Dell XPS M1730: SLI, Penryn, and Overclocking
by Jarred Walton on February 28, 2008 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Cover Me - I'm Goin' In!
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If you want to get at the motherboard/internals, start by lifting up the plastic access panel above the keyboard. Four screws hold the keyboard in place, and once you remove those carefully lift up the keyboard and then disconnect the ribbon cable underneath. Under the keyboard, you will find three mini-PCI slots; on the test system, an Intel 4965AGN wireless adapter occupies one of these slots.
That's as far as most users will need to go, but if you actually want to get down to the motherboard you'll have two remove the four screws holding the main LCD panel in place, and you will also need to remove the two screws and the mini LCD panel above the keyboard. You'll also need to disconnect the power and display cables for the LCD, plus the wireless networking antenna. Take your time and move slowly.
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At this point, in order to remove the plastic shell that's home to the touchpad you will need to remove a whole bunch of screws. There are 14 screws on the bottom, one of which hides underneath the hard drive cover. Nine more screws secure the panel from the top - five of these are under the keyboard area, and two more are along the top of the notebook underneath the main LCD panel. When you've removed all of the screws, the plastic cover should pull off without requiring an excessive amount of force. Again, make sure to disconnect the various cables/ribbon cables before you pry things apart.
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At the top left of the motherboard we find the GPU (GPUs) module, which is easy to remove. It can presumably be upgraded should Dell decide to provide such an option in the future. The top right is home to the Northbridge and CPU, covered by a heatsink/fan and secured with several more screws. While we didn't fully dismantle the chassis, the PhysX 100M sits up in the top-right between the CPU and Northbridge according to Dell.
Dismantling the whole system to get at the CPU isn't particularly difficult, but it does require a bit of time. During testing, we were on a conference call with Dell and NVIDIA at one point, and one of the NVIDIA people asked if there was an easier way to swap CPUs. The answer: no, not really. If you plan on swapping CPUs back and forth repeatedly over a short period of time, about the only shortcut you can take is to not put all of the screws back in place. Luckily, for most people upgrading laptop CPUs is a rare occurrence. Give yourself 30 to 60 minutes and you should be able to do it without difficulty. The only thing you really need is a small Phillips head screwdriver, preferably one with a magnetic tip to help extract the screws. (Yes, we know that magnets are supposed to be dangerous around electronics... we haven't killed anything yet, and we hate losing screws.)
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hyperealism - Monday, May 19, 2008 - link
Are there any stats available showing how much power is saved by using the single video card compared to the SLI? I am buying one and I want to know if its worth getting the SLI version. It would be nice if you could disable one in the bios.Thanks in advance!
Tye
xantha - Monday, March 17, 2008 - link
Just in case there are any Aussie readers that aren't aware but a gaming notebook can be more affordable than you think.You can get the XPS 1730 nicely specced for around AU$4300 (includes bluray, tv tuner, dual 8800, T9300, 4G) If you have the ability to salary sacrifice then that $4k+ starts dropping - lots :D
First you don't pay GST so its now AU$3900. Then its taken out in pre-tax dollars so depending on what you are earning thats another 30-40% off. Making the XPS only AU$2340-$2730 effective cost. And its like 12mth interest free cause the payments are spaced out over the FBT year.
Thanks Mr Taxman for a half price gaming notebook every year :D
docjon - Monday, March 3, 2008 - link
I'm just curious, With the new drivers is there still a large performance difference between Vista and XP?JarredWalton - Monday, March 3, 2008 - link
The short summary is that I found no reason to even want to run XP on this system. It works great as is. Time constraints do not permit me to test every option, unfortunately.As you can imagine, given the number of tests run, all of the testing was done with the system as shipped (after uninstalling any Internet Security Suite of course - PUKE!) It is possible to order certain models of the M1730 with XP, but at this point I see little reason to buy a DX10 SLI setup only to run XP. I believe that the focus on driver optimizations for 8800M SLI has been primarily on Vista as well.
I'm sure there are instances where XP is still slightly faster (and likewise others where Vista is faster), but the last time we took a close look at XP and Vista graphics performance those situations were very rare and generally not a serious concern. I mean, if we're talking about 30 FPS vs. 40 FPS that would be a serious issue, but when it's 180 vs. 190 I'm not too worried.
Scottyboy99 - Tuesday, March 4, 2008 - link
Am a bit gutted reading the article. I have dell xps m1730 (Core 2 duo 2.4 ghz, 8800m gtx sli & 4 gig ram - Vista Home Premium) & my 3d mark 06 are nowhere near the scores shown. I have 3d mark 06 basic demo version (I can only run half the tests & stuck at resolution 1280*1024) and my single gpu score is 8700 whilst my sli enabled score is 10750 ish. So I am 2000 points at least shy of the systems tested here. My drivers are dell stock 167.55. I did try out 174.16 from laptop2go & my scores went down by a few hundred so went back to 167.55.What am I doing wrong?
Thanks
JarredWalton - Tuesday, March 4, 2008 - link
Well, outside of overclocking, at stock speeds with the official 176.55 drivers I got 12859. My guess is that you might have a bunch of other software still installed that is affecting performance. I clean out all the stuff I don't want (i.e. McAfee Internet Security Suite or whatever it's called - Norton/Symantec is just as bad - and various other programs; I shut of Dell QuickSet as well as most other system tray icons/utilities), so that might be the problem you're having.The CPU score is going to be a factor, of course. I tested with Penryn 2.8GHz and got the following:
2.8GHz 3DMark06 Scores:
3DMarks: 12859.000000000
SM2.0 Score: 5971.000000000
SM3.0 Score: 6559.000000000
CPU Score: 2554.000000000
Bumping up the CPU speed to 3.2GHz (the same 400MHz gap that your system has relative to the test system) yielded:
3.2GHz 3DMark06 Scores:
3DMarks: 13920.000000000
SM2.0 Score: 6337.000000000
SM3.0 Score: 6969.000000000
CPU Score: 2893.000000000
So that's ~1000 points right there, and potentially I have a 6MB cache chip vs. your 4MB chip (T7700?). That could account for another ~1000 points or so. Also, the 174.20 drivers dropped Futuremark performance, but they dramatically improve gaming performance.
Scottyboy99 - Tuesday, March 4, 2008 - link
Ok thanks mate. Yes mine is T7700 cpu. You are probably right in that I should shut a whole bunch of stuff off. I do have the McAfee security suite running so maybe I should re-bench without that on (if I can work out how to close it down without disabling it at start up!!!). Based on what you have said I lose 1000 based on my cpu & the cache might be almost another 1000 so perhaps my score isn't so bad after all. Having said that I expect I should be able to eek some more performance out of my rig and maybe go past 11,000 marks. Will post if I get any joy.Thanks again
flatron85 - Saturday, March 1, 2008 - link
**** - **** - **** - **** - ****the last B could be an 8 the rest is readable.
mark3450 - Friday, February 29, 2008 - link
In Feburary 2005 Dell released the "Dell XPS/Inspiron Gen 2", which was the equivilant of the one machine reviewed here at the time. I own one.The last video driver update for this machine was November 2005. That means that Dell continued to the video drivers for this machine for LESS THAN ONE YEAR after it's release.
I have attempted to update to various unofficial drivers without success (machine boots and runs but then crashes after a few minuites of use), and have been forced to return to the Dell blessed ones.
Overall it's a nice piece of hardware, but the lack of driver support that was given too it makes me leery of buying the M1730.
JarredWalton - Friday, February 29, 2008 - link
Would these by chance help?http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_notebook_167.51...">http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_notebook_167.51...
I don't see any Vista drivers for those notebooks, unfortunately, but maybe I'm just not putting in the correct search criteria.