reviews TESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED
68 MA XIMUMPC APRIL 2006
I
f you’re limited to a notebook PC, you’ve
no doubt been wrought with envy as your
desktop buddies brag about their dual-core
processors. Well, suffer no more! You aren’t
stuck with single-core anymore!
Dell’s Inspiron E1705 officially unveils
dual-core processing for road warriors, in
the form of Intel’s Core Duo T2500 CPU.
Wonder what the heck a Core Duo is? We
understand. Using a marketese-to-English
translation converter, we discovered that the
Core Duo T2500 is a Pentium M derivative
CPU featuring two 2GHz cores, each with
2MB of “smart” cache. Smart cache lets a
single CPU core use all of the cache—a phat
4MB—when only one core is under load, to
improve performance. Core Duo is paired
with the new 945 Express chipset, which
supports DDR2/667 and ups the front-side
bus to 667MHz.
The chassis itself is the same as the
Dell XPS notebook that won our last note-
book showdown (July 2005), so there
aren’t many surprises. It’s got a gorgeous
17-inch screen with a wide notebook body
to match. The chassis is solid and doesn’t
exhibit any undue flexing. The insides, how-
ever, are quite different from the XPS. The
hard drive, which we slammed in the XPS
review for being too slow, is a much faster
100GB, 7,200rpm Hitachi drive. The GPU is
nVidia’s GeForce Go 7800, and the optical
drive is a Sony 8x DVD burner capable ofsupporting dual-
layer +/- burns.
The real story
is how well the
E1705 numbers
stack up. Once we
were into our test-
ing, we realized
one serious shortcoming: The bulk of our
mobile benchmarks aren’t multithreaded.
So we ran a few more dual-core-oriented
benchmarks and the Core Duo is indeed a
butt kicker. In SYSmark 2004 , for example,
the E1705 is faster than our FX-55 desk-
top zero-point system, with a score of 210
versus 201. It also completely spanked the
2.13GHz Pentium M we built for this month’s
DIY notebook feature. (For more about the
benchmark comparison between the E1705
and our DIY notebook, see this month’s In
The Lab on page 66.)
The E1705 fared very well in our official
benchmarks. In our lone multithreaded test,
Premiere Pro, the E1705 turned in a score 37
percent faster than the XPS (and we might
add, faster than our FX-55 desktop system).
We even saw a good bump in Photoshop CS,
where the E1705 turned in a 9 percent higher
score than the XPS despite Photoshop CS’
minimal multithreading use. We credit the
larger “smart” cache, as well as the faster FSB
and RAM in the E1705. The 7,200rpm drive
is also quite a performer with average read
speeds of 42MB/s.
The fun stops there. Even though our zero-
point XPS has an older 12-pipe GeForce Go
6800 Ultra powering it (Dell has since switched
to the 7800 GTX in its top-of-the-line XPS
config), the 16-pipe 7800 in the E1705 just
couldn’t hang. Why? It was probably the clockspeeds. The XPS cranks its GPU at 450MHz,
while the E1705 sits at 250MHz. That’s enough
to make the E1705 between 15 and 20 per-
cent slower in many games. Still, the E1705
can manage 40fps in Doom 3 at 1280x1024
with 4x AA and 4x anisotropic filtering. In other
words, it’ll play 90 percent of the games very
well at a decreased resolution, but you prob-ably shouldn’t expect to play at the panel’s
1920x1200 native resolution with AA on.
That jibes with Dell’s primary pitch for the
E1705 as an entertainment box. The company
even includes a clunky USB TV tuner so you
can watch TV, DVDs, browse and edit video,
and maybe play an occasional game. For
gamers who want all-out speed, we recom-
mend waiting for an XPS equipped with a
Core Duo and 7800 GTX.
The most disappointing feature of the
E1705 is its battery life. To test it, we loop
3DMark03 on its default settings until the box
goes dead. The E1705 gave us only 78 min-Dell Inspiron E1705
Core Duo offers impressive performance
The new Core Duo in the E1705 smokes all single-core mobile
processors.You get both DVI and analog outputs with
Dell’s E1705.4.25
"4.25"UNDER THE HOOD
CPU Intel 2GHz Core Duo T2500
(945 chipset)
RAM 1GB DDR2/667
LAN Intel Pro/Wireless 3945 ABG
and Broadcom 440X Gigabit
HARD 100GB Hitachi 7,200rpm
DRIVE TravelStar
OPTICAL Sony DW-Q58AVIDEO nVidia GeForce Go 7800 256MB
(250MHz core / 658MHz DDR)
DISPLAY 17-inch (1920x1200@32-bit)
AUDIO CHIP SigmaTel HD-capable audio codec
LAP WEIGHT 8.2 lbs
CARRY 9.25 lbs
WEIGHT
BOOT: 33 sec. DOWN: 14 sec.BRAINSBEAUTY92 min4,889686 sec
394 sec
27.6 mb/sec
49.1 fps502
362
42.7
40.1 (-18.33%)78 (-15.22%)BENCHMARKS
Premiere ProZERO POINT SCORESPhotoshop CS
HD T ach
Doom 3
3DM ark 05
Portable Gaming0 1 0% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
Our zero point is a Dell Inspiron XPS, with a 2.13GHz Pentium M, 1GB of DDR2/533 RAM, and a GeForce Go 6800 Ultra.3,823 (-21.80%)