Anyone ordered XPS 14/15/17?

Hi all,

I'm looking into the new Dell XPS line, and they look like pretty awesome laptops. But there isn't much traffic here and absolutely no talk about these new laptops! I know they haven't shipped yet but I'd really like to hear from anyone who's ordered one as soon as you get it.

In the meantime... What do you think of them?

I'm really interested in the Nvidia Optimus technology and these are the best Optimus laptops out there right now. As a college student I am having a hard time with my current laptop's one hour of battery life and want something with (much) longer life, but at the same time I need good graphics card performance for games and game development. So I think Optimus provides the perfect balance. In addition, I carry my laptop around everywhere. I fear my current laptop, at 8.2 lbs, is doing damage to my back. So shedding a couple of pounds by going with the XPS 15 (6.5lbs w/ 9-cell battery) looks really appealing.

Opinions?

Well, the video cards are the best NVIDIA Optimus ones available. Nvidia has a webpage of Optimus laptops and as far as I know they are keeping it updated (i.e. they updated it with the XPS laptops just a day or two after they came out). If you go through all of them you see all the other laptops are the 300 series.

I'm still torn between exactly how important battery life is to me, though. I'm starting to lean towards something more powerful than Optimus can provide. Especially after looking at benchmarks; my current video card (7900GS) gets around 3745 in 3dmark06; the 420M gets around 5988. This is in contrast to, for example, if I were to get an Alienware M15x where the ATI 5850 has a score of 9804 and the NVIDIA GTX 460M gets a 12080 (!!). That's a GIANT difference.

But, the 460M takes 65W in addition to the processor power (45W for quad core, 35W for dual core). So without Optimus, and estimating 50% power during idle or low activity, that's still around 55W if I go for a quad core system. That alone would use up the battery in less than two hours; minus the display and everything else and I estimate it would get less than one hour of battery life, just idling. I don't think I would be happy with that. On the XPS 15, Optimus would of course disable the video card, and is only for dual core machines, so it would be sipping a maximum of 35W (graphics+cpu); again estimating 50% (so 17.5W), that's around 5 hours in the 9-cell battery, and subtracting a bit for the rest of the machine, I can assume the XPS 15 with Optimus technology would probably last around 4 hours. That's plenty.

I guess I need something in between, maybe?

I'm pretty sure it won't work because of Windows 7, not because of the computer... As qhn said, there might be patches somewhere or other fixes such as this one.

Ah sorry, I basically forgot about this thread! Two weeks ago, I took the plunge and bought a MacBook Pro. I love it! I highly recommend anyone with an open mind to try OS X (and a really open budget), go for the MacBook Pro. I just wasn't confident enough with the XPS or the HP Envy -- sure the processor and graphics are a tad newer and better, but I didn't feel confident enough reading the reviews.

It's my first Mac and my first time giving OS X more than 15 minutes of my time and any serious effort. Before now I made fun of Macs and couldn't stand using them. But I decided it was worth a huge gamble and it paid off. I can confidently say I like using OS X as much, if not more, than Windows; the Unix roots are familiar to me, since I often dual boot into Linux.

Anyway, I'm guessing everyone reading this probably thinks I'm ridiculous, so I'm not going to bother going on any further. Windows is still great, and PCs are still much cheaper and a little more powerful. To be honest, my biggest reason for getting the MacBook Pro was peer pressure: many, if not most, computer scientists smarter than me own and use them. I didn't know what the appeal was, but I wanted to find out. Now I know, and I agree with them.

rage4order, that looks like a great configuration, I definitely support the 1080p choice and that's a great price. If I had bought the XPS 15, that's basically what I would've bought.

I'll try to make time to add a review of it after exams are over! Though I almost feel like OS X deserves its own separate review (of course there is no place for it).

And congratulations rage4order! I agree with your lower specs/higher price comment. It is unfortunate that Apple doesn't update more often; I would've liked to have a 400-series Nvidia chip instead. And nobody can deny Apple is extremely expensive. I saw just how much I could've saved and how much better specs I could've gotten if I had went with the XPS 15. So there are definite tradeoffs.

I suppose, but have you seen the teardown of the inside of a MacBook (or any Apple device really)? They're extremely dense, with a custom motherboard and everything fits together with no wiggle room. I think this is the main reason they don't upgrade often - the engineering and manufacturing required to do so is probably pretty substantial.

Also to do with their price is the simple law of supply and demand. Apple doesn't sell as many MacBooks as other PC manufacturers sell PCs, so they have to be higher price to make up for the costs. Seems to make sense to me...