4 months and going strong!

Mine literally has been running since day one (only restarting every so often). Mine works from 7am to 6pm then plays/works til I go to sleep or spend time with the wife and then its doing maintenance. Couldn't be happier except for the fact it refuses to make my coffee in the morning.

Has anyone else been as satisfied as me with their ATI 5730 SXPS1645 as I have?

 

Based on what people have said, it seems like almost everyone is very satisfied with the XPS 1645 with 5730.

I wish I had one.

 

Hey, that's good to hear. I ordered mine with the same specs as yours, exept with 8gb ram. It's still in production.

What temp does ur gpu get at when it's under heavy use?

 

Under heavy gaming or 3dmark usage my GPU hits 66C max. When running Furmark and Prime95 concurrently, I can get it to hit 79C, but that's not exactly normal usage.

 

3dmark doesn't stress it that much.. that's why so low temps on there.

 

You using a cooler O_O. Max my gpu goes with overclock is 83c without 79c. But 66c O_O Give me your laptop

 

I'm with you, although mine is 4670 not the 5730. I have had mine since February and it is still going strong. I have the following config:

17 820QM
ATI 4670 1Gb
8 Gb 1033 DDR3
16" 1080p RGBLCD
Panasonic BD-RE
256Gb Samsung SSD

 

Nope, no external cooler, though I did replace my thermal paste, and remove the dust cover over the fan intake. Those 2x things improved load temps by over 5C.

 

The most I saw was low 70s and that was no cooler and that was during extreme testing. I was running furmark and prime 95 as well as pandora to work the speakers (wattage test). All in all its a great rig, I am considering making it a desktop and getting a ultraportable to lug around. Not 100% settled on this idea as the SXPS 16 is pretty light and easy to bring with me. My needs seem to be changing significantly where I only need a few SSH sessions and an IDE/notepad 2 open. I guess the next few weeks will show me if I will make my SXPS into a desktop.

 

I'm completely satisfied with mine. It's been a dream. I am also considering getting an ultraportable. This is the only area where I'm rather let down: this computer doesn't lend itself well to long hours away from an outlet.

I need a decent 12-inch netbook for school/home browsing. I'm willing to wait until Zacate debuts to make my decision though

 

I've only had my 1645 for a month and some change, but I'm really liking it so far. On a scale of 1 through 10, I'm giving it a 8.8.

It's been a great machine since day one, and like liquid it is only off when I'm travelling to and from work. Hasn't fallen out of step once.

Got a few quibbles about the build quality (it's not really as good as I thought it would be, or as people were saying), but I came from a magnesium alloy chassis with a steel rollcage. I can't really compare in that department.

Like Gloomy, I'd like to have seen better battery life: 2.5+ hours is still quite good for a quad core with dedicated GPU and brightness set to 2/3. In fact, coming from a machine that barely got 2 hours, I'm quite happy. However, I tend to have lost-track-of-time work sessions in a colleague's office, and I often catch myself screaming "oh sh*t oh sh*t oh sh*t oh sh*t oh sh*t" as I sprint back to my desk to pick up my AC adapter when my battery gets critically low and threatens to sleep on me.

One final "wish it had" comment is having a second hard drive bay. Not really a must have, but would have been nice since some notebooks of this size are stuffing them in. But I would assume that means having to donate your kidney to afford that kind of feature. Even with the 320GB HDD I put in (swapped out the 128 SSD which is too small) I'm starting to run low on space. Will need to run out and buy a 500 gigger soon. Those freaks in the graphics dept are famous for creating some unfathomably large PSD files!

 

The build quality, is what it is. The eyecandy on this system will chip and wear over time and it will look like complete butt after a good two years of use, but the chassis -is- magnesium alloy, and it is built strong.

It's hard to give this system a rating on build quality because people don't agree on what build quality is. The chassis is built to last, but the sad truth is that the glossy plastic is not, and cheapens the feel of the system as a whole imo.

I give it a 7/10 because I can lift it from a corner with one hand and it doesn't flex in the slightest (this actually surprises me lol)

 

If you're not using the optical drive, you can get an adapter to put a 2nd HDD in there instead of your DVD player.

 

i should've been more clear. my old chassis and body were both magnesium. internally it also had a steel cage to protect the goods. this body is just plain plastic which will damage quickly over time.

i highly considered this, but as i burn upwards of 4-5 CDs/DVDs a day at work, it would be really cumbersome to have to lug around an external DVD-RW everywhere I go, in case i need to burn something to DVD on-demand.

(on a side note, i want to KILL the brilliant genius at my company that decided that USB sticks were far too inconvenient to transfer files from one another, in an official capacity. nooooo, instead we must use DVD/RWs. MORON.)

 

I will save my final comment until when I have done a fresh install of Windows 7.

But apart from a few hiccups, I am lovin' mine at the moment. Sound is good. Feel is good. Speed is excellent. Screen is awesome. Just blows me away. I also think the laptop is rather light but this is comparing it to my old Inspirin 6000.

Minor hiccups thus far were an optical drive issue where it kept rejecting a blank disk but has gone away and now I am experiencing a random reboot issue. Searching for answers for the latter ...

When I do a fresh install, I will be hitting this thing with a few harder tasks to push it a bit.

 

It's like that where I work too, but for a good reason. Too many people bringing in infected USB drives from home and spreading viruses over the network.

 

i used to work at my university's IT department, and there we had the same rule. except that rule was exceptionally appropriate, just as you explained. a billion and a half students with laptops, and maybe only 200 knew how to really operate the interwebs without contracting LOLCATS and other internet STIs.

however where i work now, there's absolutely no need to have that rule. we have so many networked drives and even more shared drives (i share a folder on my D:\ with at least 7 other people in the office, and vice versa). if there was a virus, a USB is the least of our concerns.

funny thing is? a couple of our higher-ups are from the same IT department i used to work in at my university. so i guess old habits really do die hard.

 

Mine got 3.5+ the other day at work doing very basic tasks (lan, no wifi and brightness to 0) very useable and did the job which surprised me for a quad core cpu and near enthusiast gpu laptop. I'm not in a hurry to get an ultraportable as the xps is working out great for everything. But a super small notebook with 5-8 or more hours of battery life and smaller footprint would be nice for long meetings, classes (when I get the money for school again), and long plane rides. I also have noticed that I have been spending a lot more time off ac and doing less cpu and gpu intensive tasks (yet I do need to be able to multitask and gaming is a decent release when I have the time). The notebooks I'm looking at are an m11x r1 with su7300 and a dual core x100e thinkpad. Both seem great for what I need and would allow me to park the xps at home or the office and use the quad core for more intensive tasks and when I need a quad core and stronger gpu. Honestly it all depends on how much I get for my birthday and christmas.

 

that's fantastic! how did you manage to squeeze 3.5 hours?

usually i have 12-15 tiles in my Windows task bar (usually 4-5 folders, rest are applications), and occasional disk activity (when somebody's accessing one of my shared folders). otherwise i just have my wireless somewhat idling (Outlook 2010 with 2 Exchange accounts), and my brightness set to somehwere around 30% brightness. with that i can just manage 2.5 hours.

i guess you have very little network activity going on? i've been trying to maximize my battery life, but i can't seem to get anything past 2.5 hours.

 

Since Im using wired there arent any radio broadcasts and the tasks Im doing are light web browsing and an IDE open with a dash of RDP here and there when my end users get cranky. I sometimes listen to music with head phones to save power and block out everybody's noise as well as I have the screen set to the lowest brightness.

 

i guess with very light usage you could easily eek out something like 3 hrs. perhaps i'm quite fortunate to get ~2.5 hours with (subjectively) "moderate" usage.

still anything better than 2 hrs (which is the max my old laptop could have gotten, brand new) is good enough for me.

 

With your exact specs i could get over 4 hours. But as soon as they gave back my RGB that dropped to 3 or under

 

You do know that the RGB uses almost 3 times the wattage a WLED uses right? Im sure I could get 4 hours with mine but I havent gotten to the point where I need it off AC for that long yet (but I have gotten over that much before). But I fear that time is coming soon hence why Im looking at ultraportables. I would LOVE to have an x200s thinkpad with a 9 cell and WXGA+ but there is only one on the outlet, it wont do much if any of the light gaming I do, and for that price I can get a well equipped c2d alienware m11x. I was thinking about the thinkpad x100e but it only gets 4-4.5 hours of battery life max and for the performance drop for maybe 30 extra mins does not warrant spending $600.

 

i have a 2 year old dell d430 to go with my primary desktop replacement xps 1647. but i actaully lug studio 1647 along more often, its not very heavy even with power adaptor, its quite manageable.

 

I know the RGB is a power sucker. That is why it caused so many of the Throttling issues. But yea without RGB i got about 4 hours 20 minutes on balanced just surfing the web and watching a couple of videos.