4. XPS M1730 Components

Try as he may, chief lab technician Shelton Romhanyi wasn’t able to disassemble the XPS M1730 without damage, so our photos are limited to those few parts he could access.

One of the more impressive features of Dell’s XPS M1730 is its overclocking capability. Overclocking is a rare find in notebooks, so even minimal adjustability would be extraordinary, and that’s exactly what you get. The mobile Intel Core 2 Extreme X7900 is multiplier unlocked, so the 2.80 GHz XPS M1730 supports it at speeds up to 3.40 GHz. No further BIOS settings are available, and notebook cooling limits forced our testing to stop at 3.0 GHz.

Dell rates its battery in Watt hours rather than milliamp hours, but our calculators tell us that its 85Wh rating at 11.1 volts is equal to 7658 milliamp hours. That’s certainly larger than the 4400mAh typical of midsized notebooks.

Two DIMM slots come equipped with two 1 GB DDR2-667 modules for 2 GB total memory. Dell offers an upgrade to 4 GB for an offensive $375 additional charge, while savvy buyers can purchase top-brand 2x2 GB DDR2-667 SO-DIMM kits for around $200. Perhaps Dell is charging a $175 recycling fee to ditch the 2x1 GB kit the machine comes with? It’s purely insulting to pay Dell to remove the standard RAM kit you’ve already paid for in the base price, and our recommendation for XPS M1730 buyers who want 4 GB memory is to order the 2 GB configuration and replace the RAM themselves.

Notebook drives are finally approaching acceptable daily-use capacities, and Dell boosted its XPS M1730 to 400 GB by using two 200 GB drives in the on-chipset RAID controller’s Level 0 mode. Level 0 also increases peak theoretical throughput by up to 100%, though typical increases are 20%-50%.

At no additional cost, Dell allows buyers to substitute these 200 GB 7200RPM drives for two 250 GB 5400RPM drives, increasing capacity from 400 GB to 500 GB but reducing performance slightly. The reduction in rotational speed typically decreases heat and power consumption as well, but Dell doesn’t provide any further details.

Buyers with loads of cash and not much need for capacity can also choose Dell’s flagship 128 GB SSD (Solid State Disk) Level 0 array for "only" $1650. Whoever buys these will help drive SSD’s into the mainstream, so wealthy customers should feel free to take one "for the team".

Likely chosen for its low power consumption and low heat output, Dell’s motherboard is based on Intel’s mobile P965 Express chipset. But unlike most other Intel chipset systems, the M1730 uses an SLI pair of mobile graphics chips for increased gaming performance. This presents something of a conundrum for desktop users who’ve found that SLI "doesn’t work" with Intel chipsets.

The magic is in the graphics driver: Nvidia simply refuses to let "competing brand" desktop chipsets use SLI mode because doing so would eat into its SLI chipset sales. In fact, Nvidia even "disables" SLI on some of its own chipsets so it can boost prices on those bearing the SLI label. Yet the company doesn’t produce an adequately power-efficient notebook chipset, so it allows (begrudgingly we assume) SLI mode on competing-brand notebook chipsets.

That the PM965 Express is nothing other than Intel’s desktop P965 Express with a few power-optimized features is further proof that Intel chipsets really are SLI capable, and that Nvidia is using graphics driver "locks" as a way to force desktop users to buy motherboards using its chipsets. This strong-arm tactic leaves desktop SLI users with the single hope that Nvidia will improve its chipsets to meet Intel’s technological challenge, while buyers of gaming notebooks such as the M1730 get the best of both worlds - SLI and an efficient Intel chipset - but only if they’re willing to accept the lower-performance of Nvidia’s mobile graphics processors.