Dell XPS M1730: SLI, Penryn, and Overclocking

Overclocking and Futuremark Performance

While we don't consider performance results in 3DMark or PCMark to be anywhere near as meaningful as actual gaming/application performance - outside of bragging rights - these applications do provide a consistent means of measuring performance and scores do tend to correlate reasonably well with a variety of real-world games/applications. We also experienced a couple system crashes at the 3.4GHz overclock in the various 3DMark versions.

Note: All of the Futuremark overclocking tests were performed with the 174.20 drivers.

Again, the XPS M1730 pretty much walks away from the competition. Drilling down into the individual PCMark05 results, we do find a few tests where the M1730 doesn't place at the top of the pack, but rarely is it far behind and several of the tests where it doesn't place first may have more to do with specific driver optimizations that affect this benchmark than reality.

In the overclocking department, we see good performance increases in most of the test suites. 3DMark03 is the odd man out, with a more GPU limited nature, while 3DMark05/06 and PCMark05 scale quite well. The margin of error is a bit higher on the Futuremark applications when overclocking the M1730, as we saw variations of up to 3% between consecutive test runs. Regardless, clock speed will help if you're after ORB placement.