my XPS M1730 $4000 blows...........

I read most of this thread, dingkingdotnet, and I agree 100%.

To the moderators: BAN these people who are ridiculing people for posting messages on a NOTEBOOK HARDWARE DISCUSSION FORUM! The PURPOSE of these forums is for people to seek out HELP for Christ's sake! To come on here and be ridiculed by posters like B2TheEYo is inexcuseable! Ban the F*CKER!

Ok, back to calm now.

First, I'm not going to explain to ANYONE why I bought the X7900 CPU. It's none of their business.

I'm not going to justify upgrading my OS from Vista to XP Pro.

I will agree with the OP that the performance of the XPS M1730 is pathetic compared even to my XPS Gen2 with a 7800 Ultra.

I should NOT have to download HACKED LV2G drivers to wring acceptable performance for games like System Shock 2 and Anachronox on a state-of-the-art machine.

These games are 6-8 years old and there is noticeable frame skipping and stuttering! A QUAKE2 ENGINE GAME!

Why should I have to overclock it or run it in SLI to get smooth performance?

I shouldn't!!!

OK, calming down again.

By the way, I tried every combination of the LV2G drivers and it was a pretty close call that I was able to recover at all, as I was having such severe trouble with dual monitor support and (which I use in my job) that I considered formatting the drive and doing a full reinstall: I managed to excise the LV2G drivers and revert to the default XP drivers and recover... but performance is still terrible. I need this machine for my day-to-day work, and can't risk it getting screwed up with non-standard drivers.

Clearly, mileage varies when using the LV2G drivers: I've had machines where they worked great, and other cases where they just F*CK things up, and I don't think with a $3200 computer I should have to take that risk. Note: the M1730 is available with Windows XP, so I expect XP to be supported properly by Dell.

I'm more than a little pissed off at the juvenile attitudes of some of the posters in this thread, and disappointed that the MODs don't do something about it.

I used my rights as a privileged XPS owner and spoke to their north american XPS support, and the best they could do was point me at the "vista" performance driver... but the tech sounded pretty embarrassed when I complained about relatively ancient games not performing well... I'm tempted to take a ride to the Dell Canada office (20 mins from me) and just ask for the director of canadian marketing or sales and demo Anachronox for them and watch them squirm.

...but if there's a solution to this that anyone has heard of, I will be watching this thread.

Thanks to the OP, and to those that supported the OP, and thanks in advance for any helpful, positive advice.

 

I was not impressed with the 8700 series cards that were in my original XPS. About a week after I recieved it I noticed on dells web site that the 8800's were now avaliable. I quickly got an RMA number and returned it and purchased another one with the 8800's. I'm glad I did, this new XPS is incredible... O/C cu to 3.0ghz and hit 13,000 on 3D mark 06. It runs any game I throw at it perfectly with all settings maxed at 1920x1200 resolution.

 

One thing I noticed on what few games I tried to play on Vista was that the games will, by default, attempt to run under DirectX10, and most (all?) nVidia cards (at least so far as I have read, don't pretend to have read everything available) have - at best - lackluster DirectX10 support. After reading that, I chose the DirectX9 option in the configuration menu for the respective game(s), and performance was instantly better - often dramatically so.

The best example I can give you is Company of Heroes, which under DirectX10 was struggling to hit 20fps and came across as "Poor" in the performance tests. Under DirectX9, it popped right back up to the mid 40s and played just fine. (Mind you, this was on a Dell XPS M1530 w/3GB, 7500 CPU - 2.2Ghz/4MB cache - and the 256MB GeForce 8600 GT).

Also, my experience has been that, subjectively, XP SP2 will perform better than Vista on identical hardware - general interface responsiveness, etc objectively XP SP2 performs substantially better - sometimes as much as 30% faster - on large network file transfers. On benchmarks like 3DMark05, WinXP generally bought me about a 10% performance increase.

May not be helpful at all, just my own experience. Good luck.

-SoonerDave

 

You clearly have some anger issues, but let me clear a few things up for you.
1) Nobody's asking for justification as to why someone specced their machine in whatever way they did. I don't see why you feel they are. This is your first post on this thread. Nobody's asked you to justify anything!

2) You haven't "upgraded" to XP Pro from Vista. Technically, that's a downgrade.

3) Why shouldn't you have to download "hacked" drivers? I think a better word, by the way, would be "optimised." Everybody who takes their PC gaming even mildly seriously will, because these drivers are updated much quicker than drivers from suppliers, leading to better performance, from a community effort.

4) It's not a state-of-the-art machine. Sorry.

5) It is well documented that SLI has issues running older games. Not anybody's fault, it's just the hardware as it stands at the moment.

My points here lead to this: you should have done some research on the technology and the computer before putting down that amount of cash. Wanting to play older games is just one example where having prior knowledge goes a long way.

Relax, chill out, and stop calling for the Mods to help. Nobody's being victimised, but if you come across like an ass-hat, people will treat you as such.