Macbook Pro VS. Dell XPS

Amazingly the only task you listed there the video card makes a truly significant difference in is gaming. Video Editing, not much. Composing? Why the heck would it make any difference at all, except to get in the way on occasion

The 7900 GT I believe does outperform the 8600 GT used in the MBP for gaming, but not by to much to be honest. And I still hope that others take advantage of the available power in the 8000 series for tasks other than straight graphics processing.

Seablade

Does the 7900 GS guzzle more battery life than the 8600 GT? If so, that would be a difference you might notice a lot more.

The 8600 is nowhere near as good for gaming as the 7900...

The 7900 in the XPS is by far the better card and will certainly do you a better job of games.

Battery life though is a completely different story. The XPS eats batteries.... I get about 1 and a half hours from full and thats just doing light stuff. The MacBook Pro gives me 3 hours.

However when it comes to everyday use the XPS gets very little use. For day to day stuff the Mac kicks serious Ass... Far easier to use and seems to handle most non 3D stuff a lot better. XPS really is only worth the money if your gonna game.

The XPS will game better. No doubt about it. If you go over to the Dell 17"+ forums, you can see how far the XPS and 17" Inspirons get pushed.

However, as betafrog said, the XPS eats batteries.
I have a i9300 (Barely a step down from XPS 17" in 2005), and it has a 6800 Go. "x800" and "x900" (6800, 7800, 7900 7950) are the upper end of the product lines for that year. an x600 model is meant ot be mid range. (7600, 8600)

That being said, I am looking to get a MBP cause the 17 " is way too big for me to carry to class. Additionally the 15" MBP build quality and how "Smooth" (no feet or under paneling) make it much easier to carry with you.

My i9300, on the big battery, no wifi, can do ~2.5-3 hours. It can take me 2 batteries to watch a long movie with the brightness all the way up.

Basically it comes down to if you want to game hard core or not. apparently form recent independent tests, the 8600 isn't much of an improvement from previous video cards, and DX10 support is nasty on the MBP. Not htw 8600 is the GT, so it is the better of the two.

My advice is to ask/see/find out how the games you want to play perform on the current gen MBP's. And, if that isn't good enough for ya, Go XPS.

One last thing, the matte screen of the MBP is so much easier to read in all environments. I have a "True Life" glossy and it sucks if your not indoors. However, when I am playing HL2 on full settings, it is gorgeous. The17" Dell is portable, but no where near that of the mac. That being said, my i9300 is in my backpack ATM because I need if for school this afternoon.

The 8600m GT in the MacBook Pros is about 60% faster (from what I have seen) than the X1600. So yes, the 7xxx card in the Dell XPS will beat it, but will lose in terms of processor (still using the older Napa? chipset), battery, and portability. Besides, there are people on this forum here, and others, that have run FEAR, and BioShock on high settings on the 8600m GT with no issues whatsoever, so IMO, it is a more than capable card.

The older X1600 can run CS:S, HL2, NFS, and all those others (no idea about SpiderMan, never played it) and I know this because I have used my friend's to play all these games (hurray for him being out of the country!) So if it can run them, the 8600m GT can run them no problem.

Pure gaming Microsoft is ahead and always will be.

I dont use macs, they've always cost more and done less only people i know that use them are either abit of a poser or have little interest in technical things.

Dell customer support sucks pretty much 60% of the people working at dell are morons. But then i have heard many bad things about Mac CS too, the thing i like about dell is i feel no guilt when milking my CC warranty ;P.

But macs never seem to go wrong, though i am never sure there ever working right either, having to be the tech for the few macs, i wouldnt feel happy a computer that after a scans says everything "appears" to be ok, lol.

But i wouldnt advocate mac or PC its about what you need, how you use it, what you like and how much money you have everything has a place, and when i saw my mums new mac lappy i had to sneak off for 5 mins and rub my self against it, very sexy machine, gonna try stuffing the contents of my 1710 inside that case lol

yeh, posers. those damn artists, industrial designers, photographers, graphic designers, CGI/3D animators, journalists, IT people, programmers, etc....friggin lamers...don't know WTH they're doing with their Macs.... that's about as well thought out as saying that someone should have a similar response if their windows spamware/AV did a few scans and told them everything was okay. damned posers must have written the software, not to mention those twits who actually believe what the scan tells them. :P

Any way mac products are designed for posers, weather they be cool kids or geeks thats one of there selling points :P

I didnt say my opinion wasnt biased or inaccurate but yuor need to miss represent what i said and attack me for stating my opinion shows an odd need to deffend somthing that wasnt under attack. implying that it needs deffending and therefore is inferrior. QED.

Its just my opinion.

Its funny how you don't have to be technically literate to keep a mac running isn't it? I would say, that being said, you have likely had a very small sample size. Reminds me of what I tell people when they ask me to fix their MS based computers these days... Sorry folks, I am not smart enough to fix MS's screw ups. That is why I use Linux. Seablade Who worked in IT for a good while, trying to fix MS's screw ups. Most would consider him neither a poser or technically illiterate... though maybe just plain illiterate on occasion Does use a Mac though for his laptop, everything else he runs Linux.

This guy sounds like ABF but makes even less sense.

/start translator...

who exactly is miss represent and what does she have to do with this discussion?

at least i was trying to be playful, lol

Come on boys, play nicely or I'm gonna have to put all your GI Joes away.

The idea that only people who have no interest in technical things use macs is far from the truth. Mac OS is a far more powerful and robust os than Windoze and being based on Unix is incredibly customisable and capable of doing things that the microsoft boys could of only dream of. That would be why everyone in the Computer Science department and half the students there, in my Uni all use macs....

To late, I already stuck mine through the Microwave.

Seablade

[Cartman]Bu, But, But, MAAAAAAAAM[/Cartman]

No cheesy poofs for you tonight.

Friend of mine did a Halo 3 thing where he recreated the museum battle field model. Except he used firecrackers and gasoline for the special effects. No matter how geeky I feel I always have loads of fun when fire is around.

As for my personal GI Joes. They never survived the magnifying-glass discovery.