Dell XPS M1730: SLI, Penryn, and Overclocking
by Jarred Walton on February 28, 2008 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Overclocking and Futuremark Performance
While we don't consider performance results in 3DMark or PCMark to be anywhere near as meaningful as actual gaming/application performance - outside of bragging rights - these applications do provide a consistent means of measuring performance and scores do tend to correlate reasonably well with a variety of real-world games/applications. We also experienced a couple system crashes at the 3.4GHz overclock in the various 3DMark versions.
Note: All of the Futuremark overclocking tests were performed with the 174.20 drivers.
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Again, the XPS M1730 pretty much walks away from the competition. Drilling down into the individual PCMark05 results, we do find a few tests where the M1730 doesn't place at the top of the pack, but rarely is it far behind and several of the tests where it doesn't place first may have more to do with specific driver optimizations that affect this benchmark than reality.
In the overclocking department, we see good performance increases in most of the test suites. 3DMark03 is the odd man out, with a more GPU limited nature, while 3DMark05/06 and PCMark05 scale quite well. The margin of error is a bit higher on the Futuremark applications when overclocking the M1730, as we saw variations of up to 3% between consecutive test runs. Regardless, clock speed will help if you're after ORB placement.
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FXi - Friday, February 29, 2008 - link
If folks are going to be told that a laptop performs extremely well, I think it would be fair to throw at least a single desktop system (mainstream enthusiast level, nothing over the top) into the charts for comparisons. I realize it could stunt the graphs a bit, but folks really need to understand what they are buying into with these machines, and all too often they think they are getting something that is 90% of a desktop's power, and that's rarely the case.If it breaks the grapsh too badly, throw a couple of graphs in the end of the article (much like you have a couple of pages dedicated to "overclocking performance") that give the fair comparison. I'm not saying that lappies aren't worth it, just people should be fully aware of what they are paying for.
7Enigma - Friday, February 29, 2008 - link
I would completely agree with you up until the conclusion of the article. I have never owned a laptop, and probably won't for quite some time. Because of this I don't follow the laptop-only parts (CPU/GPU/RAM/etc.) much and so thought, "This is a crazy fast laptop but I wonder how it compares to a Q6600 with 8800GTX".The conclusion really put the laptop in perspective for me. Basically its a top of the line desktop system from a year ago. That's all I needed to hear. I think it is quite a feat to have a laptop capable of performance a year behind current tech. Yes it is more desktop in a small form factor, but it is a easily portable computer that behaves like a very capable desktop system.
With all that said, I can't wait to build my new system after 3 years with my current un-upgraded one. Just waiting on the 45nm quads and the new 9800's to pull the trigger...
funky24 - Friday, February 29, 2008 - link
man they got the best job in the whole world do u keep all hardware u test here ,man that is one mean laptop would kill to have it lolPlasmaBomb - Monday, March 3, 2008 - link
Nope, they have to give it back :(Baked - Thursday, February 28, 2008 - link
This is totally necessary... You can probably murder somebody w/ the power brick if they try to take the "notebook" from you.PlasmaBomb - Thursday, February 28, 2008 - link
What size and rating does the power brick on this beast have?JarredWalton - Thursday, February 28, 2008 - link
It's the biggest power brick I've seen to date, rated at 230W output. So assuming ~80% efficiency, even at the maximum load with overclocking it still has some remaining capacity. Heck, the power brick probably weighs as much as a Mac Air! ;)PlasmaBomb - Saturday, March 1, 2008 - link
Cheers for the info, any chance of a piccy?It must get rather hot, if indeed it's 80% efficient it is dumping 50W when drawing 260W from the plug!
JarredWalton - Sunday, March 2, 2008 - link
Image added. And it could be less than 80% efficient, but the point is the laptop uses nearly as much power as an entry level desktop with discrete graphics.Direct link to image:
http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/mobile/2008/de...">One big power brick
PlasmaBomb - Monday, March 3, 2008 - link
Cheers for the pics, good job btw :)