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. "

What?

[Duds]

"Play games while encoding music or scanning for viruses"

Even as a desktop replacement that's just not sensible. Unless you're playing games from 1998 you're still going to need every teeny little bit of power that thing has, and you'd still be alt-tabbing out of games to check the other tasks, which will do nothing for them.

And how exactly the hell does "Dual core" help you when you're thrashing the hard drive wildly trying to virus check?

Scanning for viruses?

[Tibor the Hun]

Is scanning for viruses a regularly scheduled activity for windows gamers nowdays?
WTF?
Heey everyone! Now you can use your computer AND scan for viruses at the same time! How awesome is that!

Is that really a selling point?

Scanning for Viruses = IO Intensive

[kannibal_klown]

I don't know about you, but scanning for viruses isn't something that I'd want to do while playing a "3D Game."

I find that virus scanning isn't so bad on the CPU but is killer with the I/O. And personally, I'd rather save my IO for map loading and such.

Dual CD drives?

[gEvil (beta)]

Since nearly every game out there requires you to have the CD in the drive to launch it (ignoring no-CD cracks for the moment), where are you supposed to put the CD to encode music while you're playing games? Or are they referring to the raw wave files of your band that you just finished recording before starting into a heavy gaming session?

Have they removed the Dell spyware and malware

[John the Kiwi]

There are two big problems I have with Dell computers:

First they have random unneeded software such as Musicmatch jukebox, Quickbooks Demo, various useless Dell phone home software packages etc. There have been several reviews of Dell gaming machines where some games won't even start because of incompatibilities some games have with Dell's TSR's.

Secondly, Dell's warranties aren't worth a crap. For example if a Dell computer has a bad hard drive it will take at least 3 hours of calls and diagnosis before you can get their helpdesk to send someone out to replace it. It's generally easier to go to (insert computer store here) and replace the drive yourself rather than wearing the cost of using Dell's helpdesk at all.

A lot of my customers use Dell computers. I support them a lot. If you do end up with one make sure to reinstal from scratch, try not to use the recovery CDs which will restore all the crappy Dell spyware with it.

That's my 2c.

Kiwi

Re:What?

[tokki]

While it doesn't help with disk I/O, dual cores really do make a system much more responsive. Alt-tabbing over to another app during a game is instantaneous and snappy, where on a single-core processor alt-tabbing brings the sounds of "chariots of fire" into your mind as it moves in slow-motion.

A dual-core really doesn't make games snapper, as I can't think of any that are designed as multi-threaded, but it means you can leave a lot of other stuff running (assuming you've got enough memory) without worrying about how it might drag the game down.

And in the somewhat frequent instances where one app might consume 100% of the CPU through either design of flaw, the system is still responsive because you've got another CPU handling your requests.

In short, I'm never going back to single-core.

Marketing dual cores to windows users

[amightywind]

a dual-core processor system designed to let gamers simultaneously play three-dimensional games while encoding music or scanning for viruses.

This is the first time I have heard of virus protection as justification for using a dual core processor. That is almost as bad as marketing dual cores because they do fast DRM. Why have windows users come to expect so little?

Re:Duo Core

[Garabito]

Hope Dell seems the same results for this gaming machine

I doubt so, considering that Dell bundles its XPS PCs with a crap load of software that slows down your gaming exprience [slashdot.org]. Of course, it's possible to achieve good results by doing a fresh reinstall of Win XP on them.

Battery life

[vchoy]

Notice how the article mentions everything but the battery life...

With all that high spec dual core processor, gfx card, big 30% brighter lcd screen, simulateous virus scanning, burning cds and all the wizbang gizmos...I think it's more of a 'desktop replacement' than a 'notebook'.

If you are doing word processing good, if you're playing, have a power socket nearby.

Re:I don't get it.

[Garabito]

What's the point of XPS now that they've acquired Alienware? Now they can just focus the Dell brand on business and home users with Alienware going towards gamers.

Or maybe they will just let the Alienware brand die? It's not something that hasn't happened before.

60GB HD?

[C_Kode]

also sports a 256MB nVidia graphics card, 60GB hard drive

60GB hard drives is quite small for a *gaming PC*. Between todays OS (several GBs) and games sizes reaching into the GBs, mp3/ogg collections reaching into the GBs whats up with a 60GB HD? I'm supprised the default isn't at least a 120GB. I don't even game much (though I keep Quake 3 installed for the times when I want to get my blood flowing) have 3 drives. (1) ATA 120GB, and (2) 35GB 10K rpm SATA in raid 0. That gives me 70GB for fast loading software, video, etc, and another 120 for the OS, backups, and scrach media.

Re:Marketing dual cores to windows users

[badasscat]

Most people run virus software all the time. They also have a few other programs running all the time. Touting your machines ability to run these programs while playing games is an obvious fit.

Unless you're a gamer. You know, the kind of people Dell is hoping will buy an XPS system.

It's all fine and dandy if "most people" want to have all these programs running all the time. Hardcore gamers, though, know to turn everything off if they want the best performance. Dell apparently still doesn't understand this - they first of all load all the same junk onto their XPS machines as they do on their mainstream machines, then rather than tout the raw gaming performance of the XPS line, they tout the fact that you can multitask. Gamers don't care about multitasking. They care about one task and one task only: playing games.

Again, if Dell wants to market the XPS line as sort of a high-end everyman computer, that's fine. But that's never been their stated goal. This was the line intended to garner them street cred, the "top-down" approach where the real hardcore users will spend that extra money and then tell all their friends how great Dell is.

This strategy is ass-backwards if that is their goal. They should be touting how lean their systems are, not how many things you can do at once. They should be touting how many frames per second you can get running the latest games, not how you can encode music while you're playing. These are things that appeal to mainstream users, not the high-end, hardcore users Dell is trying to attract.

Great Expectations...

[Nephroth]

People tend to have pretty great expectations of dual core systems. Partly due to marketing, and partly due to our own subconscious association, many tend to think that "dual core=twice as fast." While dual core hardware can get more done in the same amount of time as a single-core processor, anyone with even a cursory familiarity with SMP systems knows that the performance increase is variable. Single-threaded applications, for instance, aren't going to gain any direct benefit from an SMP system. (Although they might benefit to some degree from having another core to run other system processes, but the process itself won't go any faster)

I think what bothers me most here is the examples given, playing a game while encoding audio, playing a game while running a virus scan. I'm certain the dual core processor will keep your simultaneous CD ripping and virus scanning from interrupting your rousing game of solitaire but don't expect to be playing Doom 3 during these activities with any processor.

That's right, any processor. Reason? The main bottleneck for these activities isn't generally the processor, it's the other hardware involved.

You can't, for example, encode a CD any faster than the CD drive can read its data and load it into memory. This, of course, raises another question: Who the hell encodes audio while playing a game? Most games require some kind of optical media in the drive in order to play, so chances are pretty slim that you'll be doing any encoding while playing a game in the first place.... Unless of course you use a no-CD patch, which is a gross violation of the EULA, and only pirates do that! (please note sarcasm) I'd even be tempted to ask them if they are endorsing EULA violation, I'm sure the response would be pretty funny.

And virus scanning... firstly, not nearly as important as everyone thinks it is. I don't get an HIV test every week because I don't go putting myself in situations where I can contract HIV. Likewise, I don't compulsively virus scan my personal computer because I protect myself from getting infected in the first place.

Furthermore, both games and virus scanning are pretty hard-drive intensive. Unless you've got some kind of crazy dual-arm hard drive, chances are you're going to get a lot of disk thrashing if you try to play UT2004 while running McAffee.

It's almost as though the marketing department at Dell has a hat full of those magnets with words printed on them and they just toss a few at a blackboard when it comes time to write a new ad.

Re:60GB HD?

[LandKurt]

The M1710 is available with a 60 to 100GB 7200RPM hard drive. That's as large as you're going to get in a laptop unless you go down to a 5400 RPM drive. You do have to make some sacrifices for portability. But for a gaming rig it's all about the GPU, and the 512MB Nvidia GeForce Go 7900 GTX in Dell's M1710 is just about as good as it gets (outside SLI anyway).

Tits

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha "Mr. Tits"

I am sorry, but the name of the submitter stole the show :-)

Re:What?

[Tim C]

Alt-tabbing over to another app during a game is instantaneous and snappy

I have an Athlon X2, and yes, alt-tabbing is snappy. However, since my 2 gig of RAM had to be returned and I'm temporarily down to 1 gig, alt-tabbing out of games is noticably less snappy.

Basically, the snappiness is down to the amount of RAM - if you have to swap the game out and the desktop and other apps back in, then it'll crawl, regardless of how many processors you have. If not, then a single processor will still manage snappy tabs.

Re:What?

[Surt]

True, though you'll still want to have all the cores you can get in your gaming notebook. Fortunately, when games are dual threaded in 2007, we'll have quad-cored machines. By the time we hit 16 to 32 cores, you're reaching enough cores that parallelizing that many threads gets really hard, so at some point in the not too far future, multi-application running will stop being a problem, and hardware builders will all be turning their attention to contention reduction, and people who have worked on supercomputers will be in high demand.

Re:Have they removed the Dell spyware and malware

[lasmith05]

Well I guess I won't get gold support. Whatever warranty we get with Dell Small Business gives me next day support. I don't have to deal with five different manufacturers, I can call just one. And in my experience, these days dell doesn't spend a lot of time troubleshooting if you make it clear you've already tried everything. On the home front, I've purchased a c640 latitude with complete care warranty and YES they come next day with whatever part breaks. In the three years i've owned the c640, I've replaced the lcd twice (two accidental breakings) the keyboard once(broke some keys), the motherboard once (fan died), and finally the dvd/cd-rw (was kind of acting up) just for fun. I don't think Dell is the god of computer company's but they certainly aren't bad enought to be characterized as crap. Compared to other companies I think they do pretty well for a computer seller.