XPS M1730 First impressions

OK, ordered from Dell 1st March only to find that Dell's website miscalculated the price and I paid too much, I phoned up Dell on Mon. 3rd who told me to cancell the order and place another one, which was a better spec, yet cheaper!

Suffice to say - because Dell had already charged my credit card for the 1st order, they exceeded my credit limit on the 2nd order - so by the 4th March the 2nd order got cancelled!

A phone call to Dell on the 4th March soon rectified the issue - I re-ordered and got the exact spec I ordered on the 3rd, BUT EVEN CHEAPER!

5th March (phase 1) - got order confirmation and ETA - 19th March (or before)

7th March - despatched! - got voicemail on my mobile - laptop would be delivered on the 11th March between 8am and 1pm

11th March (10am) - THE BEAST ARRIVED!

Faie to say - Dell delivered where Sager failed (waiting 2.5 month for a SLi notebook is taking the piss!)

OK - took laptop down to work (computer shop) and opened it up there. (excited!)

First impressions = FANTASTIC BUILD QUALITY - surpasses previous Dell's which I have owned by far! - love that magnesium underbelly

Because I like to keep a backup of the machines original state I fired it up for the 1st time and used norton ghost to make a complete image of the hard drives. A slight annoyance was that after waiting over an hour the writing failed to the 2nd DVD, so I decided to forget the 'ghosting' for now and fire the laptop into XP.

Love the lighting and the finish - very nice, minor gripe is that I wish you could customize the colour of the keyboard LED's - modification anyone?

Also the media buttons on the front - I wish they lit up constantly.

LCD screen = perfect - nice and bright thanks to LED illumination and no dead pixels (yet!)

G15 gaming panel - a very nice feature - trying to find out how to display framerates on it though.

Sound quality = better than expected - as loud as the Qosmio G30 that I owned, albeit maybe not quite as bassy, but certainly much louder than the 4.1 speaker setup on my Clevo D900T

Ambient noise levels = amazingly quiet for this power of notebook - if stood behind the notebook you will feel a warm breeze upto a few feet away - but the fans are barely audible. The notebook is cool to the touch in all the right places, the only place it runs hot to the touch is on the plastic above the keyboard - but it doesn't run as hot as my D900T

Performance = STAGGERING! - stock drivers - non-overclocked - 48500 3DMark03 marks - my m8's quad core SLi 8800 desktop with 4GB RAM and 2xRaptors in RAID 0 can only manage 51000!

Hard drive performance = very good - have managed to use nero 8 as a image recorder and got sustained transfer rates of 40mb/sec.

I haven't come across any testing material for my Physx adaptor, so i'll pass on that one for now.

Plays Crysis @1920x1200 all settings on max. - but I prefer to play it comfortably at 1680x1050 (which it does effortlessly)

CD/DVD capability - when the Ghost imaging failed, that set alarm bells ringing about Dell and their drive firmware - but this was the first thing I tested when I got it home - nero infotool reports the read/write speeds of the drive incorrectly - and there is no newer firmware available for the drive, but so far, I have found it doesn't need a firmware update.

Media tested so far:

Dysan DVD-R 1-8x = DVD decrypter reported it as burning up to 8x with no problems in verification.

Ritek CD-R (52x) = Worked fine at 16x burn and verified.

Tuffdisc CD-RW (32x) = worked fine at 16x

Verbatim DVD+RW (4x) - worked fine at 4x

AOne DVD-R DL (8x) = burn't 2 of these on max. speed, which = 4x - both discs failed to verify data! - will test further with 2.4x setting.

the first time I used the drive for 'Ghosting' I used Ritek G05 discs - but it bombed on the 2nd disc, but I need to test this media further, so i'll keep you posted.

Webcam = GREAT! - admitedly I'm not really into Webcam/Messenger stuff - but I am impressed with the camera - made by Creative labs (as far as I know) - and the picture quality is good - but even better is the comical special effects you can add to your picture. (I really need to find out how to put a 'Manhunt' smilies mask effect on then maybe I would chat on messenger all the time)

Not tested anything else yet - but it is early days.

If there is anything you need to know don't hesitate to ask.

 

yo man
let me be the first to say CONGRATS, this machine is a beast/beauty
reading all these good things about the m1730 makes me all the more excited to get mines...
glad to see it handling crysis effortlessley.
but i thought the keyboard did change colors? i thought it was like part of lighting effects? or was that from a winamp plugin? notsure...

 

Thanx m8 - have you ordered yours? if not, you should - this is the hot product this year when it comes to high performance notebooks.

With regard to the keyboard - it does not change colour - you can dim the lighting to the keyboard and back panel, but the colour is white.

There is plugins for Media player that allows you to configure the lights to 'pulse' to music, which looks good (look on youtube there's loads of videos)

The touchpad and speaker grilles are colour customizable.

Going to fit my 4GB of RAM soon and see how it runs.

 

cool for the 4gb. u going to install x64 as well?
btw, how does the crimson red look? that looks the coolest by far. but i dont know how itll look with the diff. colors that reflect off of it. like how do other colors look like on the red when ur just trying diff. colors?

 

WHAT!!! No photo's?

 

Grats man, i wish I had to cash to get one of these, but sadly with college, and a new car around the corner I have to pass.

Pfft 3dmark 03? Do 3dmark 06!