Dell XPS M1730
March 11th, 2008 | by Josh Norem
Full Review
Features and Design The CPU Graphics Nifty Lights Media Mogul Logitech LCD
With very few exceptions this M1730 has the nothing but the highest-end parts available, which is why it costs so much. But keep in mind that there are several other configurations available, and even those are customizable depending on your needs.
The M1730 sports the latest and greatest Intel mobile processor, which is the Penryn flavor Core 2 Extreme. It succeeds the Merom chips and features a die shrink to 45nm as well as an additional 2MB of L2 cache, bringing the total to 6MB. Since it’s an Extreme processor, Intel has left the multiplier unlocked for easy overclocking. Dell provides the option to crank the CPU up in 200MHz increments from 2.8GHz to 3.4GHz.
No gaming notebook would be labeled as such without a powerful graphics system, or two of them. Naturally, the M1730 has two NVIDIA 8800M GTX cards, which are the most powerful portable GPUs available at this time. Each GPU has 96 stream processors and 512MB of memory. Both cards run in SLI, of course. The M1730 also includes an Ageia PhysX physics processor.
Dell calls its XPS lighting scheme LightFX, and it’s hard to miss on the M1730. All of the lights are either customizable or can be disabled. The lights inside the speakers as well as those powering the XPS logo on the touchpad have 16 color options, including no light at all. There is also a glowing Dell logo on the LCD lid, which is flanked by two bright wing-looking lights. The keyboard is also backlit with white light. You can also choose from four accent colors on the lid, including blue, red, smoke and white.
The 1730 has a giant 17” widescreen LCD with a glossy covering. Its native resolution is super-high at 1920x1200. Our test unit came with a DVD-R/RW drive, but Dell offers a Blu-ray combo drive as an option ($200 USD for read-only, $400 USD for a BD-R/RW). The 1730 also includes DVI and S-Video out ports.
If you’ve seen the Logitech G11 or G15 keyboards, you’re familiar with its LCD. Well, that same LCD is embedded in the M1730, right above the keyboard. It displays system information, shows the time, and also works with select PC games to show how much ammo you have, lives left, etc.
Image Courtesy of Dell
RSS Feed
by richard on July 9, 2008:
“I recently purchased a fully loaded Dell M1730 laptop SLI 8800GT graphics cards, 4 gigs of DDR (only 3GB can be used by vista 32bit and Dell does not offer 64 bit edition!)and so on. The laptop for the first few days was perfect, super fast performance and...” More...