4. Dell XPS M1710: An Impressive Gaming Notebook

Reviewers: Barry Gerber and Darren Polkowski

From its sleek design to its CPU, graphics processor, display, memory and disk drives, the Dell XPS M1710 screams speed. "Our" M1710 came with a 2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo CPU, an Nvidia GeForce Go 7900 GTX graphics processor with 512 MB of DDR3 memory, a 17" 1920 x 1200 display, 2 GB of 677 MHz DDR2 memory and a 100 GB 7200 rpm SATA hard disk drive.

Dell's XPS M1710 is a graphics notebook well suited to gaming.

The M1710's cool design points include a metallic red or black top, a lighted mouse touchpad and color changeable LED lights at various places around the notebook. Here's a picture of the XPS with a red top and another of the notebook's vent LEDs set to produce a multi-colored pattern.

The XPS M1710 completed our gaming tests with flying colors. It also did pretty well on component and battery life tests. The notebook's display left a little to be desired, but in most lighting situations it worked well. See the second part of the XPS M1710 article for testing details.

While the M1710 is the fastest graphics notebook we've ever tested, we don't think it's the fastest ever. We're anxious to test notebooks with AMD CPUs and SLI-based graphics solutions, such as those from Alienware, Widow PC and Eurocom. Based on our findings with desktop SLI cards, we would expect that SLI will add 30% to gaming performance and 60% higher resolutions, but that remains to be seen.

At this writing, you can buy an XPS M1710 configured like our evaluation unit for around $4,200 at www.dell.com. The starting price for metallic red models is $3,400. The starting price for metallic black systems is in the neighborhood of $2,600. The metallic red models have a higher minimum configuration than the metallic black ones. You may consider these prices high, but high quality, high powered graphics notebooks don't tend to come cheap. If you want Dell quality and you want it now, go with the M1710. If you can give your dad a rain check, wait for the next generation from Dell and the other vendors.