New Gaming Notebooks Launched by Dell

Large and lovely - initial impression. Never before have I seen such components under a hood of a mere notebook. And what a notebook it is, at 17 inches with a large bezel, this monster weighs in at just under five kilograms. Its aimed at LAN party freaks and gamers who want limited probability, certainly nobody who wants to cart his notebook around everyday ever will. If you want compact; skip this review now! I'd call it a desktop replacement but its clearly oriented towards the gaming fraternity; which makes it some what of a rarity.

Its colossal bulk aside,the XPS 1730 is quite a looker. With a solid body that has a mock carbon fibre finish and solid built quality all round you can be sure of a long lasting product. The screen is very crisp and has great viewing angles, while the resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels maybe considered to be too high for a 17 inch screen; I respect the fact that this was a necessity for what is essentially a gaming notebook. The keypad is also very well laid out although this isn't apparent immediately, but it becomes more evident once you spend some time using it. Keypad feedback is right on; as is the ergonomics and I have absolutely no complaints. There are also large and blue back lit, chromed multimedia buttons on the front of the notebook which work well and are usable in the dark. Bluetooth and WiFi can be switched on and off with a well positioned switch, very thoughtful. Four USB ports will be enough for almost all usage scenarios. The palm rest is nice and large. The recessed but sensitive track pad works well.

There's a little monochrome LCD display below the right hinge that works like a small status display showing the time, CPU and memory utilization among other parameter. Powered by an X9000 Core 2 Extreme Edition CPU that runs at 2.8 GHz, the XPS 1730 has enough processing grunt to handle nearly anything you can throw at it. The price of this CPU alone is in the region of $900 so be prepared to an unpleasant surprise when you read this behemoths price. The configuration I received also had 4 GB of DDR 2 667 Mhz memory and two NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards in SLI. You can also upgrade to a 500 GB x 2 RAID 0 hard drive solution, and Dell offers an 80 GB SSD solution too, although this is prohibitively expensive at the movement.

With such components I expected performance to be shattering; while not on par with a fastest desktops around, the fact that Dell was able to get two of the fastest mobile graphics solutions under this things hood itself speaks volumes about their designs. Obviously this notebook dissipates a lot of heat and the rear portion gets very hot; but through the vents large fins are visible which evidently do a good job, as the palm rest does not heat up at all.

So it is fast and expensive. This configuration costs around $1600; which is definitely very high for a notebook. While it is true that you could assemble a PC that's thrice as powerful for the same price its equally true that no other notebook can even hope to approach this sort of performance. If you have the moolah, are looking for something exclusive by nature of its very price and desire a gaming notebook that stands out at next LAN fest, you may have found just the thing.