Dell is offering the i1720 configuration at the Outlet store for $849 (plus tax) shipped . Are there any Dell notebooks under $1000 better suited for video processing (incl some gaming)?
The i1720 includes Intel c2d 2GHz CPU, Vista business, 160GB SATA, 256mb NVIDIA 8600M GT, 17" WXGA+ TrueLife Glossy screen, 9 cell bat, 1390 wireless, burner.
I'm trying to grasp this one... but my mind can not wrap around it, so here goes. I just got off the phone with Dell University sales and talked to the rep. Since the i1720 came out in July I have spec'ed and spec'ed and seen that IT DOES NOT COME WITH OR HAVE OFFERED A 7200RPM HD.
I have a e1705, my dad has one, my girlfriend has one, and my uncle has one... all on my recommendation. I have dabbled/worked in the IT industry since I was 10 and I can't believe that this speed RPM is not offered.
5400RPM existed clear back in 1994.
I just bought my GF a 7200RPM 7k200 200GB Hitachi HD with 16mb of cache for her e1705 from NewEgg.
When we ordered all of our e1705's we intentionally ordered them with the cheapest HD's cause we ordered 7k100 7200RPM 100GB Hitachi's from Froogle searches.
Am I the only one that can't wrap his/her mind around this one....
Well as some of you know I got my Inspiron E1705 replaced with an Inspiron 1720 because my E1705 was having major heat problems.
I always noticed that the E1705 ran pretty hot, but I started monitoring it latley and the CPU and GPU reached temps around 200 F...mainly due to the Geforce Go 7800 heat issues.
Called DELL and they were going to replace my system with an Inspiron 1721.. I raised cain and they sent an Inspiron 1720.
I was actually impressed with the 1720's looks. It is well built, and I loved the dual hard drive capability, as well as built in MIC.. and it had a faster burner DVDRW. I also loved the Chocolate..AKA Espresso Brown color.
I was VERY disappointed that it did not have HDMI or no longer DVI built in as I have a 52" Samsung LCD that loves to take advantage of this connection.
Well I am NOT a huge gamer... but I do like to occasionally game, and when I started doing benchmarks with Vista's performance analyzer and noticed video LAG while doing simple tasks but serious multitasking, I was very disappointed...............
The L521x drivers clearly have a problem when any two finger scrolling can cause the document in any program to immediately skip to the very beginning or the very end.
This issue has come up in the thread [URL] .... but that has been incorrectly marked as answered and I'm concerned that the issue will be buried because of that.
Synaptics have released several driver versions since the 16.3.7.0 driver, up to 16.3.8.8, fixing many issues including a BSOD, whereas so far for the L521x we have just had A03 and A04 variants of the same driver (16.3.7.0), neither of which solve this problem.
I have a Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop. On the keyboard the F1-F12 keys double as multimedia keys - so if you press just F5 for example, you'll raise the screen brightness, but hold Fn and press F5 and it'll be a normal F5 press (e.g. will refresh a webpage).
The Multimedia functions of F10, F11 and F12 are Back, Play/Pause and Forward respectively. These have worked for years, for example if I had a song playing in Windows Media Player and hit F11, it would pause the song. F12 would skip to the next track in the playlist. Recently I must have unknowingly changed a setting somewhere because this no longer seems to work. Bizarrely, every other Multimedia key works, so F5 still raises the screen brightness for example.
I swapped the primary bay 120GB 5400rpm that came with the DELL for a 7k200 200GB 7200RPM Hiatchi 16mb Cache Hard drive.
No bent pins, reseated twice.....
ALL DELL diagnostics pass.... but when I try to launch Hitachi's hard drive fitness tests/diagnostics it fails to load when detecting the bays.... give me an OLD DOS COMMAND.COM error.... this software with my 7k100 works perfect on Inspiron E1705.
BIOS is seeing hard drive... as 200GB... Vista sees the hard drive....
I can even do a FULL FORMAT (not quick) through Vista's advanced command prompt install and diagnostics.....
it formats successfull...
HOWEVER!.... when Vista gets to the final phase of its install when it is @ the VERY last step... I believe its called Finalizing the install.... it just sits there with the three ... and the dots are animated... so the install is not frozen, just doesn't go anywhere.
This install on my e1705 /w 7k200 and 7k100 takes like 10 minutes TOPS....
I've talked to DELL hardware and Dell Software On Call support (first 30 days free).... I've worked in IT since the early 90's and I must be missing something here.
Was using Google Earth Pro and the screen blanked out for a second before being restored. The error was as below
"Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered."
The references to this error seem to infer that the GPU is close to death, and the error will get progressively worse. Anyone else had this error and survived? I've had the laptop less than 4 weeks.
I'm really not keen on getting the laptop replaced and possibly ending up with a poorer display i.e. more screen bleed.
Now > Why is the new one having this description > Quote:
nVidia(R) Extreme Graphics Controller
while the previous release said it was a driver? I mean whats the actual difference? And any idea why they haven't released this new graphics controller for the other models with the same graphics card? This one is apparently for the "Inspiron 1318"...
It's been a long time since i've posted on this forum, but i was wondering wether or not a 6800 go is better than the 8600m gt? The reason for this is that my 9300 seems to be on its last legs (after three keyboard replacements, two motherboard replacements, a 3d card replacement, and various other little problems) and i was wondering if they replace my 9300 with a 1720, would i be satisfied? (im already worried about it not having a DVI port as i regularly connect my 9300 to my 20' monitor).
My wife and I just recently purchased a inspirion 1720 with a 8600mGT to plan and play some games together. I have a 8600 GT in my desktop so I assumed I knew what range the new laptop would play in (FPS wise), even with the ddr2 and new die.
We recieved it about 2 weeks ago, and first thing I noticed was very sluggish FPS on all the games I installed (20% of what my desktop 8600 GT can produce). So I go on the normal witch hunt, trying different drivers for the GPU and make sure all chipsets and bios updates are in...all to no avail.
So I dig deeper..I downloading 3dmark, GPU-Z, and CPU-Z. First thing I notice is my 3dmarks are 1.5k when other 1720s are getting 3-4k on their tests (even with somewhat lower stats )
So then I run GPU-Z and CPU-Z and the only difference I could find from other 1720s is that the 8600M GT I had was running at PCI-E X1 not the maximum the card (and motherboard) can handle which is X16.
*the imageshack pic is from another 1720 who ran GPU-Z
So I looked around to see the difference from 1x PCI-E to X16 (my thinking was zero difference just like AGP 4x to 8X)...and apparently the difference is HUGE.
[url]
*Only difference from those 2 cards is the speed at which the bus is running for PCI-E
I also concluded that those benchmarks fall around what Im getting compared to other 1720 users with the exact same GPU.
So Ive contacted Dell and had to convince him that my card was NOT suppose to run at that X1 bus speed. After and hour and a half, he did not know how to fix that(Bios has no option) and he scheduled a call back within 2 days from another tech to try and get this resolved.
I do have the option to just return the laptop(within a month). But hopefully if by sending it back and having them replace it after troubleshooting with them, I wont get another lemon..
so lesson of the story, if your getting less performance then what your expecting..run GPU-Z and make sure your card is running properly.
I just installed the 185.20 beta driver (which supports the 8600m gt ddr3 without the need for a custom inf), I didnt have any crashing or glitching, and I will let the pic do the talking
this is the first stable 18X.XX driver I tried, and its weird that the 8600m gt doesn't need a modded inf lol
download the driver from LV2Go but dont download any modded infs because you dont need them
im bothered with GPU issue. my 1 yr warranty will expire in few days. the quote of 200$ on one yr warranty extension is EVIL.
so my question is whether i can get 6 month more life on gpu. from yesteryear august i quit playing games. always use in powermizer mode with no intense work.dont knoe how much dell will charge for motherboard replacement
When i changed to 185.85 i noticed that the temperature of my video card lowered. Now im moving to 186.81. Do you think its a good decision, or know a better driver?
dell is no longer offering the Nvidia 8600m gt, they only offering only the 8400 in this system,
is this just coincidence? they gonna finaly take out the m1530 and m1330 systems? and if we, happy customers of the m1530, get in some trouble with this graphics card, they probably gonna replace with a Studio XPS 16? of similar specs? cause they wont have 8600m for replacement
i dont know about u but i dont like te studio xps 16, first bigger, heavier, and not as stylish as the .
my m1530's 8600m gt is now idling between 69-73 degrees celsius, as opposed to the 58-65 it did when it was new. also, in-game temps are now well into the 90's. will be calling dell support this afternoon to have them set up a tech to come out and replace it.
I'm trying to update my 8600M GT drivers on my Dell Vostro 1500. I downloaded the following file dated 23/1/2009 from the Dell drivers website after entering my service tag:
R190066.exe
I tried to install but an error came up that no drivers matching the hardware could be found (or something like it)...
I recently had Vista installed and attempted to play some games I bought that I heard ran well on the m1530. Unfortunately when trying them out for myself I found that they did not run very well at all.
The most recent game I've tested this with is The Sims 3. I've read on my different forums that people are running this game easily maxed out with the 8600M GT, 2.0+GHz Processor,
and a few gigs of RAM. Unfortunately when I ran the game I found it to be quite choppy at even Medium settings.
After reading around, I thought that maybe a reformat and a new OS might help. I took off Vista last night and threw on Windows 7. Even without any programs installed, The Sims 3 still preforms pretty badly.
I have my laptop set to "High Performance" mode. Here are my specs:
2.4GHz Processor 3gigs of RAM 32-bit Windows 7 8600M GT Video Card (I recently installed the 185.85 Windows 7 beta Drivers from NVIDIA)
about a modified bios to increase the voltage on the 8600m gt?
I remember there was a 7800/7900 modded bios I used in my inspiron 9400 to bump up the voltage for better overclockability and was wondering if anyone was working on one for the 8600m gt?
I've been able to get the card up to 635/535, but can't seem to go any higher. Temps max at about 55C, so I'm thinking there may be more headroom.
Is the 8600M GT good enough for games such as Battlefield 2? I read a 4,000 plus benchmark somehwere...but others were mid 3000s on 3Dmark06...That's not much, but I think it's faster than my X800 XT is in the XPs desktop which plays BF2 fine.
I'm going to be going with a new gaming desktop within a year or so, but I still want the laptop to be able to handle BF2!
I can't seem to get settings to stay in Windows XP with my new 1520's 8600m GT. I go to apply settings (in either rivatuner or ntune) and it just goes back to default settings.
Currently my M1530 has the nvidia 8400M GS chip in it. I'm thinking about swapping the motherboard out for one with an 8600M chip on it.
My question is, will it make much of a difference? How much greater is the 8600M w/ 256mb versus the 8400M w/ 128mb that is currently in my machine? Look forward to your responses.
on 575/475 i scored 7100, on 550/450 i just played bf2142 on high settings and it ran at 60fps or so, give or take, i just installed windows xp on my 1720, it came with vista all i had to do was switch something with the hd in the bios, im using ntune to overclock. my system is a t5450 1.66,1g 667mhz ram,120gb 5400rpm hd, nvidia 8600m gt, using driver 165.01.
My new laptop has the Nvidia GeForce GO 8600M GT 256MB graphics card in it according to the Dell listing.
I can find mention of Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT 256MB without the word GO in the title all over the net and it doesn't look to bad.
So I'm wondering, is the word GO in the title of my card suggesting that perhaps I have a down scaled version / cheaper version or are they the same thing and same performance?
I apologize in advance if there is already a thread dedicated to this issue as I made sure to search around to see whether someone had already started one on this issue.
My question goes out to other Dell 1500 Vostro owners who ended up with a defective card and underwent the painstaking process of replacing their 8600M GT cards:
Have the replacement cards been defective as the stock ones? Are the replacement 8600M GT cards better built to withstand heating? Has Nvidia fixed the silicone issues?