5. Within The Shell

Once you pass the outer layer of devices and simple panels, you have to do some work to get inside the chassis. Trying to find those hidden screws can make for an interesting game - interesting, that is, until you get frustrated enough with the unit that you contemplate thoughts of throwing it out the window. Fortunately, the frustration level never got quite that high with this notebook.

With the DVD burner and Hitachi Travelstar hard drive removed, the system looks empty. There is a surprisingly large amount of space inside the case. There isn't as much as in the Clevo chassis, but then, the Dell doesn't have the extra three pounds either.

The cooling solutions are simple and effective. There is a heatsink over the Northbridge, a simple single heat pipe leading away from the CPU, and a dual heat pipe system on the GPU. This system has much better real estate management than previous high-end systems, including only two fans (compared to five).

So it looks good, but how does it perform? Let's see some benchmarks!