Dell and Alienware are supposed to target different markets, but what happens when the parent company's gaming notebook takes on its similarly priced sibling? Dell's XPS M1730 vs. Alienware's Area-51 m9750.

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/2007/1 [...] index.html

I would first like to thank you for a well written article but it would have been nice to see benchmarks under the same OS however I understand that such information would have required a significant amount of time to compile.

I noticed earlier in your article that you stated....

"Dell offers an upgrade to 4GB for an offensive $375 additional charge, while savvy buyers can purchase top-brand 2x2GB DDR2-667 SO-DIMM kits for around $200."

I have a Dell XPS M1730 arriving any day now and I would be most interested in upgrading the ram myself, as you say but I can't seem to find 2X2GB modules for anywhere near the price you have listed previously. I would appreciate it greatly if anyone had any personal recommendations on which brand of notebook memory to buy and where from ( I live in Australia ).

I have never owned a notebook before the XPS as I have always built my own desktops but due to travel I have deemed it necessesary to purchase one, any advice would be appreciated.

http://www.umart.com.au/newindex2.phtml?bid=5

Is a site that I have often used in the past and have found to have rather good prices. Even factoring in the exchange rates though it still seems rather expensive compared to the previously quoted price in the article.

I guess I better do some snooping around myself!

Do you think that the M1730 will be compatable with any old ram? I checked the Dell site earlier and couldn't find anything resembling a compatability list.

http://www.techbuy.com.au/searchca [...] -2_RAM.asp

Not my usually preferred site but they have a great range. Other Aussie sites are;
http://www.centrecom.com.au/ - good prices poor range.
http://www.scorptec.com.au/ - Good range not as cheap
http://www.eyo.com.au/ - Better range also not as cheap

Hope this helps.

Maybe I'm missing what you are seeing, but to me they never say that the Dell is better at games. The conclusion leads you to believe that it's a better value, which it is since it beats the Alienware in everything but games. They also make the arguement that Dell will allow the user to upgrade the 8700GT's when newer stuff (8800m) comes out. That alone would make the Dell more appealing to a user, knowing that they can upgrade their system if it becomes outdated 2 weeks later.

If you base everything off of gaming performance, the Alienware is the clear winner. The 8700's just can't compete with the 7950's especially when eye-candy is turned on. The Alienware's smaller price tag would make it the more appealing option to those looking for raw gaming performance.

That wouldn't work as well. HP doesn't have much that could compare to Voodoo, especially in the desktop department. You might be able to compare a lower end Voodoo with a midrange HP, but I dunno.

Not really a fair comparison between the two laptops..

1) XP vs Vista, everyone knows XP is faster for gaming
2) The 7950 laptop drivers in the Alienware are battle proven, the new 8700m laptop drivers in the Dell are new and still need to work out all the kinks

I wouldn't be surprised to see a big performance increase 4-6 months from now when Nvidia gets around to improving the 8700m drivers

That is true. I even made a post about that system in the HP section and yet I forgot about it. Way to go me!

Voodoo is known to make some of the fastest and cleanest prebuilt systems on the market. It would be interesting to see if any of that has rubbed off on the blackbird (besides the price). I think the Voodoo would win just because it is water cooled and could probably be clocked to hell and back.

Are you planning on running the 64-bit version of XP or Vista? the 32-bit versions dont take advantage or recognize anything over 3GB.

This was ok, but not very conclusive. Considering the nature of the two notebooks, and the fact its also a 8700 vs 7950 comparison, i would have liked to have seen a greater range of games benchmarked other than FEAR and Oblivion...

How about Bioshock? Crysis Demo?...

We have a review of DX10 compatible hardware, with no DX10 tests.

What other people said about the drivers is true also, but i dont consider AA/AF the be-all and end-all of a GPU. I mean did we need benchmarks to show that 256bit is better than 128bit? We knew that the thing would lose out in AA/AF at higher resolutions. Does the GPU compensate in other areas though.... we know (from synthetic tests) that it has 3x the shader performance. That could make a difference in certain games, especially upcoming.

I dunno its just some stuff to think about and its stuff i would have liked to have seen investigated.

I wonder if they had the XPS M1730 running in SLI for the tests?

When I first got mine I ran 3DMark06 and got a score of 4861 which I though was OK at the time as my desktop machine only got around 5600 running an FX60 cpu and a 7900GTX. BUT upon further checking it turns out that the laptop is shipped without being set to SLI. Once I figured that out I set it to SLI and I repeated the test and got 8308 with my XPS M1730. Yes I am running Vista Home Premium with 2gigs of Ram and the X7900 Core Duo Extreme CPU.

Almost forgot to add that I am NOT overclocking the unit either.....

Most interesting! The link does not work for me either. I wonder if they pulled it when they discovered that they had forgotten to set the SLI on as that gives a totally different picture...

My Dell XPS M1730 has dual 8700s not the 8800s. But IF there is a big improvement and Dell offers the upgrade then I will look at upgrading to the 8800s.

I was especially interested in their comment about the RAM upgrade as a $200 upgrade now is OK but a $400 was not at the time of purchase.