Dell XPS15 For Gaming?

Hi I am looking for a laptop up to £550 to take to university with me, and im wanting to be able to play some games on it (call of duty)

I have been looking for laptops for ages and some people say its impossible to find a laptop to play games smoothly in my price range and other say its easily possible so im a little confused!

Ive been looking at this laptop:
Dell XPS 15 Laptop Details | Dell

Would it be able to run games such as call of duty smoothly out of the box?

Thanks a lot

 

Yes it can! I have an XPS 15 with the 1080P Full HD screen, 2GB Nvidia card, Core i7 2720 Quad Core, 6GB Ram, Blu Ray, Tv tuner, basically fully loaded. It runs Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops like butter when I play in 1366x768 resolution on max textures and with antialiasing on. The graphics look amazing and there is no lag! I had a huge smile on my face when I first got my XPS and started playing, I'm really having a blast. Just installed Battlefield 2 as well (damn this game is so much fun) and it also plays amazing! I'm very impressed and pleased

 

sure it can. buy it with the GT 540M (on your link it has 420M) and you'll have nothing to complain ! happy gaming !

 

Ok well i can get this for 529

COLOUR CHOICE Metalloid Aluminum Cover edit
PROCESSOR Intel® Core™ i3-380M (2.53Ghz, 4Threads, 3M cache) edit
OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium, 64bit, English edit
LCD 15.6 HD WLED TL (1366x768) 720p with 2.0 Mega Pixel Integrated Camera edit
MEMORY 2048MB 1333MHz Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM [1x2048] edit
OPTICAL DRIVE 8x DVD+/-RW Optical Drive edit
HARD DRIVE 250GB (7,200rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive edit
PRIMARY BATTERY 6-cell 56Whr Lithium Ion battery edit
GRAPHICS CARD 1GB NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 420M Graphics Card edit
WIRELESS CONNECTIVITY Intel® Centrino® Wireless-N 1000 (EUR) edit

Would that be ok? Im not nesseceraly saying i need it to be top class gaming i just wanted something that can handle games as i only have 550 to spend? Or does anyone have any other laptops they would reccomend which would be better than this within my budget?

Thanks for the awesomely fast replies!

 

You've gotta get the 1080p screen. If you can't afford the 1080p screen upgrade, I advise you don't get the XPS 15.
The B+RGLED 1080p screen is the most important upgrade, because it's one of the best quality screens currently available (on the XPS 15 in particular). The colors are very vibrant and the higher resolution gives you more screen space to work with (you can actually fit two side-by-side windows without horizontal scrolling).
The 720p screen is awful, I've seen an XPS 15 with it (someone at a help desk had one) and would never recommend it to anyone. It's just like my roommate's Toshiba Satellite with its awful low-contrast 720p display. Technically there are two 720p screens, one's ok for a 720p and one's awful, but neither are great and you can't choose which model Dell gives you.

 

XPS are high end consumer notebooks, they can game but usually not at the highest resolution or highest quality.

At 1368x768 it should handle COD games, but if you opt for the FHD which is highly recommended, COD will stutter.

 

Not if you just run in lower-than-native resolution.

Running in 1366x768 resolution on the 1920x1080 B+RG display is supposed to look better than running in 1366x768 on the 1366x768 display, because the XPS 15's 1080p display is just that good.

Older versions of COD should run with no issues on full 1080p.

Plus, you can always:
1) tone down the game's graphical settings a bit
2) overclock your graphics card

 

Sorry I meant if you were running it at native resolution on the FHD screen. Black Ops even lags on my uber i7 gaming desktop..

 

agreed.


Also, just be aware that the XPS 15 is NOT a gaming laptop like it once was. Dell's gaming laptop is now the alienware series. the XPS is more of a media center.

 

Excactly.....Bump.

 

The GT 420M will handle Black Ops okay at 1366x768 when overclocked to 740/960. Without overclocking I was unable to play Black Ops on my L501x with GT 420M, i5 560M, 8GB ram, and 128GB SSD.

Factory WLED screen sucks. Had it on my L501x and immediately bought an aftermarket LG 1080p screen and dell cable to replace the screen. I wouldn't recommend the computer with the WLED 720p screen. Ended up spending more than it would have cost to upgrade to the top notch 1080p screen.

 

If you want a real gaming laptop, you could look at a lightly used ASUS G50/G60/G51/G61 as they actually have high end GPU that will play the latest and greatest games, and they are ASUS MXM.

 

Very true about ASUS... they are incredible at providing good gaming rigs at a good price, even better priced in comparison with XPS15, but problem lies there with shipping, in some cities around the globe gamer are dying to get their hand on one but just cant find it available or too overpriced with shipping cost, however, a fairly overclocked XPS15 GPU with moderate cooling can drastically improve gaming perfomance, e.g bulletstorm with 1366x768 res, 2x AA, Post Processing medium, rest All high giving FPS around 40~42 FPS, fully playable