hardware.earthweb.com/computers/article.php/3333501
By Eric Grevstad March 30, 2004 Dude, You're Getting Fragged
Dell's getting in touch with its dark side again. As it did with the Dimension XPS desktop last June, the company has taken its top-of-the-line laptop and issued a loaded, tricked-out model for hardcore gamers and performance buffs, taking a break from its usual corporate competition with HP and Gateway to crash a LAN party with the likes of Alienware and VoodooPC. Dell being Dell, the Inspiron XPS is a bit less radical than the gaming specialists' mobile systems, but it's priced noticeably below them: A bigger-screened but otherwise comparably equipped VoodooPC Envy M:780, for example, is almost $1,000 above our test system's $2,786, even before the latter's $200 mail-in rebate. And it's hardly a hardware weakling, with ATI's 128MB Mobility Radeon 9700 blazing through the latest games while Intel's 3.4GHz, Hyper-Threading Pentium 4 crunches numbers. The CPU, by the way, is the 800MHz-bus "Northwood" model with 512K of Level 2 cache, not the new Pentium 4/3.4E "Prescott," but if you're starved for speed and status, slip Dell an extra thousand bucks and you'll get the 3.4GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition with 2MB of Level 3 cache. And the Inspiron XPS comes with a free backpack for lugging it to gaming contests, plus your choice of three snap-on, funky-looking (if, in our opinion, not all that comfortable, hard-rubbery-feeling) covers. Our XPS wore the colorful "Cipher" lid, though you might prefer to go Goth with "Skullz."  From Mild To WildJust as the Dimension XPS is the evil twin of the Dimension 8300, the Inspiron XPS has a civilian cousin for travelers who don't know who Tony Hawk is: the Inspiron 9100, which also combines Intel's desktop Pentium 4 and 865PE chipset with ATI's Mobility Radeon 9700 graphics controller. The 9100, however, gives a choice of Pentium 4/2.8, /3.0, or /3.2 processors, instead of offering 3.4GHz and Extreme Edition options, and gives buyers a choice of 64MB or 128MB video-memory configurations while the XPS comes with 128MB only. The Inspiron XPS also heads straight to the top of the options list as far as its 15.4-inch, wide-aspect-ratio screen is concerned -- its display resolution is a whopping 1,920 by 1,200 pixels, whereas the Inspiron 9100 can also be ordered with slightly less squint-making 1,280 by 800 or 1,680 by 1,050 LCDs. The super-high-resolution screen is a beauty, with bright colors and no bad pixels that we could see, but it's more suited to alien-landscape panoramas than humdrum office applications -- even with Windows XP Home Edition configured for enlarged fonts and icons (120 rather than 96 dpi), we found ourselves grumbling that items were too small and spanning the screen took too much touchpad trekking. We've enjoyed superfine 16- and 17-inch notebook screens, but considering the display's 15.4-inch size, we'd probably put down our bifocals and vote for one of the Inspiron 9100's slightly less micro-pixeled panels.  That said, the Mobility Radeon 9700 graphics processor proved impressively up for the challenge of hi-res gaming, although a step short of the fastest, costliest desktop 3D cards such as ATI's Radeon 9800 XT or Nvidia's GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. Reset to 1,600 by 1,200 resolution, the Inspiron XPS powered through our Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory benchmark at a smooth 35 frames per second, accelerating to 75 fps in High Quality 1,024 by 768 mode. Admittedly, some of our benchmarks were more a matter of marveling that the Dell could complete the normally desktop-, let alone notebook-killing, tests at all (9 fps in Gun Metal 2 at 1,600 by 1,200 resolution or 6 fps in Codecreatures at 1,920 by 1,200, both with 4X antialiasing). But others were solid hits, such as 28 fps and a Graphics score of 3,237 in AquaMark3 or 156 fps in an Unreal Tournament 2003 flyby (both at 1,024 by 768). Still in XGA mode, the XPS jittered through the old Quake III Arena benchmark at a blinding 250 fps and cruised to a FutureMark 3DMark03 score of 3,324, passing every DirectX 9 test along the way. |
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