Dell XPS 17 L701x Thread

Following in the footsteps of TRF-Inferno, I figured it was time for a dedicated XPS 17 thread, to answer all questions in a single thread. I will try to add information and answers here as time goes by.



Current Opinion:



I have had the XPS 17 for a little over two weeks now, and I have used it for regular work and some gaming. Now that I have used it a bit, I still like the machine very much, but...

• There is indeed a high pitched whine which might be related to my second HDD, but I'm not sure about that yet.
• When gaming, left part of the palmrest does get warm. I wouldn't call it hot, but it definately gets warm. Warmer than it got during my Furmark test.
• The screen is OK at best. I can live with it for now as I only really *need* it for work, but I will be trying to put in a decent panel myself later on.

Would I buy it again? Yes. I still think the price/performance ratio of the XPS 17 is very good. Sure, it has some issues, but I haven't found a single perfect laptop yet, and this one comes very close.



Software & Drivers Updates & Manuals:



The new ). Do keep in mind though that every combination of screen + GPU yields a slightly different result, so it might not per perfect for you. Use this with aoubt 50% screen brightness (that's 118cd/m2 and it is what the profiling made me adjust it to).



A positive point for this machine, is that it comes with a caddy / bracket for the 2nd HDD, so you can put in your extra HDD or SSD right away. On the downside, the BIOS doesn't (yet?) support RAID, only ATA/AHCI. As of BIOS A05 there is still no support for RAID. Also please note that some users report their XPS 17 being delivered without the extra caddy.









The HDD on the lower right is the one I added in myself, the other one was factory installed.



This machine also has 4 slots for DDR3 So-Dimm RAM. XPS 17s delivered with an i5 processor have a different motherboard with only 2 slots.







If you have 4 slots, the configuration of these slots is like this:







You can easily reach the RAM and HDD by removing a single screw on the bottom of the machine:







The speakers are quite loud. When I set the volume to maximum, the speakers are loud enough to watch a video in the living room without the need for external speakers. The sound is also quite 'full' and the bass is nice.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Disclaimer This is a work in progress and I will update is when I can. I will gladly answer questions or run tests, but I also need the machine to do actual work on, so please bear with me. I don't game much, so I could probably only run a demo if one is available. I haven't used the machine much yet, so I cannot give you a full in-depth review of the machines quality just yet. This will change

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