BIOS: Technology Means Business

First and foremost, this is more of an update to the XPS Gen 2 rather than a new machine. Nevertheless, Dell’s Inspiron XPS M170 is about as powerful as mobile gaming currently gets, thanks largely nVidia’s awesome GeForce Go 7800 GTX graphics card and 256MB of dedicated DDR3 video memory (the XPS Gen 2 used the GeForce Go 6800 Ultra). While SLI for laptops is on the horizon, a single GeForce Go 7800 GTX is the fastest and powerful laptop GPU available.

Sporting the snazzy silver-and-black brushed aluminium enclosure and customisable 16-colour LEDs we’ve come to expect from Dell’s performance systems, the Inspiron XPS M170 (394x282x49mm, 4.2kg) also boasts an excellent 17-inch widescreen display for quality DVD-Movie playback, built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and Microsoft’s consumer-friendly Media Center 2005 Edition operating system. The only disappointment is that the laptop ships as standard with a CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo drive instead of a dual-layer DV burner. How tight!

Available from £1899, the Inspiron XPS M170 includes a high-quality 17-inch widescreen display which has an eye-watering resolution of 1920x1200 pixels (UXGA) and includes Dell’s new TrueLife technology, which enhances the LCD display contrast to offer cinematic-like images. As you'd expect from a system designed to muscle your desktop PC out of the way, the Inspiron XPS M170 offers a good range of connectivity options.

You get six USB 2.0 ports (four at the back and two on the left-hand side), FireWire port, S-Video out, Type II PC Card slot, headphone and microphone ports (located on the right-hand side of the system rather than at the front), Gigabit Ethernet, V.92 modem, and a SecureDigital (SD) slot. Unfortunately, there's no parallel port for hooking up legacy devices, such as a printer, and no infrared port (a necessary requirement for Media Center 2005 Edition).

It also supports an Intel Pentium M 770 processor (2.13GHz, 533MHz FSB, 2MB L2 cache) or Pentium M 780 processor (2.26GHz, 533MHz FSB, 2MB L2 cache), 512MB to 2GB DDR2 memory at 533MHz, integrated Intel 2200 (802.11b/g) Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capability. You even get a choice of 60-, 80- or 100GB hard disk drive (7200rpm) and choice of fixed optical drives (CD-RW/DVD or Double Layer DVD+/-RW/+R). Our review model shipped with a Pentium M 780 processor, 2GB of system memory, 100GB HDD and CD-ROM/DVD drive.

Key technical advancements of nVidia’s latest GPU include brand new programmable shader architecture, which delivers around twice the shading horsepower of the previous generation GPU, support for DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 and HDR, as well as nVidia’s PowerMizer technology to maximise battery life. Finally, second-generation nVidia PureVideo technology delivers home theatre-quality video.

Core clock speed has been reduced slightly to 400MHz from the 430MHz that powers the desktop-based GTX, while the memory still races at 1100MHz, a mere 100MHz off what is currently the fastest consumer graphics card currently available. Twenty-four pixel pipelines and eight vertex shaders put it on par with the GeForce 7800 GT and GeForce 7800 GTX desktop cards, so it definitely shifts.

A system like the Inspiron XPS M170 is designed for high-end multimedia and gaming. We tested it using FutureMark’s brand-new 3DMark06 Pro gaming benchmark and it scored 3459, just shy of 3850 scored by our test desktop system fitted with an nVidia GeForce 7800 GTX with 256MB of graphics memory. What this means in real life is that the Inspiron XPS M170 will play all the current crop of top titles, but you may need to lower the anti-aliasing settings if you intend to play at fast frames rates anywhere near the screen’s native resolution.

Having said that, in our Doom 3 tests the system achieved a whopping 105fps (frames per second) at 1024x768 pixels, dropping to 85fps at 1600x1200 pixels. In Halo, it managed 98.9fps and 78.3fps, respectively. For less 3D intensive games such as Age of Empires III and FIFA 06, the Inspiron XPS M170 won’t even break a sweat. And as for general Windows-based computing tasks, the overall performance was impressive, too; but you’d expected that from a 2.13GHz Pentium M 780 and 2GB of DDR2 RAM.

Dell’s Inspiron XPS M170 is more of an upgrade to last year’s excellent XPS Gen 2, but it’s still a top-notch machine. One tiny oversight is the lack of a dedicated Wi-Fi button or switch, which has become industry standard on laptops, and the keyboard has no numberpad. The screen is crisp and clear (despite a bit of light leak at the bottom) and the native resolution of 1920x1200 pixels is simply breathtaking, even though no game supports this resolution at acceptable fps levels yet so you’d better prepare for 1440x900 pixels or lower.

Sound is great too, being both loud and clear thanks to the built-in sub, and there’s dedicated volume and control keys on the front of the system. But there’s no integrated TV tuner (Dell offers an AverMedia PC Card solution) and the system can't playback audio or video without booting, unlike some other multimedia systems, but the Inspiron XPS M170 is a powerhouse of a laptop that will appeal to high-end multimedia users. You can expect about 3 hours running time, depending on useage. Over you to you Alienware! [9 - Editors’ Choice]

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