First time laptop purchaser, Studio XPS 1647 - confused/frustrated

Hi all,

as the topic says, this is my first laptop. I bought it about 2 days ago.

I've been a PC gamer since the 80's, always on desktops, and my Dell XPS 710 desktop has been giving me massive headaches for some time now, it seemed like it was coming up with a new blue screen/new way to crash or screw up in some game or another, every few days. This latest time it wouldn't even boot up properly, I'd been there before and knew I could probably get it "recovered" again, but between it claiming I had no system restore points (when I did), etc... I got sufficiently frustrated that I decided to accelerate pre-existing plans to get my first laptop.

Went to Best Buy, and was considering an Asus at about the $1300 mark, one of their more serious gaming systems, G73 or something I think? Anyway, a guy there who I actually respected the opinion of a lot (unusual for a Best Buy employee to strike me as being so knowledgeable etc...) suggested to me that I consider this Dell XPS Studio 1647 - for one thing it was on sale for $850 down from $1000 - the Asus was really going to break my budget so that enticed me a lot. It seemed to have good specs too.

Well, so far I'm experiencing some frustration. And I am so very, very tired of being frustrated with my PCs. I wanted at least a few months of grace period where things just worked, where I was impressed by the speed of my new machine... etc.

Well, here's the points of frustration so far:

1) I was running StarCraft 2 at 1920x1200 on high graphical settings (not maxed but pretty close) and running it pretty damn smoothly, on the 3 year old XPS 710 desktop with an 8800 GTX, with 700 some megs of vram... and now on this system which has 1gig of vram, with the ATI HD 4670 Radeon Mobility, I am seeing much, much worse framerates. I can't swing those same settings at all, not even close. Scrolling around the map is sluggish, units are sluggish, framerate is poor... system really bogs down with many units on screen (desktop would do this but not nearly at so low a number)

2) Fallout 3 won't even play more than a few minutes, locks up, have to ctrl-alt-del out of it, and even that doesn't work properly I have to do it a second time and close the closer... if that makes sense.

3) Crysis which I haven't tried much of yet at all, seemed to be far, far less receptive to running at the sort of settings I had anticipated.

These are the only 3 games I've tried at this point. StarCraft 2 did at one point give me a message about a compatability issue with this video card...

I thought if I shelled out what for me is a lot of money, and got a laptop with a quad core, where I had a dual core before... and I got a video card with more vram... I guess the fact that I am running at WORSE framerates, etc, to the point of unplayability, rather than at least AS GOOD but frankly I would've expected better... well it's just really really depressing.

I'm tired of having to worry about this kind of stuff, I just wanted some simplicity back, a system that didn't give me a fresh reason to stress out and be disgusted every few days. I guess I shouldn't have given Dell and XPS another shot? I didn't want to but the sale and recommendation and online reviews made me give it a try...

Am I just wildly unrealistic about what a laptop can be capable of with gaming? I thought maybe trying to get it to pump out to my 27" LCD at 1920x1200 while running firefox in the other window maybe was asking too much of it (Though it was not asking too much of an older, worse-specced - other than 8 gigs of RAM vs. 4 in this desktop...) so yesterday i gave it a try just by itself, not hooked to any monitor, trying to help get a more fair feel for it's abilities. Even in that situation, running at it's own native resolution... only putting out video signal to it's own built in monitor... it still was having these issues. .

I do realize this isn't a brand new system, they'd had it at Best Buy for a while etc... but shouldn't it be handling these games better?

I would *greatly* appreciate any insight anyone can give.

 

Sounds like throttling to me. You should download Throttlestop and umm, that other thing that lets you moniter GPU speed and temperature. Your system is probably not working to spec.

 

Thanks for the fast reply I'm looking into it now.

My power supply says 100-240v, do I need a replacement?

 

The XPS 16 doesn't have a great gaming GPU (it's good but it's still a mobile GPU, not even a mobile "gaming" GPU). Compare here. PassMark Software - Video Card Benchmark Charts - Video Card Model List

Your 8800 GTX is almost twice as powerful. Amount of Video ram doesn't count for much.

I also play SC2 on my XPS 1645, and it can't play at 1920x1080 with high shaders and a decent framerate, so I put shaders on medium, and most other settings on high/ultra.

 

So basically I need to return this thing in your opinion?

 

i7 720 chip?

 

Nah

i5 CPU M 430 @ 2.27GHz (4 CPUs) ~2.3GHz

 

Throttling issue for sure. When advising of the power supply, ensure you have a 130W AC adapter (and an updated BIOS).

And with the games you are playing, the GPU will indeed limit you. I love laptops but desktops come with some real kick butt video cards. You just can't get these babies in the small form factor. Heat dissipation, power ratings, size. They all come into it.

Whether you should return it depends on whether you use it mostly for gaming and whether you can leave this machine in the one spot. If you do, perhaps you should be looking at another desktop.

I can only think of a few other laptops which may come with a better GPU ... Alienware and perhaps the HP Envy??? I am not sure though; and these are expensive.

 

I think the i5's are considered dual core cpus, albeit a step up from the core 2 duos.

To hear this is a real disappointment as I was most likely going to be getting a similar laptop in the near future.

What sort of resolutions are you running the games at? I know you mentioned low specs but if youre having trouble even running sc2

 

If you bought it to replace or be more powerful than your desktop, you made a mistake.

Doesn't sound like throttling to me. I've played the game myself with the appropriate monitoring tools verifying I was getting maximum performance available.

Starcraft 2: 1920x1080, Medium shader settings. I'm having no trouble at all running the game unless you mean the trouble of not having a more powerful system being able to run Ultra with 60+fps. I get 40-50 fps average at the beginning of a new game.

 

Geosurface,

I think you just overestimated the power of a laptop. A laptop will never be as powerful as a desktop. The limits of size, power consumption, and heat dissipation prevents a brand new gaming laptop from comparing to a desktop a few years old.

Before, you had a 8800 GTX, a (one time) top of the line desktop card. The 8800 GTX is capable of 518 billion floating point operations per second (FLOPS), where the 4670 is only capable of 432 GFLOPS. The 8800 GTX, by itself, consumed 155 Watts of power, significantly more than your entire new laptop. 4 years later, the top of the line laptop GPUs are just catching up to where your desktop card was.

You can't expect to be able to run brand new games at max settings at 60fps on a laptop, it's just not going to happen.

Besides, you got one of the 1647's with a 4670, already a generation old even by laptop standards. The 5730 is nearly exactly on par with your old 8800GTX (the 5730 does 520 GFLOPS).

If you want to game seriously, get a desktop. One of the ASUS G73s might do well, but it is larger, heavier, more power hungry, and hotter than the 1647, but is still significantly below (current) desktop standards.

Also, your CPU is a dual core, not a quad core, and is the slowest offered with the 1647 at that.

 

I'm not sure if this would help. But I had lots of crashes while playing fallout 3 then I found a fix after a quick search online. Apparently if you change a couple of lines in some text file it will fix your problem. I can't remember much about this, but I thought it might be worth a try.

But as the others said... If you have the luxury of owning a desktop (not being a constant traveler), why would you even consider a gaming laptop...

 

I have a similar system (i5 540m). Get a 130w adapter, make sure the bios is up to date, run throttle stop, set SCII to 720p with max settings (you can barely notice the difference between 1080 on the SXPSs screen). You should see between 20-35fps (which is just fine for me).

 

ya your a little confused about that cpu. as previous posters have said, it is only a dual core. it has 4 threads, but only 2 cores. big difference.

If i was you id just go get a refund and configure an $850 desktop on newegg or something. An $850 desktop will destroy most laptops in performance.

 

For me, I see a monster difference between 1920x1080 and 1280x720. On the native resolution, the in-game text is perfectly crisp (and less jaggies overall), and on the lower resolution, it is blurry. Not only that, but the low fps will put you at a competitive disadvantage.

 

Thanks for the enlightening folks.

I'm going to be on a submarine for up to 9 months at a stretch starting early next year, hence having to switch to a laptop. Until then, it will usually be acting as though it were a desktop, usually in one place. I am strongly considering the G73 Asus, trading it in and paying the difference. Unfortunately this is going to absolutely clean me out on money for a good while but... I can't accept the performance this Dell is giving me.

Gaming is my primary focus, and I'm too accustomed to good framerates at 1920x1200 - the 1080/720p stuff is off my radar, I do not think in terms of HDTV terminology, I know what they mean, for the most part, but I use a Dell 2707wp or something, I think that's the model number... it's a 27" LCD monitor. It has no HDMI input, I had to buy an HDMI to DVI-D cable for the laptop, in fact.

 

720p= 1280x720; 1080p = 1920x1080. That's all they mean, just an abbreviation of the resolution.

If your only concern is serious gaming, then you got the wrong laptop, your mistake, not Dell's. The XPS16 is a mid-high end all around laptop, made mostly for multimedia, but with the power to do some gaming. It's supposed to be a compromise of as much power as possible, in smaller, lighter, less power consuming frame (compared to a 17.3 laptop). It is not a dedicated gaming laptop.

Get the G73, it's a great gaming laptop, just too big/heavy/power hungry for a lot of us. Still don't expect it to be as fast as a desktop though. As far as cash goes, if you're going to be stuck on a sub for 9 months, what else do you have to spend your money on?

 

And that is why I do not play competitively. My Korean friend is showing me the ropes. But until I can beat him once, I do not consider myself ready.

 

Well folks thanks for all the tips and info.

I did go ahead and exchange the Dell today for the Asus G73. So far, it seems to have been a great decision. Other than the whole not having any money thing, heh.

It is running everything beautifully, including SC2 and Fallout 3. SC2 at max settings at 1920x1200 - better than the desktop had been doing.

While I'm here, and before I go... I wonder if any of you have any suggestions for me getting my data off my 1 terabyte western digital SATA drive I just bought for said desktop a couple of months ago...

Right now the Dell XPS 710 will not let me access anything, all it ever does is go into Windows repair, and says it can't repair automatically "WindowsRepairOffline" error... claims I have no System Restore points set up (I did have...) and when I try to at least check on the files with Lubuntu, or Xubuntu on SD cards and USB sticks, they just hang at the loading screen eternally... that's the method I'd used at least partially some months ago when I was in a similar situation. I ended up getting this hard drive at that point...

I need these files though. I was considering the Rocketfish hard drive enclosure, though I can't afford it now, but I just learned it doesn't support HDs beyond 750gb... so yea... I am at wit's end here.

Safe mode doesn't work... same deal.

UPDATE:

Now with a few days of the G73 under my belt I can safely say it was definitely a good decision. This thing rocks. Plays SC2 great, Crysis... which I had forgotten how good it was...

happy ending about the info on desktop XPS also, got it to finally start cooperating with Ubuntu and moved some files which enabled me to get Win7 going on it's secondary HD, and was able to transfer the files over the network