14 DAY TRIAL // Dell finally resolved all issues that plagued the XPS range of gaming mobile computer systems and the company announced the launch of the M1730 laptop, the ultimate gaming machine, if we are to believe them. The Dell XPS M1730 is now available for purchase from the company's online store and the first available configuration, an entry level one if you will, will cost $2,999 and then it goes higher and higher.
The Dell XPS M1730 mobile gaming system is based on the Intel Santa Rosa platform and it is powered by a Core 2 Duo processing unit that is just a little bit overrated when it comes to its price performance ratio. On the graphics side, the newest Dell laptop is using two Nvidia GeForce 8700M graphics cards in SLI mode and in order to justify the kind of insane price tag, the producer also included a physics processing unit that will mostly just sit and idle as games to fully use its capabilities are few and far between.
Advertised as the ''Beast'', the M1730 is coming with a mainboard centered around the Intel PM965 chipset while the central processing unit is for now limited to a Core 2 Duo T7700 model that runs at 2.4GHz while using the snail's pace 800MHz frontside bus. A good part of this laptop is the 17-inch widescreen display that comes with a native resolution of 1920-by-1200 pixels that is backed up by the two Nvidia graphics cards that come with a total of 512MB of dedicated video memory.
As was mentioned before, the M1730 is integrating the AGEIA PhysX 100M mobile physics processing card that according to the news site laptoping, is ''dedicated solely to delivering rich immersive physical gaming environments'', that is when users finally manage to find a game that implements the required physics extensions.
On the random access memory side, the Dell XPS M1730 comes equipped with 2GB of DDR2 memory that run at 667MHz and users that really wish to invest heavily into a gaming device may also upgrade to a maximum of 4GB of RAM. The storage side is covered by the presence of a 200GB Serial ATA hard disk drive at 7200rpm and the laptop also comes with a DVD burner and an integrated Intel made wireless networking card that supports the 802.11a/g standard but no draft n.
To make this really expensive laptop an even bigger headache, Dell managed to choose the most incompatible and the nastier Microsoft operating system ever: Windows Vista Home Premium Edition.