Who is returning their 9200?? - Page 3

I think the verdict should be, if you bought an Inspiron 9200 recently, and you are within the 21 day limit and you are thinking about doing some serious gaming on it.... you should definitely give Dell a call to return your I9200 with the puny little inadequate graphics card! The is coming from the fact that verious people have been able to oc their 6800 go to give 3dmark05 results of ~4500. wow...

I wish I could call the stock market! But it was kind of fun the past 2 - 3 months hearing everyone's speculation about how DELL's laptop lineup would pan out.

Anettis, so do you agree that the Inspiron 9300 would be here to stay for a while? Let say until when the Yonah processors come out early next year? And when they come out, Dell will not introduce the Inspiron 9400 for about 4 to 8 weeks.

Yes - my guess is that the i9300 will have a fairly long run. I bet it will remain in DELL’s lineup at least 12 months (probably longer) and may hit its end-of-life when DELL brings its Yonah based laptops to market. And as you stated once INTEL releases the Yonah it will likely take some time for DELL to get everything in order to start selling the new model.

My current laptop is the i8600, which seems to me to have been a very successful and long selling laptop for DELL. I don’t know when the i8600 originally started selling but I have owned mine for about 15 months and I believe they were selling for some time before I purchased (I held out for the ATI 9600 GPU).

The Inspiron 8600 went on sale end of May, 2003.....it was almost there for 2 years!

The things that I miss on the i9300 are the lacking Sonoma features, namely HD sound (Azalia), ExpressCard slot(s), maybe also S-ATA and GB ethernet. Oh yeah, a Firewire 800 connector would be nice too... None of these are features that have a mass appeal at this stage but things that would be nice to have on a DTR laptop intended to last a few years down the road. I don't however think that Dell would be crazy enough to launch yet another i9x00 model in a few months time just to add some of these niche features and apart from that there really is nothing else that could be added/done in a new model prior to the Yonah launch whenever it is. Having said that, considering the pricing of Sony's 17" models which are the only real alternative to the i9300 in terms of size/weight/battery life, I'll probably end up buying the i9300 as well in a few weeks time even though I called it a dissapointment early january...

I also use i8kFanGUI but I am a bit less conservative with the settings (after several tweaks and research). I now set it so that the fans go off when the temp goes past 52C and even at that point the air coming out of the side is barely warm and is cooled down instantly (I have them shut when they reach 31C).

I am curious though - in terms of the 9300, isn't there a driver utility to under-clock the NVIDIA Go GPU when not gaming? Or use some low power setting? If so and enabled, would the 9300's GPU really always be running at around 50C at that point?

Also, I wonder if i8kFanGUI will kick both fans on at the same time after the GPU hits the set temp, or just the GPU fan? On the 9200, the CPU usually gets hotter first, which puts both fans on (from what I have noticed).

Dellbert, Sowelu, and others;

Please share your CPU/GPU and i8FanGUI experience on Christian Diefer's forum. He's the author of the program, and the board is new and sparse yet.
Diefer's Forum
I've done research on the Dothan's operating temp range as well, but it's slim pickins for info.
I have my fans set to go slow @ 50*, off @40*, Hi-speed @60*C.

As for sending back my 9200,

HUH?!

This lappie is about 250% better than any of my other computers. (They were all hand-me-downs)

Reading how everyone seems to stress and clamor to keep up with the Jones' makes me happy that I never had such a cool machine before. I Don't doubt that some here have legitimate reasons for returning their 9200 for the 9300, so I certainly don't want to invalidate anyone's priorities with a blanket statement (thereby inviting a flaming). But I have to ask just how many of you folks have ever had limited productivity or limited entertainment experiences on a regular basis by maxing out your I9200's capabilities.
I have found the limits of 256MB of RAM to be annoying only occasionally. I mention that because I realize that some of you require much more demanding performance than I (such as >512MB RAM). But even so, I can't imagine that the 9200, after upgrading RAM and installing performance management programs, would be brought to it's knees performance wise on any regular basis. -Certainly not by any demanding application that would not also bring the 9300 to it's limits in a like manor.

If the 9300 was a tremdous leap over the 9200, than I wouldn't think twice about everyone pitching their old 9200.
-But it aint.

The main reason people are probably ditching the 9200 in favor of the 9300 is because of the video card (6800 go) and that for some, it costs less than what they spent on the 9200 so it makes sense to return it. It also offers a glossy WUXGA screen which I'm sure appeals to more than a few here.

I often use my 9200 on my lap, so my goal is comfort -- there was no research required I found that under normal operating conditions, the temp rarely gets above 35C, so I set fangui to turn fans on slow at 35C and shut them off at 30C. My 9200 stays very cool and the fans rarely kick in.

They have PowerMiser which auto-downclocks, but I don't know if it's only active on battery power. You can easily change clocks with various utilities, but I haven't heard of anybody manually downclocking yet.

In any case, the go6800 still has at least twice the number of transistors of the MR9700, so I'm sure the 9300 will never run as cool or as long as the 9200, but it should still be pretty comfortable to use.

I just ran a stress test for HL2 on my 9200. With default settings and 1280 x800 resolution, i get 56 points average. This makes me lust for 9300.

Btw, anyone know how the warranty for dell works? Say if my motherboard magically burned out due to malfunctioning fan, and since 9200 is a discontinued product, whould they be cool and give me a 9300? Just wondering nothing else at all.

Upon dvi hook-up, the 9200 automatically output full screen video overlay to external dvi, which looked good... However, after toggling to external only <FnF8> contrast increased dramatically. I suppose it could just be my color settings in the ati drivers? I use very punchy color settings to wake-up the slightly washed out WUXGA lap screen(as compared to my external glass which is half again as bright, with eye popping color). Perhaps custom color settings wheren't applied to external dvi when running as a second, as opposed to primary, output?

soo... i agree, just swapping over to 'external only' video may not provide better image for all users. For me, it's not really worth trying to tweak until streamed HD-quality movie rentals appear.