Dell Inspiron 1520 Benchmarked (T7250/8600M)

Configuration:

Dell Inspiron 1520
15.4" with 1440x900 glossy screen
Core 2 Duo T7250 @ 200x10, 2.0Ghz, 2MB Cache
2x1GB DDR2-667 @ 5-5-5-13 (actually DDR2-800 but the system uses 200fsb and a 3:5 divider to get 333mhz)
GeForce 8600M GT 256MB

Windows XP Professional SP2
Forceware 169.09 (modded by laptopvideo2go)
DirectX 9.0c w/November 2007 Redistributable

3DMark2001

GeForce 8600M GT 256MB @ Default 475/950/800



GeForce 8600M GT 256MB @ Overclocked 600/1200/1000



3DMark06

1280x854

GeForce 8600M GT 256MB @ Default 475/950/800



GeForce 8600M GT 256MB @ Overclocked 600/1200/1000



This card had a lot of room for overclocking. I only changed the Performance 3D clocks to not affect the battery life in low-power modes. I was able to raise the core from 475 to 600, and the shaders then followed from 950 to 1200 since they are run at 2x the core clock. The memory allowed me to take it from 800 to 1000 (DDR).

An interesting thing I noticed when overclocking the card was that the bump from 400 to 500 on the memory produced a 500 point gain in 3DMark06, but then taking the core and shader from 475/950 to 600/1200 produced only an additional 300 points. I suspect this is due to laptop video cards being limited to a 128-bit memory bus. Since the card is essentially crippled for thermal reasons, the card just cannot get enough memory bandwidth and it will take anything you can give it and show great gains. I also saw very little temperature increase after overclocking, despite how high I was able to take it. We are talking about an 8800GT series core clock but the GPU only gained 1-2c over stock.

Crysis

GeForce 8600M GT 256MB @ Overclocked 600/1200/1000

CPU Benchmark - 1440x900 Low Detail - 42fps



CPU Benchmark - 1440x900 Medium Detail - 17fps



GPU Benchmark - 1440x900 Low Detail - 48fps



GPU Benchmark - 1440x900 Medium Detail - 20fps



Surprisingly, Crysis is very playable on low detail settings, with gameplay in the 35-45fps range and even though you miss out on some of the details the image you see is still remarkable for a single GPU 15.4" laptop. Crysis was not able to get the CPU over 57c and the GPU over 60c even overclocked.

Lightsmark 2007 v1.3

GeForce 8600M GT 256MB @ Default 475/950/800



GeForce 8600M GT 256MB @ Overclocked 600/1200/1000



1280x1024 wasn't selectable for me in 1.3...making it hard to compare to other results.

HD Tune 2.54

Western Digital Scorpio WD2500BEVS 250GB



2x125GB platters
8MB Cache
5400RPM
2.5"

http://www.storagereview.com/WD2500BEVS.sr

http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/Western_Digital_Scorpio_WD2500BEVS_25inch_SATA_HDD/

Definetely not bad for a notebook hard drive. It's fast because of its size (platter density) despite being only 5400 RPM. Access time could definetely use some help though.

It is equipped with a Dell Wireless-N Mini-card. I don't have any formal benchmarks but what I can say is that it matches all of my desktop's corded 100Mbps ethernet performance, without the wire attached. Speakeasy.net's Chicago server showed 12,000Kbps download speeds which is phenomenal and saturates the whole "10mbit" connection that I have here. It can pull in over 1 megabyte per second (1,000KB/s) from fast servers which is great and leaves me with little reason to ever use the ethernet cable again. Judging by the numbers I would guess that there is even more power that isn't being tapped, but I have the fastest internet connection available in my area so I may not know the real potential of it.

The highest temperature I saw on the CPU was 57c which seems to be where the system says "that's enough" and brings it down with the fans. The fan is incredibly quiet - you will likely never hear it during normal operation and even at full blast its still the quietest laptop i've ever heard. It exhausts air out the side very efficiently and has no trouble keeping things cool even with the overclocked 8600M GT in there. The GPU reached as high as 68c during my Titan Quest test. I have no framerates for that but it seems to be a great test for artifacts and GPU stability. It gets the GPU hotter than any other benchmark or game I have tried, even Crysis which only hit 60c after an hour. The hard drive runs very cool, in the 35-42c range during use. This is also cooler than our previous Dell Inspiron 1505 with a 60GB Samsung drive which ran between 50-55c.

I opted for the 85Whr Lithium Ion Battery which gets you between 4-5 hours of light internet work and 2.5-3.5 hours of intensive (but non-gaming) work which is exceptional. If you were working on say office files, with the wireless card disabled and a medium brightness, you could manage close to 6 hours. If you were to game on the battery you would expect considerably less battery time, and although I did try it out, Powermizer limited my 3D performance enough to not want to even bother.

Overall I am very impressed with this system. Everything about it is high quality and it packs a lot of punch for little money, especially considering the $500 off $1499 coupon I used making this the best $999 laptop buy around. Despite the hardware inside the whole thing has very efficient cooling and does not get nearly as hot as other laptops I have used in the past.

One of the only things that bothers me about it is the fact that DDR2-800 isn't supported yet, although it is an 800fsb CPU. If I could change the divider to use a 1:2 ratio I could get the perfect 400fsb on the memory, but I doubt the difference would be huge. By default a 3:5 divider is used for 333mhz, or DDR2-667. I removed the 2x512MB modules and replaced them with my own OCZ 2x1GB because it was much cheaper. Dell wanted $125 to go from 1GB to 2GB which is more than 2x markup.

So that concludes my initial testing. Thanks for reading my little review. If there are any other benchmarks you guys want to see, I can take requests

 

Wow, for a guy with only 3 posts, I nominate you for most helpful per post. Good job.

 

Bravo, you know you're stuff man.

Mind me asking what applications you use for monitoring and overclocking? Currently I'm a Riva tuner guy.

Outstanding results and work, you've shown a lot of potential buyers why this notebook and why Dell machines are the way to go.

 

good job man

 

could u test hitman blood money if u have it

 

can i just confirm that you are useing windows xp with a areo skin? cheers

when i get my laptop next week im gonna be doing more or less the same thing, wonder if the extra 200mhz and the fact im running Vista with a smaller HDD make a difference to the results...

i will be doing a benchmark with out of the box vista, striped down vista, and tweaked for my everyday use.

Good testing +rep

 

Sorry don't have that one.

It is Windows XP with the Vista Transformation Pack.

With the T7500 you will get slightly higher scores but nothing huge. The smaller HDD will be slower due to a smaller platter size. I chose the 250GB drive not only for its density but for its speed.

 

hmm, dont really understand alot about HDDs, but ill mainly be useing a external one for all my photos music and movies.

i see what you meen about slower

[source] - http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3846&review=Dell+Inspiron+1520

 

Very comprehensive! Although most people looking for a 15" Dell are now looking at the XPS 1530, it's still good to see this as it will help people who are a bit confused on what to buy.

BTW, is Vista Transformation Pack safe? And completely free? Where'd you get it? Thanks

 

Please forgive my complete ignorance here. But. What is overclocking? How would I do it? What purpose does it serve?

My ignorance is attributed to my lowbie lame laptop I currently have (got it from college). Never looked into any of this stuff before.

 

GOOGLE is your best friend! Just type in "OC" or "overclock video card"....

 

http://youtube.com/watch?v=D-so7c1bWtc - here's a video of VTP and WindowsBlinds in action.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=bq86zuyMHfk - more VTP

^both videos not mine, but if you're like me, its cool to see how people have customized their desktops.

And to be a bit *more* helpful, you can get VTP here: http://www.windowsxlive.net/?page_id=15

So far as I can see, its totally free.

...

Hehe. Smartass And yeah, I know. I plan to look it up later, on google and wikipedia. Just figured I'd get some basic info from here first. ^.^

 

overclocking is making your gpu work faster that it is currently is. it can be done with multiply tools but rivatuner is in my opinion the best. the helps increase frame rates and can be a major help when a game is a the borderline of playable and unplayable

 

Hey, yuna - gave you some + rep for calling me a smartass!

Return the favor for being called a smartass

 

Uh...sure? +Rep = good thing, yush? (Damn, I feel like such a n00b)

and thanks for the info, sly!

 

"GeForce 8600M GT 256MB @ Default 475/950/800"


Isnt the standart clock of the Core 475 and the memory 400 :S ?!

how come you say its 475/950/800 ? i dont get it sorry.


*edit* oh and what tool do you use for overclocking ?

 

It goes like this:
core speed / stream processors speed / RAM speed.

So the core speed is 475Mhz, the stream processors run at 950Mhz, and the RAM runs at 400Mhz (since DDR is double data rate, its effective speed is 800Mhz).

 

Interesting. With your 1440x900 display, what does 3dmark's resolution default to? I know when I open it up, it defaults to 1280x1024, which is beyond what you can display (I have 1680x1050).

I OC'd my 8600GT to the same numbers and got the following results with 1280x1024 and all 3dmark default settings:
05: 7546
06: 3930

I'll have to try 1440x900 to see what kind of "boost" I get.

 

most people use rivatuner as it is very user friendly and yuna.fire no problem

 

I used ATI Tool to find my max settings. Funny thing is it didn't throttle down when my card started artifacting.

 

Nice benchmarkings. XP seems to have helped a bit with the 3dmark06 scores - you're about a hundred above what I got with Vista and 169.02 and T7500. Your CPU temp (57) seems very low as well - mine maxes out at 80 Celsius with both cores at 100%. Are you sure you were maxing out both cores when measuring that? wPrime is a good test for the CPU temp - it will max out when running wPrime.

Also curious as to your 3dmark resolution - if it was 1440x900, those are really good scores.

I use nTune, from nVIDIA. Works well.

 

I thought you cvant overclock the stream processor on windows xp? or am i mistaken ?

 

It was 1280x854.

I did not specifically try to max out the CPU with Orthos or OCCT (my favorites). I could do that, but I thought "real-world" results would be more relevant so I went with the highest it got during gaming.

The shaders are run at 2x the core speed. So by default, if you overclock the core the shaders will follow. Thus a 125mhz core overclock will get you 250mhz on the shaders.

I use Rivatuner. Great program

 

I see that everyone is overclocking their memory quite a bit, like up past 500... the only problem is that I can't get mine past 445 without artifacts? is that jsut the luck of the draw with my card?

 

Yikes i cant dream of O'Cing a laptop, cant cool it or swap out the video card like a Desktop PC!!

Awesome review I will forward to my buddy who just got his 1520!

 

Wow. That's a nice little article there. Lots of information.

Good job.

 

Mine did 500, maybe I am lucky but that gives 1000Mhz DDR which is a nice even number. It's odd because all of my clocks ended up that way, more than 600 on the core and I had problems, and more than 500 on the memory and I had problems so I ended up at 600/1200/500 (or 1000, however you want to say it).