7. Gaming Performance: Quake 3 Arena

As the demo runs with Quake Arena III showed, graphics tend to fall by the wayside relatively quickly at high resolutions. Although the system is good enough for the occasional quick game now and then, real gamers will be expecting more power, like the kind they get from a Mobility Radeon 7500/9000 von ATI , for example, or NVIDIA's Geforce4 Go440/Go460 chips.

Summary: Half-Speed In Battery Mode

Owing to the really lavish configuration, Dell's SmartStep 250N could be considered a real bargain. A closer look, however, reveals the system's weaknesses: with a traveling weight of altogether 4.26 kilograms (device 3.7kg, power supply 0.56kg) and dimensions of 32.5 x 4.8 x 27.5 cm3, it is at best suited for short trips. The graphics resolution with the Mobility Radeon M6 does not represent the latest in technology and, far more seriously, in battery mode, the CPU runs at half-speed only . The user does not have the option of running the SmartStep on battery at the advertised speed of 2.2 GHz at the expense of battery-running time. The advantage of the quick processor is thus lost in mobile operation. We find the fact that Dell fails to clearly point out this special "feature" pretty shameless , to put it mildly.

What did leave a good impression were the two hours and 47 minutes of battery-running time and the complete set of equipment.