My review of the e1505

Well, now that I have had this thing for a few days, heres my final words on my experiences with it. I previouse laptop was a tosihba 1800-s207 with a celeron 1100 (that performed no better then the celeron 500 in my last lapop honestly) and a trident cyberblade chipset. My main use for the laptop is movie playback, interneting, and if I am traveling, games obviously. My past laptops have been able to do all except games. One laptop had a rage mobile chip that could do Quake3, but had a dual scan screen. The trident chipset couldnt even play Quake3, and its 2d performance was worse as emulated games in MAME were also droping frames (and looked horrible due to the awful interpolation support built into the display).

Well in the past years, even the toshiba has been flunking on the movies part, generaly being unable to play anything that had hardware subs, used the h264 compression, or the MKV container in general. Even DVDs required %100 of its resources and a clean boot to play dvd's glitch free, so I setout to build a dell laptop for me.

Seing as I had a little more cash to spend then usual, I went with dells step-above cheapo laptopseries, putting me with the 1505. I selected the 1.6 dual core with default setting and proceeded to uprade the monitor to the wsxga (Since movies is my primary use) and bumped the video card to the x1300. I wanted to stay away from any intigrated solution as far as possible. Even if 3d isnt my primary concern (I have a gaming pc for that), intigrated graphics in the past have allways seemed to be WORSE then you can imagin, often offering low performance in 3d and 2d as well as lcd interpolation (a must for viewing non native resolutions on LCD). So even if it wasnt atis fastest 3d chip, it was an ATI chip briming with quality and supporting everything under the sun, even shader model 3.

I also opted for the audigy sound option, saddly before I read that it was nothing more then a fancy software program..doh! Well, atleast it offers a nice looking sound panel.

When the laptop arrived, one of the first things (since i read that dell loads their laptop up with tons of 3rd party crap and partitions galore) I did was format it, unifying all partitions into 1 and then reinstalling windows (I opted for the stand alone windows xp backup cd just so I could reinstall w/o 3rd party crap). BTW I also choose to have my laptop installed with XP home instead of media center, because I didnt have any of the TV stuff so why have any extra overhead in your OS? The reinstall went fine, great even considering the disc they give you has SATA drivers (xp originaly dosnt come with them, makes it a PITA when installing windows onto a pc with only SATA drives and no floppy drive cause windows cant see the sata drive and requires a floppy with the drivers on them) and also has SP2 slipstreamed in it. So pretty much when your done installing, you dont have to download much..for windows anyways.

You see, the dell driver cd sucks.. its horrible. The only reason I still have it is because it has the ethernet driver and I can use that to get on the net and download all the other drivers I need. The driver disk has all the drivers neatly zipped into crypticly named (file names like 3387462.zip) zip files and the only way to make sense of them, is the program on the disc. The program even tries to detect what you have and makes check marks by drivers it thinks you need. Unfortunatly it makes check marks by hardware you dont have, and dosnt check hardware you do have (it said my audio chip was the none sigmatel HD, and didnt have a check next to the sigmatel HD drivers). Also it dosnt have all the drivers. Notibly missing was the wifi and video driver.

After the laptop is up and running on all cylinders, I copy over all the data from my other laptop, and install the escentials like Firefox and the Combined Community Codec Pack.

Some thoughts that passed through my head so far was the laptop design, I like it. Others seem to think it feels cheap, but to me, all my laptops feel cheap, so imo the dell is a step up, if just a little step. Also ive heard of people complaining on previouse versions of the laptop, like about how the screen sits when close, and scuffing issues. Well it looks like they have done everything possible to prevent that. The lid has 8 rubber feet to protect the screen when closed, and the keyboard and mouse keys are compleatly recessed, there is no way the lcd is going to get touched when closed. Also the rubber feet + silver plastic give the lid a sort of industrial look. The white "bumper" around the shell that people like to call it is also not really what it seems, its not rubber at all and looks/feels like the white shiney plastic used on apple devices and such.

The screen, well despite the shiny plastic, I havnt had to many issues with glare, so that part is fine with me. The LCD itself is good, but not perfect, probably not what I would expect as "the highest quality screen offered by dell for this laptop", but its still good, and totaly blows away my old laptop. Theres a medicore light leak at the bottem (dosnt seem to be just this screen too, other screens on other laptop models have it, so me thinks dell is just using an inferior backlighting scheme on them all) but thankfully the other 3 edges are fine. Some report of dark lines on the sides, I find that its just due to the viewing angle issues and is something I see on most laptops still, probably because they still need to use thinner light defussers then LCD monitors. Anyways, yea the LCD has view angle issues, maybe even slightly below avg at that. Its bad enough that the center of the screen is indeed noticably brighter then the edges. Not as noticable in movies and games, but if your browsing windows, the solid color backgrounds bring it right out.

Well after testing out a few movies (and laughing at how a movie that took all of my last laptops cpu now only takes 10-20%) I wanted to see how fast the 3d was. From what I uncovered before hand, the x1300 was as powerfull as my old 9600xt, so I figured id have no trouble with old favorits like unreal tournament 04, and maybe even NFS underground 2. Unreal 2004 whent without a hitch, and I was surprised to find I could run in a widescreen resolution of 1280x800, run smooth, and look good as well. I havnt tried NFSU2 yet, but I did install Guild wars (I no longer subscribe to WoW), mainly because it consist of 3 files you can copy to any computer and it will pick right up and load (Holy ****.. if only all games were like that!). I was really shocked that it too ran smoothly at 1280 x 800 with some adjustments to graphic quality (namlely, shadows turned off, and I think I lowered some world detail setting down to medium. but texture quality is still high and draw distance is maxed, though I dont think you can adjust that in guild wars). I even viewed a few 12vs12 guild matches and visited crowded cities all with great results. Only issue was I had sound breakups in guild wars.

Internet wise, the Wifi functionality has been superb (though if anyone knows how to turn off the beep sound it makes on aquire, please tell ^^). Due to the high resolution, even with windows set to the 120dpi setting (wich the only side effect I have seen is the icons on the task bar are a little distorted, but honestly they are still too small that you actually notice) some web pages have text to small to read. In firefox, enlarging text on a page is as simply as CTRL - +, but It resets each page and I have been unable to find a more perminant change. Do I wish I went with the lower resolution screen? Not at all, on this screen, I can atleast zoom up text/pictures. On a lower resolution screen, you can never add more pixles or detail.

Audio, a few issues, namely breakup in guild wars, also from time to time I do notice extreamly slight crackling in music playback through winamp. I obtained a newer dell driver (5.10.0.4691) that I am currently testing out. I dont feel like doing any test to see if the audigy program changes the sound quality, I'll just accept the fact I paid 20 bucks for a fancy mixer +bass boost.

Finally, so far I am pretty happy with it. The cpu is hella fast, infact according to 3dmark 2003, it gets 150 more cpu marks then my barton core based 2800XP. I havnt confirmed it with any other test, but to think my non gaming laptop beats my made for gaming PC's cpu is funny and sad at the same time. The weight is pretty good, its lighter then my toshiba, and thanks to the lack of floppy drive and thinner screen, the overall profile is thinner. Also not needing a PC card for wifi is nice. BTW a nice bonus, even though dell says they are giving you their wifi solution free, they gave me intels and marked my laptop as a centrino system.

 

I am particularly interested in NFS Underground 2, because the only games I really play are the NFS series. If you have Most Wanted, could you try that as well? These are the games I am particularly interested in, and am wondering how the low end cards will handle them. Please let me know, thanks!

 

Well NFSU2 worked awsome. I was using 1280x800 with alot of the settings at minimal (but not deactivated). With the screen size and lcd not being quite as responsive as the better lcd's out there, you dont notice thing like lower reflection detail and update rates, heck even low geometry cars was barly noticeable. The graphic splender dosnt suffer much and I got a greate frame rate.

NFS most wanted kinda sucked..just like it did on my 9600xt. Your regulated to 800x600 pretty much, and imo most wanteds graphics arnt so impressive at high resolutions (as per my 9800GS card), so at low resolutions they look like crap. If you find it tolerable though, its smooth enough to play.

NFSU2 requires Universal Widescreen patcher to run at 1280x800.

Most Wanted uses a 3rd party launcher wich can be found on the widescreen gaming forums. http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/forum/

How ever I couldnt find a playable widescreen resolution for it.