APRIL 2004 MAXIMUMPC
Dell XPS
Shaped like a Mack truck, the
XPS also hits like one. This
laptop leaves the competition
in the dust!
Dell with a ‘tude? Yup. After years
of getting its face rubbed in the dirt
by upstarts Alienware and Voodoo,
the slumbering giant appears to
have finally awoken. While Dell
hasn’t beaten off the competition in
the land of desktops, the PC maker
pulls no punches with its new XPS
laptop. It’s, quite simply, the fastest
notebook we’ve ever seen.
Dell has crammed every top-end
component into the XPS. Fastest
processor? Check. The XPS has a
3.4GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition.
Dual-channel DDR400? Check. 4x
DVD burner? Check. Brand-spank-
ing-new ATI Mobility Radeon 9700
graphics chip with 128MB frame buf-
fer? Got it—and before the competition
did. How about the hard drive? No less
than Hitachi’s new 60GB 7,200rpm hard
drive. What about wireless? Yes, sir. Dell
included every flavor known to man, and
then added a Bluetooth transceiver and
IrDA to boot. We’ve heard rumors that
a CB radio license could be required to
operate all the XPS’ wireless transmissions
at once!
“It’s like a flat Shuttle box,” one
Maximum PC editor gushed while watch-
ing us play Ubisoft’s system-taxing Far
Cry demo. Indeed it is—this is truly
desktop-level performance in a note-
book. Dig the comparison: The XPS was
actually faster than the Transformer-
esque iBuypower desktop system (page
72) in MusicMatch , Premiere Pro , and
Photoshop 7.01 benchmarks. In fact, only
one machine has performed faster in
these three tests: the 3.4GHz Pentium 4
Extreme Edition reference machine we
built ourselves in March to benchmark
the 3.4GHz P4 EE chip. That reference
machine used a 250GB 7,200rpm Western
Digital hard drive and an 875P chipset
with low-latency Corsair Micro RAM. This
means that, technically-speaking, the XPS
is the fastest production machine we’ve
ever tested in Photoshop , Premiere Pro and
MusicMatch. Period.
In gaming performance, the XPS loses
only two categories— 3DMark
2001 SE and Jedi Academy —
to the nVidia-equipped
Alienware Area 51M, which
is no slouch itself. In modern
games, however, the XPS
shines like the sun. In tests
that stress various levels of
DirectX pixel-shading capa-
bilities, the XPS was unbeat-
able in Halo , AquaMark 3 ,
and 3DMark 2003.
Of course, while notebook graphics
offer 10 times the performance they did a
few years ago, they still don’t come close
to the performance of desktop graph-
ics. This is what makes Alienware’s GPU
user-upgrades such an attractive option.
Well, Dell also offers a solution. At your
request, the company will send a techni-
cian to your home to upgrade your XPS
for you, for a price of $400. Ouch.
So what’s not to like about the XPS?
One, it’s expensive. And two, it’s as fat as
a New York City phone book. In fact, if
you look at the picture above and think
the XPS is attached to a docking station,
know that it’s not; it simply looks like a
docking station has been welded to the
bottom. But bitching about size in a per-
formance roundup would be akin to com-plaining about battery life; these days,
you just can’t get performance without
sacrificing one, the other, or both.
If you want the fastest laptop in town,
Dell’s XPS is the only answer.No-compromise performance that’s faster than
most desktops.SUREFIREMAGLITE
Just a little lighter and smaller than the anchor
for the USS Enterprise.
$4,100, http://www.dell.comMAXIMUMPC VERDICT 10
The XPS looks like someone
glued a docking port to
it, but who says looks are
everything?Of course, while notebook graphics
offer 10 times the performance they did a