APRIL 2004 MAXIMUMPC 59
You don’t have to look far to find which
notebook performed the fastest in this
roundup. Dell’s XPS mopped up the floor
with the competition in just about every
application test and most gaming tests.
Even more impressively, in the applica-
tions tests, this juggernaut won by a lot
more than the tight 3 to 4 percent margins
we typically see in the lab. In Photoshop ,
for example, it ran 47 percent faster then
Sharp’s Actius, 20 percent faster then the
ABS Mayhem G1, and 10 percent faster
then Alienware’s Area 51M. In Premiere Pro ,
it put up numbers that were 14 percent fast-
er than the Area 51M and 19 percent faster
than the Sharp. Mind you, this isn’t some
one-sided contest in which the competition
was packing Celeron or Pentium III CPUs.
This was a battle between a 2.8GHz, 3GHz
Pentium 4, and even one Extreme Edition
chip. The XPS even beat a fully loaded desk-
top machine we reviewed this month!
Of all the contenders, only the
Alienware Area 51M managed to clip
the XPS in more than one test. In Jedi
Academy and 3DMark2001 SE, the Area
51M’s GeForce FX 5700 emerged victori-
ous. For its part, Voodoo’s Envy M:855
managed to sail past all five P4 notebooks
in Mathematica, thanks to the stellar float-
ing-point performance of the Athlon 64
3400+ processor.While the XPS easily outguns both the
Area 51M and Envy M:855, it’s important
to note that the latter two notebooks are
far more portable than the anchor-like
XPS. If you’re willing to compromise a
little performance for a computer you
can actually carry, you should probably
consider the more practical Alienware or
Voodoo laptops.In the end, we have no reservations
declaring the XPS both the winner of this
roundup and the fastest laptop we’ve ever
seen. Technically, it’s a little too big to be
considered a notebook, and at $4,130, it’s
freaking expensive, but Dell has spared no
expense and cut no corners in creating the
ultimate power-user notebook. nGAMING PERFORMANCE TOSHIBA SHARP ABS PC ALIENWARE DELL VOODOO
3DMark 2001 SE (fps) 7090 1214 9144 12677 12416 11132
3DMark 2003 (fps) 954 84 2551 3033 3378 2990
AquaMark 3 (fps) 6993 3101 21476 22299 27666 23609
Jedi Academy 10x7 (fps) 25.9 18.4 36.3 54.6 46.3 40.1
Halo 1.31 10x7 (fps) 7.73 WNR 20.88 25.46 28.78 24.2
APPLICATIONS
Photoshop 7.0.1 (sec) 330 534 349 308 278 297
Premiere Pro (sec) 628 765 666 625 536 773
Mathematica (sec) 753.2 849.8 809.6 714.2 613.9 571.6
MusicMatch (sec) 264 286 274 255 227 278
SiSoft Sandra 2004 Composite RAM MB/s 3766 1952 2352 2904 4315 2284
HD Tach AVG KB/s 28,573 19,270 29,227 29,975 29,310 30,389
Battery-life DVD playback (minutes) 112 72 80 98 87 138And the winner is—
Dell’s XPS
WINNER
*Best scores are bolded.