Dell XPS M1730: SLI, Penryn, and Overclocking

Overclocking Application Performance

Besides gaming tests, we also wanted to run some more traditional benchmarks. Many of these depend more on CPU and system performance rather than purely on the graphics cards, so this will give us a chance to see how the X9000 scales with overclocking when the GPU isn't a factor. We have used some of these tests in the past, but with new versions of QuickTime and DivX we have opted to start fresh.

Note: All of the application tests were performed with the 167.55 drivers.

We see much better scaling with the CPU overclock in these tests, likely in part because the GPUs are not contributing to overall system load. The CINEBENCH single core result scales almost perfectly with clock speed, while the other three tests get about 80% of the potential speedup. If you want a fast laptop to do this sort of work, the M1730 will work very well. On the other hand, these types of applications also benefit greatly from multi-core CPUs, making quad-core more attractive. It may be quite some time before we see any official mobile quad-core CPUs; in the meantime, there are some notebooks that use desktop CPUs, including the Q6600 and its ilk. Whether you actually want to go that route rather than simply staying with desktops is a tough call; we've never been particularly fond of running a desktop CPU in a laptop, ever since the days of the "mobile" Pentium 4.