12. What Is A Final Engineering Sample? Continued

Dell has chosen to go with a small, two fan configuration to remove heat from the heat pipe out of the rear and left corner of the notebook. At times, this back part of the notebook can reach some high temperatures that are a little more than warm to the touch. The two fans in the back of the unit do not run all of the time. In fact, at times only one of them might come on for a minute or two, depending on the temperature and how much heat needs to be dissipated from the unit. When the unit gets really hot, both fans might come on for an extended period of time. With both fans running, it can get a little noisy, but we have noticed some improvement in our test system over other Dells that we have tested. Overall, the fans don't stay on too long, even when running the most intense of benchmarks, but with both of them ramped up to full speed to cool the system, you will definetely hear that they are on.

In our test unit, Dell uses a heat pipe configuration along with the two fans to keep the unit cool.

The bottom of the unit does not present much of a change from other Dell Latitude 8xx/Inspiron 8xxx models. It comes complete with one MiniPCI slot that is standard. On our unit it was not populated, but as you can tell from the picture, it had an antenna hook-up for 802.11b wireless. In addition, it offers two memory slots, which can be populated up with PC2100/266MHz DDR to reach it's maximum memory limit of 1 GB of RAM.

You really don't see much on the bottom of our test unit other than the MiniPCI slot and the two memory expansion slots.

From what we could see from our test unit, Dell really didn't introduce anything new. Instead they took a unit that was already successful and upgraded it to the latest processor, chipset, and the latest graphics technology, sticking with a proven winner. While we would have liked for Dell to show us something new, our test unit didn't disappoint, but we sure would have liked them to show us some new and innovative features rather than just sticking with the status quo.