**The Official Studio XPS 1647 Intel Core i5/i7 "Owners' Lounge"**

Sorry for the missunderstanding, I've been following the thread and know about the switchable graphics. But, there was said, somewhere back, that it could become available in the future.

It was the reason I would go for the i5-540 instead of the i7-620.
Another reason would be the price and the heat, cuz I seriously want the RGB-LED screen. Must be great for designing graphics.

 

After Dell has sold you an item and got your money, what motivation do they have to spend money on adding a new feature like switchable graphics?

They're not overly motivated to make what they sold you function properly let alone add on additional features after the sale is done.

 

True, and a good argument. It would be dreamy to hope for more, but there is always a chance. I mean, after the 1645 they actually owe us. Nevermind the switchable graphics... it would just be a nice extra...

How about running multiple adobe CS4 programs simultanously, and rendering video/3d?
would the 540 suffice.. is there a real good reason to go for the 620 instead of the 540?

PS. could the 'unconfirmed' introduction of the 5xxx Series ATI cards help in the throttling of the 1647 ]

 

Well I was the one that threw up the stats showing it throttling but that was (as pointed out) stressing the machine as hard as possible. I am not a gamer and didn't buy this as a gaming machine but even while stress testing the machine I found its response and useability to be excellent. When I can have Outlook running picking up mail, surfing the web and having flash based apps running in Chrome all while Prime95 and Furmark are running in the background with little noticeable impact to my overall response then I am impressed.

The RGBLED screen is absolutely amazing to work on. Movies are incredible and I love it. It boots quickly, the wireless connection works flawlessly and with really good speeds (stuck on a 802.11g connection at the moment). The keyboard is a joy to work off of and the backlighting is excellent. I love the touch controls up at the top for the DVD and wireless etc and despite reservations on a slot load drive I like that a lot too.

It doesn't run hot and every application I've loaded on it runs better on this machine than on any of the previous ones. I spend a lot of time in 3DS Max and Maya and they don't even test this machine.

Does it throttle, yup. Do I think thats a concern, not one bit. Would I send it back, not a chance. I love this thing.

 

The ATI 5000 series cards should help. The less power consumption the better.

Anyone buying a new product like this is taking a gamble. You can't take any manufacturer at face value so when you get your new laptop, you need to run some tests of the applications that are important to you to see if it can live up to the posted design specs.

The 620 is a little faster than a 540. Is it worth the extra money? Probably not but I like it.

stormwerks: Thanks for putting things in perspective. You nailed it. If you are not a gamer then throttling will not likely be an issue for you. If you are a gamer then buying a Dell laptop for that purpose is a crap shoot. It might be fine on some games and crappy on modern games that work the CPU and GPU hard.

 

Runs it just fine. I had up this weekend with a large poly object painting on it with about 15 - 20 layers in the file and it never blinked. That was including moving it in and out of Photoshop CS4, into ZBrush back out and then back into Maya. Thats the kind of stuff I bought it for and it excels at it.

 

Thats me ... mine has the PM55 chipset.

 

After looking at the Asus and wanting it I still cant take my mind of the XPS that I have come to love with its design and RGB screen thinking about buying it again maybe it will be a love hate relationship.

 

Heh .. when I ordered I didn't have an option for the 620 or I would have gone for that too. You're right, you get the machine based on your needs. If I had been getting a gaming system I wouldn't even have looked at the Studio line. I would have been looking at an Alienware machine or one of the big Asus machines. Of course I already have one in the XPS17 with its dual NVidias and while only a Dual Core its got the horsepower to meet anything I can imagine at 2 years old.

 

Thanks stormwerks, you just sold a dell

It's absolutely vital to me that I can run photoshop alongside illustrator, indesign and dreamwaver. Talking about multitasking XD

So it would be a real good addition to my i7 desktop and an immense improvement over my current lappy (it will go dark after photoshop ánd illustrator are activated, damn you school ict guy!)

 

HAHA though it was you Storm. Can I measure my CPU's temprature with CPU-Z ?

 

just curious Can you guys game on the 1080p res? if not does it look worse if you bump the res down a notch? just worried t he 4670 isnt enough horsepower for me since 1080 is too high.

 

I have the 900p screen and I ran FEAR 2 last night at my native resoluton and found it to be enjoyable. So I think the 1080p scoped down to 900 will be fine.

Hope this helpos

what the f**k is helpos, lol sorry I mean help

 

@Padre: I know that this machine has gotten a lot of bad press in her but its all around throttling. As a performance desktop replacement this little beauty is more than up to the task. I consistently have Photoshop CS4, ZBrush, and either Maya or 3ds Max open up along with a couple of browser windows, e-mail and MSN (so my wife can get my attention) all at the same time. My photoshop files are many many many layers thick and I don't work on small scenes or low poly objects when I get to that point and with heavy usage all day yesterday it never faltered. Now to be sure I have 8GB of memory in it which you WILL want but the rest was fine.

In some render tests I have a test scene that I built a long time ago to assess different software packages and machine capabilities. When I built it it was running on a Pentium 2 and took 36 hours to render. On the XPS17 in my sig it takes about 3 - 4 minutes. On this machine it was under a minute.

The screen quality also really makes using photoshop a joy, the colors pop right out and are really crisp and clear. Again I love this machine.

 

@FluffyUK: Yes you can but you'll get the same results as you do with Throttlestop, just make sure to do as UncleWeb said and edit the .ini to include your TJ Max temp.

 

Oh so TS will measure CPU temp ? well then thats fine.

 

@stormwerk we are speaking the same language, and I'm very glad to be hearing this.
I often have the whole package of programs opened with sometimes some rendering in the background for video encoding. You know how it is

But 8 gigs? I have 6 on my desktop i7 -920 and it runs marvelous, I too have the issue of having more layers than I can count. But I'll take your word for it. You probably have the ssd option, no?

Great news, and that for a dual core, haha, marvelous!

 

Mine just shipped today! WOOHOO!!!

It will be here on Thursday and I was curious if anyone was interested to see some benchmarks from the i5 430m. I know it's the slowest i5 in the XPS 16, but I thought it might be interesting to see if a lower powered chip is throttling as well. If anyone is curious I can have something up by this weekend.

 

What do you mean, "if anyone is curious?" Everyone here is curious.

We need to know. With less throttling, your little Dual Core might be a much better CPU for gaming compared to the mighty yet throttled Core i7-720.

 

Does it throttle when playing Crysis? There was some video on youtube that demonstrated this. Apparently on the battery it runs fine but this was on the 1645. I don't see how this can throttle on a dual core based system. Aren't the core i5's equivalent to the Core 2 Duo's? Don't they use the same power? 90W should be plenty to supply an efficient amount of power to the core i5 chip?

 

If an XPS 1640 with a 35 watt Core 2 Duo can throttle then I can't see any difference between that and these new XPS 1647 Dual Cores that are also rated at a TDP of 35 watts. The new i5 run at a higher MHz so there isn't going to be a huge savings in power and throttling in some demanding games is very likely. Variable turbo boost is probably going to help keep this CPU closer to its TDP than a Core 2 Duo will.

These might even draw more watts when gaming compared to a Core i7. In both cases, even a demanding game will just fully utilize two threads which is equivalent to a single core so with a higher average multiplier on the Dual Core, power consumption might be higher. It will depend on what screen you have, etc.

A 90 watt adapter isn't a great idea for a Core i7 Quad and I don't think it's a great idea for a Dual Core laptop either.

 

It shouldnt be any worst than C2D. I am running Photoshop CS4 and other photography programs on C2D fine.

 

Its te old saying: "If it aint broke dont fix it" Werent the C2D doing just fine ? why make a new duel core ?

 

It looks like they have the intel 6200 wifi cards back in stock.

 

Probably for people like stormwerks and me... I mean, my C2D can't cut it, photoshop, fine... but more than that and some background stuff. Also, rendering will be very slow. i5's have a huge advantage IMO

And buying a C2D now would be living in the past, no? I mean, these new machines are more futureproof then a C2D extreme

 

When gaming some XPS 1640 laptops with Core 2 Duo CPUs are being throttled back to 800 MHz. There's nothing fine about that.

Photoshop doesn't load the CPU and GPU like 3D gaming does.

 

I too would like to see benchmarks of the i5-430m

As I have gotten that XPS 16 system in production already and I do a lot of layer extensive work in photoshop, also after effects, aptana (coding program), illustrator.

 

@Padre_s: You'll probably be fine with 6. I know that many were getting 4GB with their machines and with these apps the heavy lifting needs the memory room.

 

Yeah I figured... thanks mate I think I'll just upgrade when it's needed... I mean, the 1067ram modules are getting cheaper every day, so.. will be alright

 

The Core 2 Duo's aren't multi-threaded like the new i5 and i7's (at least when I look in task manager I see two threads on a Core 2 duo and four on my i5). I don't have a copy of Crisis to be sure. Neither the 1645 or 1647's throttle on battery only on adapter power. I'll have to download a demo of Crisis and try it. I was going to do that on the weekend but got busy with other things on it. I'll pull down a demo and see what happens. It did throttle on FEAR2 but I couldn't tell it was doing it while playing.

 

I wonder if we can order them like outside dell. I tried Google but no luck no one sells them. Plus, for the 1647 we need the half or full height?

 

I think it's a bit early for third-parties to be selling the 6200/6300 since they were only recently released.

 

Thanks for clearing the C2D question up. Makes more scense now.

 

Looking for some advice....

I had an XPS 16 with and I7 720 and RGBLED screen back in December but was not impressed with a few things. The battery life and RGBLED were the two biggest issues. The screen blew out and was always producing colors off the chart. Ended up returning to dell.

I was looking at getting a new XPS with the i5 and the WLED screen. Will this help out my battery life? I was trying to get the i7 620 but cant find it on the Dell site anymore.

I do a ton of audio conversions/production and some video. Maybe a game or two every now and then.

What do you guys think?

Thanks in advance!

 

WLED will help your batterylife(as it is less consuming as the RGBLED-screen), also it appears that the i5's don't throttle with the WLED-screen. For audio you don't need the best screen ever, and for video editing, I guess the WLED could be enough

And the processor will use far less power, so that will help batterylife aswel

 

I'm typing on a 1647 i5-430 as we speak with the 1600x900 screen. I like it alot, but not sure the battery is going to be enough for me. I get right around 2 hours surfing and doing office stuff before it needs to be plugged in again. Considering getting one from Dell with the 9 cell battery, though.

 

Sounds good. I'll throw some benchmarks up the day it arrives. I can't wait

 

How big is the laptop when you hold it in your hands? Is it entirely unreasonable to haul this thing around throughout the day?

 

I wouldnt haul it about tbh but thats me, I have a Netbook for day to day use at work. But thats more because im scared of breaking it.

 

Well, my gf has an Inspiron 15 (which is 15.6" also) and I took it with me to school for a few days and it's actually a very nice size, good to handle. Not too big, although it has an 16:9 ratio, so it's wide.. but light. But you will defenately need the sleeve they ship with it, against all kinds of scratches and prints

 

Hey!! So my order specs are below, I'm REALLY happy to see that when I checked today.... my order is already in "Delivery Preparation" !!

I'm pretty excited, perhaps I'll make an unboxing video and youtube it, I'm guessing everyone here would enjoy that?! Cheers!!


Ordered: January 26, 2010
Order Status: In-Production
EDD: 2/19/10

Specs:
Core i5-520m
4gb ram 1333 (runs at 1066)
500GB 7200RPM
ATI Radeon 4670 1gb
1080p edge to edge WLED
Intel 6200 WLAN Wireless-N
6CELL
Obscidian Black w/Leather

 

Yes, im sure everyone would enjoy that, but we would specially enjoy some demanding tests on the laptop, to see if it throttles.

Im seeing a lot of owners that are quiet, please, do us ALL a favor and run some tests!!

 

I will if if I can just get Crysis demo to effing download. The Nvidia one keeps restarting.

 

Yes...agree with fmac....
I would really love to see more testing result, so far, we have one person with the i7 620m with WLED screen confirms there is no throttle, and one person with i5 540m RGB LED confirms there is throttle....With only two result in hand we cannot confirm weather 1647 throttles or not....

I know a lot of us is not concerned with throttle issue...but since we already paid a big buck for these faster CPU/GPU, why shouldn't we expect them to run at their 100% potential?? otherwise I could just go and pick up a Inspiron from dell for a much cheaper price....and run the same or better speed than the throttled XPS...... What I am saying is no matter if you are concerned with these throttle or not, you should know that you are not getting your money worth if these throttle issue exists...

I wish I could have my 1647 faster so I can run some test...

 

I SECOND THAT!!!!

This is something I would like to see, how it handles the Crysis demo.

 

OMG guys!!! I just checked my order status and it is shipped already!!!!

my new EDD is 2/4/10....(It was 2/16/10)

How did that Happen??

Awesome!!!

 

That's awesome, glad to see production is moving along on these 1647's instead of delays. Do you have an estimated delivery date yet through fedex?

 

OMG, I just checked again.... my order has moved from "Delivery Preparation" to "Shipped" !!!! SO FAST!

Looks like they're rolling these machines out boys

I'll run some benchmarks when I get the machine and try to confirm/deny the throttling issue. However, in my opinion, from reading the review earlier, it seems as though whatever throttling exists is a non-issue. Either way, I'll let you know on my system! I didn't get the RGBLED screen so I'm expecting there to be no throttling... we'll see!

Cheers

 

no luck here. order i5 540m with rgb ..on 1/16
original EDD 2/3
New EDD 2/10

Still in 'pre-production' status.

Anyone else has luck on above config?

 

OMGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!! UPON READING YOUR POST I WAS LIKE "YOU LUCKY !!" I CHECKED MINE AND IT SAYS "SHIPPED" TOO!!!!!!!!

EPIC EFFFFFFFING WIN!!!!!