Dell Studio 17: When Gaming Isn't Enough

Gaming Performance at High Settings

Finally we decided to see just how hard we could push the Dell Studio 17. These numbers are more academic than anything, intended to help demonstrate the difference between a mainstream-class card like the Mobility Radeon HD 4650 and its higher end peers, but it's worth seeing just how the 4650 handles the native resolution of the Studio 17 at these high settings. The Mass Effect 2 results are a repeat of the native res score on the previous page, but this time we're comparing the Studio 17 with some higher end gaming options.

Now we see performance of the 4650 start to grind to a screeching halt. The low memory bandwidth and core clock speeds are finally catching up to it, and it's barely able to produce playable performance in DiRT 2 and Left 4 Dead 2; everything else is unplayable.

The 4650 is certainly enough to get decent gaming performance out of the 900p screen in the Studio 17, but it isn't 100% ideal and isn't going to be able to max out most games at that resolution. We did also experiment with playing some games at 1080p with the 4650 connected to an external monitor, but the limited memory bandwidth just can't pick up the slack.

Worth note is how the 4650 stacks up against the GT 335M here when the GPU is the primary bottleneck; most of the titles are close to a tie, with the two systems changing places. Oddly enough, StarCraft II, which seems to be rather dependent on a fast CPU for our test scene, favors the 335M, despite the use of a ULV processor.