Dell XPS M1710

Reviewed by: mcbarker

Duration of ownership: 2 Months

Strengths: Fast. Large wide screen.

Weaknesses: Heavy. Poor battery life while playing games. LCD problems.

Overall Evaluation: This is a fast and powerful gaming desktop replacement. It's a bit too heavy (and flashy) to be your business portable laptop. My system, configured with a 512MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GTX, T2500 CPU, and 2 GB RAM, easily handles Doom 3 and Elder Scrolls-Oblivion at full high quality resolution with very little or no lag. The keyboard is quite large for a laptop, making typing quite comfortable. On the down side, battery life during gameplay isn't exceptional. I managed to squeeze about an hour out of mine. The LCD screen is big and bright, but the native resolution of 1920x1200 can be a bit uncomfortable for those of us with less than perfect eyesight. Many people who bought this model (including myself) have noticed that there seems to be excessive light leakage across the bottom of the LCD screen with dark patches in both lower corners. Considering the high price of this system, one would expect Dell to use premium components, but the screen's poor quality makes this "Lamborghini" seem more like a "Camero". Because of the poor screen quality, I would not recommend this system for anyone whose primary use will be photo editing, or anything that requires color, contrast and brightness consistency.