I'm thinking of buying one, but is there a next GPU upgrade in sight ?

Nope. Great 'puter, tho. Peeps are always speculatin that the chassis is 'built to last' an stuff, such that Dell intends to keep throwing cards into it year after year; however, there's been nothing so far to confirm that's actually the case...hopefully the next monster iteration of GPU will float into this format...whenever Nvidia decides to invent one....as it is, ain't nothing can beat the dual 8800's that are stuffed into an M1730...! Get one, biaaatch...ya know yawanna!

Well word on the street is the release of the 9800M or something, but who knows.

Sager has a laptop for pre-order right now with the 9800M GTX 1GB and it is supposed to be available Aug 22nd. Who knows when Dell will follow suit.

will we be able to even upgrade these though? i wonder........and wish......lol! hell i still dont even have the dual 8800's! but i've got to dream big!

Has anyone come up with a fan controller for the 8800 gpu's yet ?
I see if8kfan owner, writer, is missing in action . I'm really surprised because this is one of the most important issues with this laptop,despite the A09 bios . I can mod the mobo in a heartbeat ,but rather use software
at this time ...

Why? The built in fan control in the bios does a great job of cooling down the GPU´s.

Because i want to control the fan speed (high or low), and keep it in the margins i want .

I'm a hardware tech for 20 years ,done all sorts of mods to mobos including volt,CPU,gpu, north bridge (Control with volt pots adjusters) ext..
Problem is it fluctuates to long of a span and to keep it in the 40's you need to over clock to 3.4 gigs in bios(fans on high constantley) .Simply put i want to decide how fast or slow and when fans kick in, thats all. Sure the cards run in 70's c fine,but how long they last is key.

I just roll stock speeds...Tends to last longer and fans don't have to kick in so much...For the 10% increase it just isn't worth the lesser life of the cards....Each there own though.

Well you can´t overpower the bios fan control even by setting the Fan Enforcement to 10ms or even lower, it will always interfere with the bios fan control.

I noticed this when I ran I8kFanGui with my XPS M170. And you know what the actual bios did cool the GPU better than having I8kFanGui control it, my go 7800GTX got hotter by using this fan control program.

I had set it up correctly. I am no novice when it comes to computers. Working with them on a daily basis, have built computers for 10 years.

I just got my big beautiful machine yesterday. Still trying to figure out Vista. However, Call of Duty 4 and Crysis is running well at max setting.

Just wanted to add that the 1730 can use 8gb and Vista 64 works fine with it. I found drivers for everything and have a clean device manager. I think I got all drivers from Dell except the video, webcam, and logitech LCD drivers.

I found so little info on it at all my favorite sites it was amazing. After a bit of googling I found a few that had tried. I took the plunge and bought 8gb ram and 2 x 500gb drives, used my OEM key and upgraded to Vista 64 for free!

Feels like a whole new machine now!

anybody knows about a new 1730 upgrade, like gpu?
what's up with the sli 8700m gt anyways i mean ain't this card is old now?

shouldn't they offer the 9800m gt sli like alienwire clevo etc.? anybody?
sadly i am about to buy one this week, i'd be so pissed if they come up with a new gpu week after that.

Best I can tell, the 9800m GT is the same card as the 8800m GTX, even using the exact same 65nm G92M Core. So Dell probably isn't offering the 9800m GT since there would likely be a backlash from people attempting to upgrade from the 8800m GTX only to find out they didn't really upgrade at all.

The 9800 GTX's are a possibility though, but I haven't seen many computers with those cards yet. To top that off, what little info I've seen suggests that the GTX is a rather minimal upgrade from the GT, nothing that a little OC-ing couldn't compensate for:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/typo3te...170f0ef96e.gif

About the only other high-tier upgrades that I can think of on the horizon that the 1730 won't support at all is the mobile quad-cores. So there really isn't a lot in the near future. I would say now is a fine time to buy if your in the market. The 8800GTX sli are still top tier and not looking to be outperformed by a reasonable margin for some time.

i agree with you on that, 9800m gt is same as 8800 gtx, in fact 8800 gtx probably even faster. well DELL wants 1000 extra for sli 8800gtx wow, but there's like %102 performance increase over 8700m gt sli....

anyway gotta get rid of my 1530 soon...