Dell Monster – M1730
As some of you may already be aware – I’m looking to buy a gaming/home recording laptop. Machines that have made the shortlist include wares from Rock, Asus and Dell. Whilst looking at the Dell site I found that they’ve added a new machine.
The XPS M1730 is an updated version of the award-winning XPS M1710. The “minimum-spec” machine, which includes 2GB of 667MHz DDR2 RAM, SLI GeForce 8700M GT graphics and a 2.2GHz Core 2 T7500 chip, weighs in at £1,799 including VAT and shipping.
The M1730 is the first laptop to feature a dedicated Ageia PhysX processor of the sort you only ever find in high-end desk rigs. Dell have squeezed an Intel Core 2 Extreme X7900 CPU clocked at 2.8GHz, a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo T7700, or a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo T7500 and room for two 200GB hard drives, a single 250GB drive, or a 32GB solid state drive to help boot speeds.
“Physics-processing units are handy because they take the strain off the CPU and graphics cards, making your system even faster. They’re used to model thousands of so-called ‘smart particles’, so hair, cloth — anything that moves in fact — behaves as realistically as it would in the real world.”
As yet, there are only a few games that have been designed specially for the Ageia PhysX chip but it will come with Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 (GRAW2) so you’ll be able to experience PhysX straight away. A list of the other games can be found at the Ageia Web site.
As usual you can pick from various combinations for your machine if you wander over to Dell’s M1730 page.
