The XPS series seems perfect except one thing...

The XPS 15/17 seem like awesome laptops for the price, but one thing that bothers me is: Why does Dell insist on using DDR3 memory on all of their graphics cards across the board? To my knowledge, from the 525M and 540M of the XPS 15, to the 550M and 555M of the XPS 17, they all use DDR3 memory, when all of the 5xxM series are capable of using GDDR5 memory, as stated on Nvidia's site.

Is Dell just too cheap or lazy to implement these cards? I mean, I'm not asking them to pull rabbits out of a hat. I just want the option to choose a more competent card when the technology already exists. Can someone explain to me in more detail why the 525M, 540M, 550M, and 555M are ALL kept at DDR3, when GDDR5 exists? There must be a catch. Did Dell just look at the cards and go like, "Oh well, we'll just throw the weaker version of these cards into all of our laptops. No one's going to notice." and call it a day?

My OCD must just be kicking into overdrive...

*Note: I'm also aware that there are varying memory bus widths/shaders. But for example, why can't Dell just use the 192bit/144 shader/GDDR5 version for the 555M? Is it that hard to implement?

 

Just price.

Dell has premium GPU, screen and ram all over the place.

Just look at Alienware and Latitude/Precision laptops.

 

I'm thinking it would have little benefit since overclocking the ram seems to have such small differences. At least on my 525 when I OC it. I'm not exactly an expert on this though

 

Yeah.. I've noticed Dell's inconsistency quite a bit. Stuff like offering a subwoofer on the XPS15/17, M14x, M18x, while not offering it on the M17x? Not that a subwoofer on a laptop matters, but it's just those small things. Or like offering Momentus XT drives on the M18x, but not on any other laptop. Or offering 8GB of RAM in only 4DIMMS on the M17x, while offering both 2DIMMS and 4DIMMS on the M18x. Or having WavesMAXX Audio on the XPS 15/17, M11x R3, M14x, and M18x, but not the M17x... I could go on and on.

It seems like Dell's doing a good job at staying technologically ahead of the competition, but everything's just so spread out and inconsistent that there's never really a "perfect" laptop. All of the good features are so spread out. Every laptop is just missing that one thing.

 

No one is using DDR5 on the 555m type cards. It isn't just Dell. It's cheaper that way and since the cards aren't the super power horses that GTX cards are and so are targeted more at multimedia audiences, they don't see the need to. They still perform quite solidly.