14 DAY TRIAL // Dell's latest and greatest mobile gaming platform, the XPS M1730, will not come too soon on the general consumer market as some rumors claim that its official launch was to take place on the 21th of September and there is no trace of it yet. However, a number of juicy details and bits are now available for us to drool upon.
The newest Dell mobile gaming platform will be powered by quite a selection of Intel made central processing units that include the Core 2 Duo T7300 processor running at a frequency of 2GHz, the T7500 version running at 2.2GHz, the T7700 that reaches 2.4GHz and the top of the line Core 2 Extreme X7800 at 2.6GHz. All these Intel central processing units are based on the same general internal architecture so they all come with 4MB of L2 cache memory and an 800Mhz frontside bus.
As this laptop is intended as a mobile gaming station, Dell outfitted it with a widescreen display capable of a native resolution of 1920-by-1200 pixels that also implements the TrueLife technology and which is backed up by a discrete graphics card made by Nvidia and centered around the GeForce 8700m Go graphics processing unit that brings 256MB of dedicated video memory. The graphics department also supports dual video card setups (SLI), increasing the memory quantity to 512MB. While the hardware specifications are not talking about the higher end card GeForce 8800M or about the AGEIA PhysX 100M physics card, these options might be available later.
M1730's mainboard is based on the Intel PM965 chipset that is able to accommodate up to 4GB of DDR2 memory modules and while the mainboard is capable of using 800MHz memories, the system will most likely be delivered with 667MHz compliant ones. Apart from the dedicated random access memory, the M1730 also comes with 512 or 1024MB of Intel Turbo Memory which is supposed to increase the system's responsiveness.
On the networking department, the new Dell laptop will be available with 802.11a/b/g/draft n wireless adapter, integrated Bluetooth and a Gigabit Ethernet. On the connectivity side it will sport an ExpressCard slot, a Smart Card slot, a FireWire port, DVI and S-Video outputs and an infra-red receiver, as well as between four and six high speed USB 2.0 ports.
The dell XPS M1730 will come with either Windows XP or Vista pre-installed and it will be available with a ''flashy industrial design with color customization options''. Price range is still not yet known but taking into account its hardware setup do not expect it to be cheap, or even affordable.