XPS2 impressions after a night of use

Just got my XPS2 yesterday after work. Spent about 6 hours with it last night and early this morning, reloading windows and apps, and trying a couple games out to see how it goes. Back at work, so thought I'd post first impressions in case anyone is curious.

To sum it up, yea baby......

The good.

The 1920x1200 screen is absolutely gorgeous. EQ2 at that rez running high detail just looks increadible. I gave Doom3 and HL2 a quick try and they look great. I still need to find my Farcry Cd's to check it out. Makes me wish I could have poped for a higher rez lcd for my desktop, or that desktop LCD's came with higher native resolutions. The difference between 1920x1200 and 1280x1024 is huge. I couldn't see any need to run AA at that high of a rez. Text size is small at windows default, but I like it. The little Dell Quickset or whatever it's called app makes upping the icon/text size easy. Before reloading the OS, the factory setting was a bit too large for my liking, but I don't think anyone would have a problem using it. Unless you have bad eye sight, I wouldn't hesitate to go with the 1920 screen. As far as any "sparkle" problems, I don't think I really noticed anything. I might have seen a little on a solid white background, but nothing that bothered me. For any color other than bright white, I didn't see any, but I wasn't constatnly looking for it either. Personally I'm happy with the screen, and since it looks so good playing games/video, I think I'll be happy with it even if I do notice a bit of sparkle on the few times I look at a solid white area. I haven't checked to see what model display I have yet, I'll update when I do just for reference.

The performance is also impresive. It has the same snappy response feel as my desktop Athlon 64 3200 system. Ran on pass of 3Dmark05 with pretty much everything on default settings and scored 5028. I went with the 5400rpm drive, since I planed on getting a 100gb+ seagate whenever they get around to releasing their next gen 7200rpm laptop drives, and honestly I'm not sure I'm going to bother. Load times seem fine. The only concern I have with the drive is it shows up in DMA mode 2 in Device Manager properties for the primary ide channel. Considering every other recent pc or laptop I've seen shows mode 5, I'm not sure what is up. Be looking into that when I get home tonight. The intel wireless 2915 is also top notch. Easiest setup and access to a wireless lan I've ever seen, and the speed is almost double what my other laptop with a pcmcia netgear 802.11g card could get at the exact same location.

Only a couple issues other than the above mentioned dma mode.

The faceplate for the cdr drive seems to not clip into the cd tray securly one one side (rear edge if your looking at the unit from the front). Clip on the faceplate doesn't seem broken, so I'm thinking that the tab it engages into on the tray itself may be the problem. Haven't looked too closely, and will probably just call Dell and complain until they send me a new cdr drive.

The other is noise. The system isn't loud, but I was somewhat suprised by the fan noise it makes even when idle. I read somewhere that there may be a bug with the current bios that the fans aren't speeding up/slowing down properly with temp. I don't think I heard the fans ramp up or slow down once, so either it's staying cool enough to maintian minimum speed, or not working and running full out. I hope it is the latter, as it's not as quite as I would like, and hate to think it could get even louder after a while under load. There is also an odd sound that is made when the 6800go ultra is working hard, difficult to describe, sort of an electrostatic buzzing sound. It's not loud, but it is noticeable. I'll be looking into the cause of this as well. Want to make sure this is taken in proper prespective, the system isn't loud. It's no where near the noise made by the stock NVidia 6800 cooler for example, but in a quite room, it is noticeable. I'm a quiet pc junkie though, so for me it's more of an issue than it might be for others.

Overall I'm very happy with the XPS2 so far. Obviously lots more testing/evaluating to do, but so far I'm looking forward to sitting on my deck gaming away when the weather gets nice