A very important part of overall system responsiveness is down to hard drive performance so we used two of our favourite benchmark utilities Crystalmark X64 Edition and HD Tach to rate the 2.5 inch 7,200 rpm SATA drive.
Hard drive performance is fairly good for a mechanical unit. Under real world conditions however the speed differences between this drive and a quality SSD are clearly felt. We would need to replace this unit with a SSD drive for 24/7 use.
That really is a fucking sweet laptop. even without the bluray and dropping down a CPU, its under a grand. t hat is excellent.
Always great when I get a new Kitguru review alert on Twitter 🙂 awesome review man and that is a hell of a good looking machine. I am not sure im sold on the appearance, that two tone thing looks a bit messy, id prefer it was darker, like the front, but I suppose you arent looking at the underside much. the intel core i7 cpu is great.
Wow that Intel QM CPU blows me away
Well what a great stoke of luck. I was looking at this machine on christmas eve and didnt know if it was going to suck. ill aim for a lower specification than this, but I need a new laptop for 2011 for work, and ill bill it to the company (just need to keep it realistic).
Excellent, I like the skins, some really cool looking ones
njice to see dell reviews here, only thing I will say is that I have had a terrible time with dell batteries failing after 18 months to 2 years time. Not sure if it has been a batch, but google shows quite a few people seeing the same thing.
excellent machine, I just bought an Acer for £500 quid in PCWORLD though :p
Great machine, however, Dell took away the 1080P screen option though! Hopefully dell will have that option back soon, or else the CPU and the GPU will be wasted! (This option is back in other country except for the US)
They actually arent selling the 1080p machine in the UK either? what happened?
I think the 1080p machine is available in parts of europe now, but it might be due to 1080p screen demands and lack of stock. very unusual to pull a system mid range though.
The 1080p option will be back at some stage. Dell said this “We still offer the screen but had to temporarily take it offline as our supplier had to de-commit on certain quantities. It can still be ordered over the phone if one doesn’t mind an extended lead time. “
The 1080p option is back in Canada
Conservative design in my opinion, and it’s even kinda of thick for laptops nowadays.