16. Conclusion

To call ATI's Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro Turbo a 3D graphics booster for the Dell Inspiron 8600 is in my opinion an exaggeration. Although the configuration of the machine with this DirectX9 capable graphics processor achieved better 3D benchmarks than the almost identical machine with NVIDIA's GeForce FX Go5650, there is not need to trash your Inspiron 8600 with GeForce FX Go5650, either.

But the following statement sums up the situation well: The ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro Turbo can make an already very well-equipped, fast notebook an even faster, more powerful device. However, it should still be noted that the Mobility Radeon Pro Turbo is in fact the very finely tuned and rapidly clocked variation of the Mobility Radeon 9600. A direct comparison to the Inspiron with the GeForce FX Go5650 from NVIDIA also serves to denigrate the incremental performance improvements.

But why did Dell offer the Inspiron 8600 temporarily with the slower NVIDIA chip, rather than picking the faster solution from ATI right from the start? Well, we can't give you the real reason either. Maybe NVIDIA's processor was already available in production scale quantities last fall, and ATI's wasn't. Dell didn't want to comment on that one, either.

Anyone flirting with the idea of getting a machine that is exactly the same as the configuration tested has to pay $2,123 (2256 euro). What the customer will get for this, however, is a well-equipped notebook with high performance reserves and good battery life, including a 4x DVD+R/+RW burner and a 15.4" WSXGA+ display. Anyone happy with less CPU performance can also order the system with a Pentium-M with a 1.5 GHz core clock speed, thus saving $325 (175 euro).

However, the devil is also in the details. The system has a relatively small number of USB ports, touchpad buttons that offer virtually no point of resistance and a case that creaks loudly when opened.