XPS2 or 9880? - Page 2

You made a good choice. The 9880 is raw and the glossy screen is great too. I'd be getting one aswell, but Im too concerned about battery life.

Got to be the sager dude............................AWSEOME! With sager you will get twice the spec of a dell for same price!!
My mates got a dell xps 2 and my 9860 DEVOURS it!!

re CPU

I say go with the 650. $200 bucks isn't worth it. The 3.4 will do just fine, that's what I'm going with.

Tom's Hardware has a nice comparison between the Dothan (in the XPS Gen 2) and the P4. They test a variety of CPUs, including a range of 6xx's. Might help you.

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050525/

I was impressed by the Dothan, esp. in gaming. Even without overclocking, the M ruled the P4 in gaming.

9880!

You could build a freaking badass desktop for less then that and still have enough money to get a cheaper laptop.

eehhh remind me y we buy the EM64
seems we'll end up having all cpu's in 1 laptop to get satisfied
..it's self defeating !

Maybe you should try comparing benchmarks between the XPS2 and the 9880 before posting "theoretical numbers".

This is the 9860/9880 review. Note that the author is an Employee at PCtorque, which sells Sagers.

http://notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=84906

Here's the XPS2. The author is a random user.

http://notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=71921

Here's another XPS2 benchmark from Anandtech
http://www.anandtech.com/video/show...?i=2356&p=4

Note that there are multiple pages to this XPS2 review. And the only similar benchmarks are Doom3 and Far Cry.


Overall the computers are dead even in gaming.

The reason for the post was not to promote either the XPS 2 or the 9880. The poster was asking about the CPUs more than anything else.

The original poster mentioned he had specific things in mind, and was more concerned about how the CPU would react in those situations, and not just about gaming.

I will be doing a bit of video editing and I really don't want to get something that does poorly (as you describe) that requires a lot of CPU power.

The PC Torque review had none of those tests, and the Tom's Hardware test did, because it was more of a full comparison of the CPUs for various different types of apps. I posted specifically because of the original poster's comments, that's all.

Devours it? what do you mean in terms of the power it consumes? or the heat is puts out.

C'mon man. Benchmarks prove that ead to head, the XPS2 is way in front of the 9860.

As is stated above the benchmarks compared were only in game and yes they are both running head to head. Most of us old school desktop processor fans can no longer dispute that the PM can hang with the P4 in gaming applications. However you need to remember this is not the only use for the computer. When the XPS2 released we had one in here to put through the gauntlet just like any other machine we review. They both excelled when put to the tests in gaming, however once you start to put multiple application load on a PM, you see why they still make P4s. The P4 excels when it comes to running multiple applications, on a normal day I have 2 instances of Wow, MS Outlook, Xfire, Multiple IE windows, Media Player, and other Misc apps that are useful at the time. While tabbing through my list of apps on a P4 driven system(9880 and my Misc 56xx that I have lying around), the transition is smooth. However on a PM System (Dell XPS2, 3880, 4880, 3790) you would start to see a slow down and lag when switching between apps. Next, 1Hdd vs. 2hdd w/ option for RAID. Besides the Obvious advantage of doubling your storage space along with options for RAID 0 or 1. We all know the advantage of 0, but we commonly neglect 1. As stated this machine is not only for gaming, the prospect of data redundancy is something many professionals can not afford to do without. These are just a few more things to keep in mind when comparing the 2 systems, not every cares about battery life and weight. Now as far as heat is concerned, I am not even sure where you are going with that, I myself was the 1st US user of the 9860 and have continued to use it as my primary machine now since Oct. of 04 and have yet to experience even the slightest issue from this notebook in regards to heat. You can say my above is from the point of view of a fan boy, or a dealer... but in all respects this is in the point of view of a gamer and a power user and nothing more.

cool. luke I just purchased a 9880 but my ccv number didnt go through...so i typed in another number. Ill pm you my order id.

Thanx man.

Yes as Luke said the 9880/9860 beats the XPS2 in multitasking hands down. The M processors aren't that great in that field. Now the M may be faster than the P4 in games on desktop systems, but it just didn't happen quite the same on notebooks for whatever reason.

if you are a dcc professional, get the DELL M70!
check out this comparison and keep in mind that the boxx 2200 and the alienware mj-12m is the same machine as the 9880.
http://www.cgnetworks.com/story_cust...id=2932&page=1

Truth is no matter what you buy now, you will always want to upgrade the whole system in a fiew years at most. You will want the newer screens, solid state harddrives, Dual Core 64 bit, ExpressCard slot, Edge Wirelss and who knows what else will be available.

What I'm trying to say is no matter what GPU (if any) you can put in your system 2 or 3 years down the road, there will be so many other features that you will want to have improved. My advice is to buy what has the greates value at the moment and in doing so you will save enouh cash to keep upgrading to a whole new system once in a while instead. So what if it has been on the market for 6+ months when you buy it, you'll still have it just like everyone else who bought it when it was THE fastest system around, and for a much better price at that, and all the quirks have usaly been worked out too by then.

What it really boils down to though is the amount of cash you can burn and how important it is for you to have the newest and latest in 3d performance right away. I can see the thrill in having the absolute fastest without having to wait, but personaly I just wouldnt have enough $$$$ to keep that up!...

Ps. As long as there is Sager notebooks Dell is the absolute LAST resort.