Dell XPS M1730 Mobile Gaming Notebook

by Michael Lin — Monday, December 10, 2007, 03:45 PM EDT

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Futuremark PCMark Vantage Wrap-Up

We contunue our test coverage with the last few modules from the comprehensive PCMark Vantage suite of benchmarks.

Futuremark PCMark Vantage

Gaming and Overall

Courtesy, Futuremark: "Gaming is one of the most popular forms of entertainment for all ages. Today’s games demand high performance graphics cards and CPUs to avoid delays and sluggish performance while playing. Loading screens in games are yesterday’s news. Streaming data from an HDD in games – such as Alan Wake™ – allows for massive worlds and riveting non-stop action. CPUs with many cores give a performance advantage to gamers in real-time strategy and massively multiplayer games. Gaming Suite includes the following tests: "

Gaming 1 - GPU game test
Gaming 2 - HDD: game HDD
Gaming 3 - Two simultaneous threads, CPU game test, Data decompression: level loading
Gaming 4 - Three simultaneous threads, GPU game test, CPU game test, HDD: game HDD

This is a test where the graphics card is a major factor and it's our first taste of how the M1730 will perform in the task it was designed for. The M1730 ends up in second to last place, however that was to be expected. The GeForce 8700M GT, while relatively fast for a mobile video card, is still quite mediocre compared to a full fledged desktop GeForce 8800 GTX. We'll explore the M1730's gaming potential more on the next page.

The overall PCMark Vantage score is a weighted average of all of the modules in the Vantage suite calculated in total "PCMarks". Here are the results:

While the XPS M1730 fell behind in a couple of the Vantage test suites compared to the desktop systems, overall, it comes out on top. It's also worthy to note the lead the M1730 has on the ASUS C90S which is close to how many mainstream laptops would perform. It's quite impressive that you can take the equivalent of one of our desktop rigs with you on the go.