Dell XPS M1710 - Overclocked

Closing Thoughts

As we mentioned at the outset, it's been over a year since we first looked at Dell's XPS M1710. While plenty of things have changed during the past year, our overall impression of the notebook hasn't been altered much. Maximum performance is now better than ever, and the notebook certainly has an eye-catching design. By no means is it an inexpensive notebook, but for those looking to get maximum performance while maintaining mobility Dell's XPS notebook line certainly warrants a closer look.

About the biggest fault that we can find with the XPS M1710 is something that's out of Dell's hands. The GeForce Go 7900 GTX launched over a year ago, and more than six months ago the GeForce Go 7950 GTX improved performance. In the desktop market, however, GeForce 7 series hardware is now old news. If you like to stay abreast of the latest technology news, you probably already know that NVIDIA's going to be launching their mobile GeForce 8000 GPUs very shortly. Unfortunately, as yet there is no successor to the GeForce Go 7950 GTX performance crown. Soon you will be able to get DirectX 10 equipped laptops, but at best we expect the graphics performance to match or slightly surpass that of the GeForce Go 7900 GS - just like the desktop 8600 GTS isn't always faster than the 7900 GS, we expect the mobile equivalents will trade blows up with no clear winner. We still don't have any DirectX 10 games to play, but every day that passes brings such games nearer to release and we would be very hesitant to lay down a lot of money right now on a gaming laptop that won't be able to run those games in all their glory once they become available.

With Dell able to offer an overclocking capable Core 2 Duo laptop, we also have to wonder when Core 2 Quad chips will begin showing up in a mobile form factor. Obviously, we're not going to see 2.93 GHz QX6800 equivalents anytime soon, but some users would certainly be willing to give up a few hundred megahertz in clock speed in order to add more processor cores. Perhaps when Intel begins shipping 45 nm processors we will start to see quad core notebooks. Just like quad core desktops, however, that sort of performance isn't something that many people need right now.

Since the overclocked M1710 that we tested today has been available for a while, it stands to reason that if you didn't want to buy it when it was first launched you probably still aren't interested. You can now get a larger hard drive, Windows Vista, Blu-ray, and who knows what Dell will add in the near future; however, at its core the M1710 remains largely unchanged. It is an attractive, fast, and expensive laptop; the only tests where it didn't come out on the top of our charts are the battery life results, which is a sacrifice that typically has to be made when looking at gaming laptops. If you're in the market for just such a laptop, give the XPS M1710 a look. As usual, however, if you're in no hurry to purchase something right now we would recommend waiting to see what the future holds. Whenever you finally decide it's time to buy, there's certain to be some worthwhile solutions available.