Unique Dell XPS M1710 Review

Searching4Sasquatch writes "Hot Hardware has just posted a unique review of Dell's flagship XPS M1710 notebook. They stumbled across some very interesting information within the BIOS which seems to indicate Dell is working on a docking station with its own discrete graphics. 'The user is given the option of using either the integrated GeForce Go 7900 GTX GPU found within the system or the extremely interesting option of using the graphics card found within a docking station. Could Dell be planning on releasing an enthusiast dock that features a high-end GPU that could not otherwise be crammed into the confinements of the notebook chassis? Perhaps an upgrade to allow for standard or even Quad-SLI would be possible with such a dock.'"

Comments

Looks nice...

[Jhon]

Well it looks nice. But will it explode?

Re:Looks nice...

[19thNervousBreakdown]

No wireless. Less concussive force than HE. Lame.

How is this new?

[Thauma]

There have always been expansion docks for laptops that allow PCI and even ISA bus access. Hell there have even been carbus based graphics adapters for notebooks. All this is a bridge to PCI Express bus. There is nothing new to see here... move along.

Re:How is this new?

[Erwos]

Absolutely correct. Indeed, it seems like the recent trend has been to move away from docking stations with real PCI/PCIe slots, and instead have these awful USB docks. That's a real shame, because I think it would appeal to a lot of folks to have a 12" laptop with good CPU, lots of memory, and a very low-power GPU plug into a docking station with a PCIe x16 slot and maybe a couple of PCIe x1 or PCI slots. Your 12" laptop doubles as a full-blown desktop, but doesn't sacrifice on either end - that's a nice selling point.

-Erwos

Re:How is this new?

[sk8dork]

if you want a Dell notebook that has a docking station connection on the bottom of the system so you don't have to use USB docks, then get a Latitude. *pets Latitude D620*

Latitudes have always had docking connectors. well, except for certain models like the X1 that doesn't have room for vents much less a docking connection.

Dell moved away from true docking connections on Inspirons some time ago. and yeah, XPS is now some generic word for Inspiron or Dimension pretty much now. XPS used to be THE high powered Dimension system, then the high powered Inspiron, now they make all these goofy flavors of XPS.

Dell does this on their other machines as well

[Com2Kid]

Their (very popular) D600 has the same option in the BIOS.

This is nothing new, please move along.

This isn't new...

[SilentJ_PDX]

My IBM Thinkpad has had the same option in the BIOS for ages. Seeing how 'boring' IBM is, I'm guessing there are lots of notebooks with similar options in the BIOS.

not a bad idea...

[Andrew Nagy]

Mobile Gaming is becoming somewhat of a buzzword, but I think this idea has some potential to it in a slightly different way. For those of us who don't necessarily enjoy lugging around a 12 lb notebook just for the occasional gaming opportunity, Dell or whoever could create a very portable notebook that docked into a more sophisticated machine, thereby allowing for a small family to go back to one PC. Of course, it's probably not in the best interest of the manufacturer, since they want us all to have as many PCs as we can stand, but it makes sense for the consumer. There are docks out there with built-in hard-drives, why not built-in video cards and extra RAM, and even a bigger monitor? Having everything on one PC would be beneficial to a lot of people.

Too bad what we want and what manufacturers want us to want are often two different things.

Anything to do with Alienware?

[gasmonso]

I wonder if this project has anything to do with their recent purchase of Alienware.

http://religiousfreaks.com/

Display Hardware Objects

[Doc Ruby]

Why don't monitors include graphics cards tweaked for exactly their performance specs? Self-powered speakers offer better performance and flexibility for upgrading the "processor" and "UI" components that drive them. Notebooks would include LCD cards, but not have to drive external monitors/projectors directly. That would make the notebooks smaller, lighter, cooler, cheaper, and the external display higher quality.

Give me an optical digital display output instead of VGA.

I could put that display output into a breakout box to any number of different displays, including multihead where I have them, without and extra HW. The differences could be entirely in software. Outputting OpenGL for display would let even simple HW and relatively simple SW exploit practically any display environment. Including the long-anticipated immersive goggles, or better.

Dell's BIOS seems to go a single step in the right direction. When will we sprint down the path?

Re:Display Hardware Objects

[raodin]

If graphics cards didn't need direct, high bandwidth, low latency access to the processor and system memory, we'd all still be using PCI graphics. AGP was specifically developed because newer, faster graphics cards needed direct, high bandwidth access to system memory... Textures don't magically appear in video memory, you know.

Re:Display Hardware Objects

[Doc Ruby]

Actually, both the video and audio compartmentaliztion you mention are mainly the result of momentum and evolutionary design, defined by backwards compatibility. People don't spend much money on speakers, even though that's where the sound value lies, either in stereo equipment or PC audio. Onboard audio electronics are cheap because their development cost has been amortized, including the cost of designing them into new PCs. Likewise with displays.

But displays do have enthusiasts, so there is a bigger niche for better display than for better audio. (FWIW, USB is not a great audio interface, dealing poorly with interrupts in its realtime data, and FireWire etc is a more expensive extra.)

The architecture I propose sends high-level graphics symbols, like OpenGL, from the CPU to the GPU. An optical cable is plenty to load textures.

I worked with a team in 1990 to produce hirez (1-64Mpxls) digital cameras with such a cabled interconnect - though not even optical. That team had just produced a dual-CPU RISC workstation, with one RISC dedicated to rendering graphics from apps running on the other RISC. 20 years later, those architectures can make flexible, economical, high-performance displays.

I like the idea of the renderer tightly coupled to the display. The notebook reviewed in the story we're discussing is a good example. Why carry something that can drive a display much heavier-duty than the onboard LCD? If you've got dual monitors, you're using a dual monitor card, which isn't necessary for the much more common single monitor, and therefore much more expensive in small production quantities. Instead, each monitor could have a much cheaper card, driven by its instructions over the cable. In other words, distributed GPU provides the same economics and efficiencies as distributed networks of host computers. There's no reason those benefits can't apply to GPUs, except that the old way is "good enough" not to invest in the "new paradigm". The same reason many minicomputer companies continued to make and sell so many units, even through the late 1990s, and even today. But that doesn't make them better, except in some remaining specific massive applications that are best supported by massive centralized HW.

Re:Display Hardware Objects

[radish]

Why carry something that can drive a display much heavier-duty than the onboard LCD?
Why not? It adds nothing to the cost, in comparitive terms.

If you've got dual monitors, you're using a dual monitor card, which isn't necessary for the much more common single monitor, and therefore much more expensive in small production quantities
Except that dual head cards are now entirely standard (virtually all cards over $30 are dual head capable) and so we're not talking small production quantities we're talking huge quantities. The cost is utterly negligible.

In other words, distributed GPU provides the same economics and efficiencies as distributed networks of host computers
No, it really doesn't. Distributed computers work well (for certain problems) because of huge scale - hundreds or thousands of nodes. This lets you scale easily by adding more nodes, and replace dead nodes without adversly affecting performance. Clustering can also be used to make use of cheaper components at the expense of some performance - 16 single CPU nodes will not perform as well as one 16-cpu beast.

On the other hand, with graphics we're looking at a typical maximum of what, 8 screens? With the average being between 1 and 2? That's just not comparable. It's not a "distributed" GPU, it's a "remote" GPU. The average user with one screen will still have one GPU, it'll just be on the end of a wire. What does that buy him? Nothing. In the case of a laptop user who occasionally uses a monitor and projector - he now needs 3 GPUs. Again, why? One works just fine for him today. Where you get into people with multiple screens in use at once, like myself, again - what does it buy me? I currently have one GPU - why have two? Each would need the same amount of texture ram as my current single card, so there's double the cost right away. They'll also need some way to communicate with the host and each other which just adds to the bandwidth requirements and complexity of your communications solution. All this to replace a simple uni-directional cable which works perfectly well. I simply don't get it.

And as a final point, I still think you underestimate the bandwidth requirements. Look at this page. We can see that PCIe x16 is 40GBit/s. That's huge - it's 8 times faster than the fastest SCSI standard and 30 times faster than fiber channel - in fact it's faster than most ram interfaces. Now I'm no electronics expert, so I'm not saying it's impossible, but getting that kind of speed in a 2 or 3 meter cable which is (a) cheap and (b) reliable seems non-trivial. The only cabled standard I can find with comparable speeds is OC768 which is far from cheap or commonplace.

Gaming laptops are over-priced

[LaughingCoder]

I never quite understood why someone would buy these really pricey gaming laptops. For my boys I built microATX cubes that have every bit as much performance as these high end laptops, for about 1/4th the price -- and they are easily and cheaply upgradeable down the road. When they go to a friend's house for a LANparty they just grab the cube by its handle and throw their keyboard/mouse into a bag. Monitors are not a problem -- most people have monitors leftover in their basement/attic from when they upgraded to LCD, so they just connect to the surplus monitor, plug into their network and off they go. Seriously, you can build a nice cube gaming box for about $550 (DVD writer, Athlon 64 3500+, 1GB DDR400, 300GB SATA HD, Windows XP license, box w/420W supply, motherboard) plus whatever graphics floats your boat (I find the $99 NVidia 6 series PCIe boards are more than adequate, though I have also found that many games are actually quite playable using just the embedded graphics like the NVidia 6150). Sure, you may be 10 or 20 fps slower than your buddies, with a little less detail in the shadows, but who cares (especially when most LCD monitors top out at 60Hz refresh rate anyhow ;-).

Re:Gaming laptops are over-priced

[Lave]

For my boys I built microATX cubes....for about 1/4th the price....Sure, you may be 10 or 20 fps slower than your buddies, with a little less detail in the shadows, but who cares (especially when most LCD monitors top out at 60Hz refresh rate anyhow ;-).

Your Children care.

Re:Gaming laptops are over-priced

[s31523]

Monitors are not a problem -- most people have monitors leftover in their basement/attic from when they upgraded to LCD, so they just connect to the surplus monitor, plug into their network and off they go
I also like to utilize my S-Video(or normal video) output and plug right into a big screen TV and play my games, if my friends don't have an extra monitor any modern TV will do!

what is going on with graphics cards...

[revery]

Perhaps an upgrade to allow for standard or even Quad-SLI would be possible with such a dock.

Hey, and maybe then I can get a docking station for my docking station that has QuadQuad-SLI, and then maybe I can get in a robotic exo-skeleton and become the first Headmaster, and we can finally take the fight directly to Unicron. Is the gaming industry out of its mind? Seriously. I mean, I am not going to buy four graphics cards to put into my computer to play games. Ever. Period. End of story. I'm sorry game developers, but you're just gonna have to make do with the measly bazillion pixels my current stand-alone graphics card can dish out.

--
Instead of imagining a beowulf cluster of PS3's, just wait three years and check out the PS4.

Hot swappable hard drives?

[nick_davison]

LCD screen... swaps out for the monitor plugged in to the docking station.
Keyboard... swaps out for the monitor plugged in to the docking station.
Mousepad... swaps out for the monitor plugged in to the docking station.
Graphics system... swaps out for the monitor plugged in to the docking system.

About the only remaining parts that don't swap out are the hard drive, CPU and memory. In exchange for that, you tend to get a clunky docking station that takes up way too much desk space rather than discretely sitting under your desk like a dedicated tower. Given laptop memory and CPUs tend to be underpowered compared to desktop equivalents, replacing them for a typical laptop would run, what, $150 at the outside?

At what point does it become a much better idea to make your laptop hard drive hot swappable and then have a dedicated tower with all of the better priced components the desktop allows with an open bay in the front to move your data and OS setup over? By the time you have a docking station with a high end graphics card in it, the additional components are pretty trivial.

Latitude D410/610 have this already

[LoadWB]

Unfortunately, I cannot get to the article, so I cannot see exactly what they are talking about.

But to be short, the D410 and D610 BIOSes I work with have an option to default to the docking station video as well. IIRC, Dell produces docking stations (not just the advanced port replicators we use in the field) which have PCI and AGP slots. It seems only reasonable that they also intend to produce models with PCIe slots (none currently show on the website.)

So, this may not be anything new or stunning.

As an aside, I am disappointed that the newer Latitudes do not have docking ports. The USB port replicators are crap, and the drivers constantly crash on at least two models I have in customer sites (not my purchase, mind you.) I believe that the ability to dock could be viewed by home users as a replacement of the desktop. Of course, that would mean that people would not buy a desktop AND a laptop, so lower bottome line, eh? :)

Re:Interesting

[Molochi]

The main reasons oem (not just dell but sony, hp etc...) tend to be much slower than one might expect.

1) Integrated graphics chips that share memory bandwidth with the system. Many (possibly MOST, I haven't checked the sales figures) Dells were sold in the last 5 years that had no AGP slot, just 3 PCI slots. Buying any cheap ( $50) PCI Videocard usually solves this... If you aren't already using the slots and if the bios allows you to disable the integrated graphics. There are a few integrated options that don't suck (the life out of your system), but Dell never used them until recently.

2) Slow memory. Early on, P4 systems were commonly equiped (because it was much cheaper)with single channel sdr-sdram (1GBPS) instead of dual channel "pc800"RDRAM(3GBPS). Woe unto the poor slob that wound up with a p4 running SDR memory and integrated graphics. Mid gen P4 cheapy systems usually (i845) came with single channel ddr266 or if you were lucky DDR333 and these weren't too bad for day to day use, tho' they were pretty weak compared to top of the line i850E or better chipset. The P4's performance "feel" (as well as benchmark scores) is closely tied to memory speed; much moreso than P3, PM, or Athlons of any stripe.

3) Crappy initial BIOS issues. I couldn't tell you how many systems I've worked on that started behaving like real computers once they recieved a bios update that was released 6 months after the system was sold to the customer. However most of those were HP/Compaq or momandpopbrand. Intel often has a bios update that will work better with a standard intel spec'd mobo than anything the OEM delivers.

4) Craptastic drivers, particularly IDE controller drivers that let the system fall back to PIO mode. This is oftem fixed with an update issued months into the model's run. Intel's own drivers sometimes fix this better than anything issued by the OEM.

I wouldn't say that every Dell I've worked on is slow. I would say that the majority of Dells I've worked on has an economy level motherboard, and below average performance parts that cost the owner less than $600 shipped. They paid for a crap level system and they got it. Congratulations. Here's your sign.

Re:Doubles as a frying pan for eggs!

[xenopizen]

I bought an XPS 1710 over 6 weeks ago and I am thoroughly impressed by it. The most important benefit is that fact that it is SILENT and COOL. I can literally play games on my lap. How Dell managed to get the 7900 GTX to run so cool is beyond me. Why is this astounding fact is missing from that review? This is the review that made me buy it in the first place: http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=2 887&review=Dell+XPS+M1710 Even running the latest games with all gfx features on and at 1900x1200, it occasionally engages its fans, and then once finished it always stops immediately - and even so the fans are QUIET. And this is during the summer at 27 degrees C. Lastly, the only other important point to add is that the built-in speakers are awesome. I have a Logitech THX 2.1 for my desktop to compare against and thus I am not easily impressed. I simply cannot fault it.