Dell Inspiron XPS Review Birmingham AL

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Originally published at Internet.com

Dude, You're Getting Fragged

Dell's getting in touch with its dark side again. As it did with the Dimension XPS desktop last June, the company has taken its top-of-the-line laptop and issued a loaded, tricked-out model for hardcore gamers and performance buffs, taking a break from its usual corporate competition with HP and Gateway to crash a LAN party with the likes of Alienware and VoodooPC.

Dell being Dell, the Inspiron XPS is a bit less radical than the gaming specialists' mobile systems, but it's priced noticeably below them: A bigger-screened but otherwise comparably equipped VoodooPC Envy M:780, for example, is almost $1,000 above our test system's $2,786, even before the latter's $200 mail-in rebate.

And it's hardly a hardware weakling, with ATI's 128MB Mobility Radeon 9700 blazing through the latest games while Intel's 3.4GHz, Hyper-Threading Pentium 4 crunches numbers. The CPU, by the way, is the 800MHz-bus "Northwood" model with 512K of Level 2 cache, not the new Pentium 4/3.4E "Prescott," but if you're starved for speed and status, slip Dell an extra thousand bucks and you'll get the 3.4GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition with 2MB of Level 3 cache.

And the Inspiron XPS comes with a free backpack for lugging it to gaming contests, plus your choice of three snap-on, funky-looking (if, in our opinion, not all that comfortable, hard-rubbery-feeling) covers. Our XPS wore the colorful "Cipher" lid, though you might prefer to go Goth with "Skullz."

From Mild To Wild

Just as the Dimension XPS is the evil twin of the Dimension 8300, the Inspiron XPS has a civilian cousin for travelers who don't know who Tony Hawk is: the Inspiron 9100, which also combines Intel's desktop Pentium 4 and 865PE chipset with ATI's Mobility Radeon 9700 graphics controller. The 9100, however, gives a choice of Pentium 4/2.8, /3.0, or /3.2 processors, instead of offering 3.4GHz and Extreme Edition options, and gives buyers a choice of 64MB or 128MB video-memory configurations while the XPS comes with 128MB only.

The Inspiron XPS also heads straight to the top of the options list as far as its 15.4-inch, wide-aspect-ratio screen is concerned -- its display resolution is a whopping 1,920 by 1,200 pixels, whereas the Inspiron 9100 can also be ordered with slightly less squint-making 1,280 by 800 or 1,680 by 1,050 LCDs.

The super-high-resolution screen is a beauty, with bright colors and no bad pixels that we could see, but it's more suited to alien-landscape panoramas than humdrum office applications -- even with Windows XP Home Edition configured for enlarged fonts and icons (120 rather than 96 dpi), we found ourselves grumbling that items were too small and spanning the screen took too much touchpad trekking. We've enjoyed superfine 16- and 17-inch notebook screens, but considering the display's 15.4-inch size, we'd probably put down our bifocals and vote for one of the Inspiron 9100's slightly less micro-pixeled panels.

That said, the Mobility Radeon 9700 graphics processor proved impressively up for the challenge of hi-res gaming, although a step short of the fastest, costliest desktop 3D cards such as ATI's Radeon 9800 XT or Nvidia's GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. Reset to 1,600 by 1,200 resolution, the Inspiron XPS powered through our Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory benchmark at a smooth 35 frames per second, accelerating to 75 fps in High Quality 1,024 by 768 mode.

Admittedly, some of our benchmarks were more a matterr of marveling that the Dell could complete the normally desktop-, let alone notebook-killing, tests at all (9 fps in Gun Metal 2 at 1,600 by 1,200 resolution or 6 fps in Codecreatures at 1,920 by 1,200, both with 4X antialiasing). But others were solid hits, such as 28 fps and a Graphics score of 3,237 in AquaMark3 or 156 fps in an Unreal Tournament 2003 flyby (both at 1,024 by 768). Still in XGA mode, the XPS jittered through the old Quake III Arena benchmark at a blinding 250 fps and cruised to a FutureMark 3DMark03 score of 3,324, passing every DirectX 9 test along the

A Heavyweight Contender

With its Pentium 4/3.4 processor and 512MB of DDR400 memory (upgrading to 1GB would add $400), not to mention a 60GB, 7,200-rpm Hitachi Travelstar hard disk with 8MB buffer, the Inspiron XPS also blazes through less graphically oriented benchmarks and applications. To put it another way, the unit doesn't run away from slower-clock-speed Pentium 4/3.0 or Athlon 64 3200+ desktops we've tested, but nor does it tempt us to pay the colossal $1,000 premium for upgrading to the Extreme Edition CPU.

The laptop bad boy earned an overall score of 289 in BAPCo's SysMark 2002, with a 187 in Office Productivity balanced by a spectacular 447 in Internet Content Creation (the last a sucker for P4's with Hyper-Threading). Its PCMark04 score was 4,980, with subscores of 5,023 (CPU), 4,623 (memory), 3,587 (hard disk), and 2,625 (graphics, running in 1,600 by 1,200 mode).

If its performance places the Dell firmly above the e-mail-on-the-plane class of portables, so does its bulk -- the chassis which the XPS it shares with the Inspiron 9100 measures a stately 10.8 by 14.1 by 2.0 inches, and the laptop tipped our postage scale at just under 9.9 pounds. Its AC adapter adds a portly 2.4 pounds to the backpack.

Our test system was about as well connected as it's possible for a portable to be, with both 802.11b/g and Bluetooth wireless adapters as well as a back panel bristling with ports: four USB 2.0 ports, one with a power connector for AC-adapter-free external devices; Gigabit Ethernet; 56Kbps modem; and VGA, S-Video, and DVI outputs. Microphone and headphone jacks and a FireWire port are on the left side, next to the PC Card slot and NEC ND-5100A 4X DVD+RW drive (which doubles as a 24/10/24X CD-RW burner).

Almost a Media Center

The Inspiron XPS has a comfortable keyboard, though as a rule we're not wild about notebooks with half-sized Insert, Delete, Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys arrayed in the top right corner instead of full-sized ones running down the right edge; convenient audio volume and mute buttons are above the main keyboard, with DVD or CD play/pause, stop, and next/previous track buttons at the right.

Sound quality is a little thin but not bad even at loud volumes, though the subwoofer -- a tiny third speaker built into the bottom-mounted battery pack -- won't be mistaken for a desktop 2.1 sound system. A cooling fan occasionally kicks in, but isn't noisy enough to be annoying. Speaking of the lithium-ion battery, we regularly managed just under two hours' unplugged operation -- 115-plus minutes for word processing and spreadsheet sessions, 100 or 105 minutes with more demanding multimedia and gaming use, although we found all but the top two of the eight screen brightness settings too dim.

Your pointing-device preference awaits, with both an IBM ThinkPad-style pointing stick embedded in mid-keyboard and an Alps touchpad below it; the two cursor controllers offer two pairs of mouse buttons, mounted above and below the touchpad. We would have liked to see a scroll wheel, however.

Dell's software bundle includes Sonic's MyDVD and RecordNow authoring programs along with CyberLink's PowerDVD player and trial versions of Jasc Software's Paint Shop Pro 8 and Paint Shop Photo Album for image editing and organizing. An interesting utility dubbed Dell Media Experience delivers an attractive, big-screen facsimile of Windows XP Media Center Edition, not for personal video recording (there's no TV tuner on board) but for browsing and enjoying digital music tracks as well as audio CDs and DVDs.

Bottom line? The Inspiron XPS is both a worthy and relatively affordable newcoomer to the narrow ranks of game-freak, show-off laptops, though even its impressive ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 will get dusted by somebody who brings a Shuttle small-form-factor desktop with faster, full-sized graphics card to the fragfest.

Sure, 90 out of 100 shoppers seeking a powerful, general-purpose, desktop-replacement notebook will be better served by its close relation the Inspiron 9100, settling for a 3.2GHz or 3.0GHz processor and maybe one of the lower-resolution versions of the wide-aspect-ratio screen, just as only three out of 100 shoppers will want to splurge on the P4 Extreme Edition CPU instead of our test unit's normal Northwood. But, like Jack Black's character in School of Rock, the XPS serves society by rocking. We salute it.

Pros: * 3.4GHz Pentium 4 or P4 Extreme Edition power, ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 graphics, and 1,920 by 1,200 resolution in a notebook? We are so there * Priced below boutique-brand gaming laptops, with a free backpack

Cons: * Heavy, bulky, and (when using the hi-res screen for regular Windows) squinty