Digital Trends

Dell XPS M1730

March 11th, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Use and Testing

We’ve reviewed so many ultra-portablenotebooks lately that we had forgotten how big a desktop replacement notebook can be. The M1730, which has a baseline weight of 10.6 pounds, is big and heavy. Its power brick alone weighs more than the MacBook Air. The chassis is made from magnesium alloy and is solid as a rock. The LCD lid, which has a “hydrographic” image and faux carbon fiber, feels very solid as well. Though the chassis has a plastic feel to it, it feels incredibly well-made and sturdy.

Aside from the notebook itself, Dell also throws in a swank leather binder to hold all the included media, a thick manual, cleaning cloth and a pair of noise-canceling earbuds.

Out of the Box

We fired up the M1730 and it took exactly 1:00 minute to boot to the Vista desktop, which is typical for a fast machine. We were pleased by the lack of trialware on the desktop. In fact, the only pre-installed programs aside from Vista were Norton Internet Security and Google Desktop, though we’ll note that Norton wasn’t fully installed (a pop-up window asked us to install it whenever we rebooted). 

Our first impression of the lighting is that it’s awesome. Some may think it’s a bit too much, but thankfully Dell provides the option to change the light colors, turn them down, and even turn all the lights off completely. We love the fact that the lights behind the speakers as well as the touchpad can be cycled between 16 different colors. The keyboard backlight is white can cannot be changed, though you can adjust its brightness or turn it off completely. You can even set the LEDs to “dance” to your music, but this is not ideal at all as it results in audio crackling and stuttering.

You can choose between 16 colors for the speakers and touchpad lighting.

The LCD lid also has a very cool design that Dell calls “hydrographic.” It looks like rays of sunshine reflected in water, embossed over carbon fiber. There are lights too, and since we’re not sure how to describe it we’ll just provide a picture of it.

The LCD cover has a cool “light beams” effect on it. You can disable it too, if you want.

We love the keyboard. It requires a soft touch and the white backlighting is cool. There’s even a full-size number pad to the right, and the touchpad felt very accurate, even though it seems incredibly small given the size of the palm rests.

Performance

This PC has a 2.8GHz Penryn processor, 2GB of RAM, two 7,200rpm hard drives and 1GB of videocard memory between its two graphics cards. Suffice to say, performance was very good. It scored 12,704 in Futuremark’s 3DMark06, which is a very high score, especially for a notebook. We also decided to try out the new PCMark Vantage test, which is a system-wide test designed for PCs running Vista. The M1730 scored a 4604, but what does that mean? For comparison’s sake, we ran it on our own high-end gaming desktop, and it scored just 3820, so the M1730 was faster overall. Also, the M1730’s Vista Experience Index is a high 5.0.

Gaming performance was also very good, which is not surprising. We were able to run Call of Duty 4, Crysis and Bioshock at high settings at acceptable frame rates. During gaming the GPU fans crank up and are a bit loud, but you usually can’t hear them over the built-in speakers, which are the most impressive notebook speakers we’ve ever heard.

Overclocking?

Since this system has an Extreme processor with an unlocked multiplier, Dell allows a bit of overclocking, which is accomplished in the BIOS. You can take it from the stock 2.8GHz speed up to 3.4GHz, in 200MHz increments. Sounds good, right? Well unfortunately we found that when the processor was set to 3.2GHz and 3.4GHz the CPU fans turn on full-bore at all times, which is incredibly loud and not worth whatever boost in performance you might achieve through overclocking. When we set it to 3.0GHz it was just as quiet as it was at 2.8GHz, which is to say acceptably quiet, but an extra 200MHz isn’t going to offer a big performance boost.