Dell XPS M1710 - GeForce Go 7900 GTX 512 Mobile Gaming, Part 1

Closing Thoughts

As far as portable gaming goes, the XPS M1710 is currently one of the best options available -- certainly the best I've ever used. SLI gaming laptops are on the horizon, but as our benchmarks show there are quite a few titles that don't really need multiple graphics cards to be perfectly playable. In fact, personally I think multiple GPUs in desktops is already getting a bit carried away, and while I don't generally want a thin and light notebook, anything larger than the XPS M1710 starts to get into the "luggable" category as opposed to being a truly mobile computer. A single fast graphics chip at present seems the best way to balance performance against heat and power requirements.

As for how the XPS M1710 compares with other laptops, we don't have anything in-house faster right now, but there will almost certainly be competitors in the near future. For now, this is an extremely powerful mobile gaming platform, and it deserves serious consideration if you're in the market for such a system. The system also looks great, and the 17" LCD feels huge -- you generally sit with the laptop very close to your face, so a 17" laptop display feels about the same as my 24" desktop display. This is by no means a complete review, and we will have a follow-up article looking at some specific details, but our first impression is definitely favorable.

Would we recommend you go out and purchase such a laptop? Yes, provided you're willing to spend the money. If you're looking to save money, you almost certainly won't be able to afford a laptop this fast and powerful. If you want maximum battery life, there are better options out there as well. You can probably even find faster laptops if you're willing to spend more money and go with a larger, heavier system. As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, there are many ways to build a laptop, and no one design will be right for every person out there. The Dell XPS M1710 manages to strike a good balance between cost, performance, and size, though obviously at the higher end of the spectrum in all three categories.

Compared to the two desktop systems, it manages to hold its own, and the Pentium D 920 in particular often struggles to keep up. The end result is that you're basically looking at a $1000 "mobility tax" if you want to have all of the performance of a desktop system in a mobile platform. The laptop even manages to handle running nearly every current game at the LCD panel's native 1920x1200 resolution (FEAR being one of the few exceptions).

We will have a second article looking at the finer details of the XPS M1710 and the GeForce Go 7900 within a couple weeks, including a closer look at the internals and construction as well as a few attempts to further increase performance. The good news is that so far we haven't encountered any serious problems -- in fact, the only problems during testing can basically be attributed to user error. If you have any comments or questions in the meantime, send them my way.