual-core processor, you can be encoding a Video stream or running virus scan in the background while getting your 60fps in your favorite Video game.

Even hyperthreaded CPUs, like the one I am typing on, I can be running Doom3, FS2004, Quake, WoW, CoH, HalfLife, and not NOTICE any frame or performance drops when letting my system even do a defrag or rip DVDs or anything that I would normally run in the background.

And this laptop was the top of the line last year, and is no where close to what the Dell offering has.

Also as for this being the 'fastest' gaming laptop, I am not so sure about that. There are models from companies like Sager, Pro-Star, etc that have dual SLI NVidia 7900GTX, and Dual-Core AMD 64bit processors. I'm sure they are bit heavier, but performance wise, I would be surprised that a single GPU laptop could keep up with a SLI notebook running the same Video chipset.

PSSST

[way2trivial]

Up to 100GB 7200RPM or 120GB 5400RPM SATA hard drive lets you store and access abundant data on your notebook.

http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/productde tails.aspx/xpsnb_m1710?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&~sect ion=specs#tabtop [dell.com]

Re:Great Expectations...

[striker64]

You don't have very creative uses for your PC do you?

The fact of the matter is, dual core processors help tremendously in many scenarios. Why should I wait while my 1 hour miniDV video is being transferred to my PC sucking up 10-15% CPU, when I can play a game during that time and not notice the slightest slowdown? How about those instances when I'm developing, compiling my app and my whole (single CPU) system slows down to a crawl ... gone are those days with dual core. You have obviously never used a dual-CPU system for any extended period of time, otherwise you would not be saying such foolish things.

And which computer these days has only 1 optical drive? Even the cheap emachines from 4 years ago came with a DVD-ROM and CD-RW.

Re:Missing the point

[Dreadknott]

I completely agree, I almost bought the M170 but I saw this Toshiba P105-S921 gaming laptop that beat the crap out of it for the price. I decided to wait for the new M1710, but after comparing the two, I dont think $800.00 more for a simmilar outfit from Dell is worth the flashy case and the higher resolution display. The Dell has more powerful models for those who have the dough to spend, but I just want the most performance for the dollar. I have never owned a Toshiba, hopefully I'll be happy with it.

probably this might help -

[dotslasher_sri]

Its called Dell Decrapifier.. It removes all the useless stuff dell machines come with. Havent tried it myself tho

http://www.yorkspace.com/dell-de-crapifier/ [yorkspace.com]

Re:Missing the point

[LandKurt]

As the other replies here point out, there is no united hardcore gamer profile. In fact, it sounds like you are describing a hardcore system tweaker. Someone who gets their kicks producing the highest FPS figure out of a machine, rather than actually playing the game. It seems to me a true gamer would be spending their time actually gaming rather than trying to figure out how to get another meaningless half percent of performance out of their system.

My wife wants a portable system with plenty of power to play whatever she throws at it over the next couple years. She's considering the M1710 because of it's large screen and the Nvidia 7900 GTX in it. She probably would have gone for a Sager 5720, but I suggested she look for a Core Duo machine rather than one based on the older Pentium M.