Just ordered E1705

You're kidding right?

The 7900gs is POWERFUL. I have the E1705, typing this on it right now, and I play all my games at the native 1920x1200 with the highest (or, in the case of FEAR Combat, almost highest) detail settings. It is INSANE, I was wondering if it would be good for gaming too but it has definitely won me over, I wouldn't settle for anything less now. Most CRTs look blurry and too low-res to me, and many monitors look small. Plus, it's always fun to see peoples' faces when they see the size of this laptop, and then the power of it.

My games, in case you are wondering, include Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life 2, FEAR Combat, Oblivion, Halo, Unreal Tournament 2004, and a few others. All of them except FEAR run at their highest settings (no anti-aliasing) which is just beautiful, and all of them run at 1920x1200. Anti-aliasing would blur the screen at native resolution, which is why I don't use it. Also, all of the games are completely responsive, with the exception of Oblivion which has some slight input lag, barely noticeable at first and you don't notice it after a couple minutes of playing, and FEAR Combat runs with some slight lag when it's on highest detail settings which is not quite tolerable since it's a multiplayer game. Still, the settings are just barely lowered, and everything still looks great, sounds great, plays great. Unfortunately Oblivion doesn't have enough settings that I can lower it to make it responsive without changing resolution, but it's not a big deal because as a one-player game, I'm not stressed to have immediate response time when I want to turn around - I can stand its lag of probably 100-200 ms when I whip my mouse across the mousepad...

Trust me you won't be disappointed. Yup the 7900gtx is one step up and the 7800gtx is about the same but this card is great. I'm playing BF2142 with high setting and it is smooth.

Oh, and I got so caught up on your worrying about game performance I forgot to answer some other things in your post.

Yes, the price sounds great for that PC. I paid $2300 for mine, which was the exact same as you got (including warranty) except with the wireless adapter (Dell Draft-N), and 1gb of 533mhz ram (there was no option for 667mhz, and I bought 2gb from newegg anyway - both 1gb sticks of 667mhz ram were cheaper than the upgrade from the 1gb 533 to 2gb 533, and they are probably better quality too). I didn't have the 20% off coupon, but I did get a discount on the warranty (not sure if it is still there) and free overnight shipping.

I don't have experience with warranties, but I'm sure I will break this laptop at least once in its lifetime, just because it's a laptop. I ordered a bag for it tho, finally, about an hour ago. I'm about to go make a thread about that so look for it if you want suggestions on what bag to get.

Like I said, great performance of the video card.

I have some pictures of my E1705 in the photo gallery, you may have seen them, not sure. Anyway check 'em out if you want.

Also my suggestion is when you first get your laptop, resist the urge to use it. Or go ahead and use it, you will find out why I say this - I knew I was going to reformat, but as soon as I saw this beauty of a laptop I was like ok maybe not, I'll just do my best to remove the crapware cause I want to use it now. Well I started it up and I had no idea it would be that bad - antivirus out of date, windows updates everywhere, tons of system tray icons, etc etc, not to mention it was very slow. Well my anxiety immediately wore off and I knew I had to reformat before I do ANYTHING. I had planned for it so I spent the $8 (or 10? can't remember) for the windows re-install disc, and so it was easy for me to re-install - I hope you spend that extra few dollars too, or else you'll have to get support to ship you a free set of discs. I loosely followed the guide at http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=67545 and reformatted, and while it did take me quite a while it was well worth it. The Dell page has all the drivers you need for the laptop, although I do recommend going to NVIDIA for the video drivers, as I did. Also install drivers sparingly. I can help you if you want, but you can pretty much disregard the section of that reinstall guide that tells you what driver order to go in. My order is like this: 1) video driver 2) everything else. And it worked fine, my laptop is completely working, every part of it works and works well. Also there is a registry "hack" that I will be glad to provide when the time comes, because you will find the default setting makes it act weird when you close your screen lid - either the light turns off but also changes to 640x480 (moving your desktop icons and windows), or the light doesn't turn off but the resolution stays.

Anyway yeah. That's that. As far as benchmarks, I didn't do too much. The standard programs are generally 3dmark ('06 or '05, or both) and SuperPI (google it, you will find the download). CPU-Z is a great tool for finding out all the specifics of the hardware, and I think it's cool that it shows the clock speed too, cause you know laptop processors throttle depending on the workload and so CPU-Z shows 1ghz sometimes and 2ghz other times.

Anyway I'm off to make that thread about the bag I just bought. Maybe it will help fellow 17" laptop owners such as yourself.

Mine took 8 days from order to my door with ups ground shipping. Hope you enjoy it !!

Yah, they make and ship these things really quickly. They don't waste any time, that's for sure. Usually, boxing takes ~3 days -- it includes the flight over from Malaysia to TN, then a couple days to be shipped to your home.

Oh, and the no software installed just means they don't inlcude their trials of Corel products . . . you still get their antivirus, ISPs, etc . . . though I haven't reformatted -- I just cleaned things up, and the computer's running smoothly. I really should call and get the disk, though. . . . I'll want to format eventually.

Taikero: your sig says "arriving 10/2" lol.

Anyway, ayefly, yeah the fact that you say "laptop slot" makes me think of something smaller. The laptop is certainly big, but not too big like the XPS M2010 (the "briefcase" as I like to call it). It's not really too heavy either, and I was expecting the worst because I'm very bad at judging weight and size... I seriously thought about making a model from cardboard and filling it with something heavy to reproduce the size and weight, but I resisted because I don't like art projects, even if they are of computers.

Also, like I said, the 667mhz RAM wasn't an option for me. I customized and bought the laptop the day that the core 2 duo came out for laptops (can't remember the exact day, I think it was a Monday) and at that time there just wasn't a 667mhz option, but I went to dell just now and went to the same configuration pages and saw it.

And yes, like Taikero said, there is not a true "no software installed" button. I wouldn't expect one anyway - Dell puts their sponsor software there because they are being paid for it, and an option to disable it would certainly reduce the amount of money that Dell's getting. Again, I recommend reformatting, but it's up to you. At least check to make sure the drivers are up-to-date when you first get the laptop, because drivers are very important.

If you reformat the hard drive wont you lose the Media Now Option?

Sorry "Media Direct."

That depends how you format. If you do it right, nope. I reformatted and I have my MediaDirect intact and working great.

Well we both learned somthing.