Dell Inspiron 9300: First impressions

Well, I got my new Dell Insprion 9300 today. Here I'll give some of my first impressions of the machine.

The first word that comes to mind is "uninspring." To get some major gripes out of the way first:

1) Why is there no numeric keypad? There's plenty of room for one. Apparently Dell didn't want to leak into their beautiful "white bumpers" to fit more keyboard.

2) The touchpad is TINY! the one on my AVERATEC 3270 is nearly as big, and that computer is a 4.3 pounds, 1-inch-thin, 12.1" thin-and-light. (On the plus side, the scrolling does work with Firefox.)

3) The screen is AWEFUL. It has this "grainy" look to it - almost like the sparkling reported on the TrueLife screen, only worse. It looks like a dusty CRT - I know, my aunt's is always dusty when I have to use it, and it looks just like this. Also, the birghtness is uneven, the backlight leaks something aweful, and the viewing angle is hideous due the uneven brightness. The good news is that there isnt a single dead pixel. (4 LCDs in as many years, and no dead pixels. The pixel gods must love me.) The WXGA+ resoultion is great, perfect for this size screen, but lord is that graininess irritating.

4) The Centrino sticker is crooked, just like it is on every other laptop in existence. Maybe that's the "look," but it makes it "look" like these companies just have retarded assembly workers. (Very minor, but I was running out of things to complain about.)

5) The function, delete, etc. keys are in radically different places than they are on my Gateway. Not necessarily bad, just confusing.

6) The LEDs are lime green. Ugly, ugly, ugly - not to mention hard on the eyes in the dark.

7) MAJOR CONCERN - CPU-Z identifies the codename of my Pentium-M chip as "Dothan." It does, however, give the correct 533MHz FSB, so I'm going to wait and see if this is normal (help guys!) before pestering Dell about it.

8) The power cord is too short. It's easily two feet shorter than the one on my Gateway. This just seems silly for a DTR notebook that's so dependant on AC power.

Now for the good:

1) The GeForce Go6800 GPU is AWESOME! Even with only the system-default 256MB of Single-channel RAM, having done NO optimizations (not TuneXP, no Bootvis, not even a defrag), with the Language bar (accident), a FireFox window, the touchpad software, the Intel Wireless software, and AVG running in the background, and relatively conservative overclocking of 336/694 (the auto-overclocking in the drivers gave me a reccomendation of 351/712), I got a 3DMark05 score of 3925, a 315% improvement over my Gateway 7422GX, even with its somewhat dangerous (as in, above the ATiTool reccomended levels) level of overclocking, hacked 9800XT drivers, 1GB of RAM, heavy optimizations, no background software AT ALL, and 64-bit MA64 3400+ processor. And the searing temperature of my GPU after running these tests? A mere 48C. The fans were still blowing cool(ish) air! I cannot stress how much I love this graphics card. I played Unreal Tournament 2004 on this thing at the LCDs native resolution, with all graphics turned all the way up, on Torlan and map default # of bots, with consistently triple digit framerates (the problem was when it had to hang every 3 seconds to dump the 256MB of system RAM). DooM 3 on Ultra, here I come!

2) The Pentium-M processor is quite a beast. Everyday Windows tasks don't skip a beat, which is suprising given the RAM situation. The only issues arise when I try to do more than one or two of said everyday tasks at once.

3) The speakers are terrific. I had previously been quite impressed with my Gateway's solid, loud, and almost tin-free sound quality, but this Dell's speakers take the cake...there's actaual bass here! And even more volume than my Gateway. Most impressive.

4) The keyboard, aside from some funky key placement and the lack of a numeric keypad, is a pleasure to type on. The keys are nicely spaced, there's almost no flex, and travel is good. Commendable job.

Overall, I'm very pleased. Am I a bit upset with the screen? Yes. Dell could learn a thing or two about screen building (and sticker placement) from a long talk with Gateway or Fujitsu. But overall, the powerful guts of this beast more than make up for the cosmetic flaws. Would I still reccomend this machine? For now, to be sure - but only if your budget won't allow a Fujitsu or a Sager.

 

cool man, thanks for the first thoughts here. It's so hilarious that a small thing such as a sticker would get you so annoyed, but rightly so, you can't pick up the sticker and straighten it once it is on. Forever crooked it is. I'd love to hear a response you'd get from Dell asking for a return because the sticker slopes to the left 30-degrees

Good luck with everything though, hopefully the performance makes you forget about any of the screen issues, and the extra RAM will help you out even more.

 

Nice, enjoy your laptop man.

About the screen, can you tell me what the manufacturer is ? Go to regedit - hkey local machine - system - current control set - enum - display .

About the cpu, yes, that is correct, the cpu is dothan .

I read somewhere that the reason they don't put in a numeric keypad because then the keyboard would be off to one side and not center .

 

man, did you read what you wrote, you are fool of it, contradicting yourself in every aspect, every comlaint is killed by the praise on the same thing, are you ok?

 

Goga; did you read what he wrote?
Just because he lists good things and bad things about the same thing does not contradict what he said. The keyboard has good points and bad points, the LCD has good/bad. He is merely listing them. It is a well written review, and honest.

If I were to write a complete review of my 9300 it would be very similar to this one. Overall, I am extremely happy with my 9300 especially for the price I paid, that doesn’t mean it is perfect.

I just took those annoying stickers off. I couldn’t stand looking at the crooked things every day. They serve no purpose. I know what is inside my computer.

 

Haha, I doubt u'd have much luck with ultra, as I think the texture maps in that mode was built with 512mb of vid ram in mind... an utterly rediculous notion considering how ugly Doom 3 looks in general...

I am also curious to see who makes your lcd panel -- can you check that out?

cheers,

yass

 

Review: Man, it is so ugly, I hate it, but on the other hand it is so beautiful and I like it so much...

people, you are somethnig, hehehe.

 

Good review!
Its also nice to hear that someone else's Centrino sticker is as crooked as mine
Sorry to hear about your screen issue. Are you going to exchange? It sounds like its defective (with the brightness being uneven). I have the WUXGA screen..and despite others complaints about it...I like it. (I believe its a personal preference.)

yass - You are joking about Doom3 being ugly, right? Extremely dark...Yes. But ugly...Huh? The game is a marvel. Just as much as HalfLife2, Far Cry, and Chronicles of Riddick.
Although, you are right about playing on Ultra setting (its made for cards with 512mb)....the game still looks incredible at the high settings @1280x1024 on the 6800Go.

 

I bought that game about a week after it came out. After crawling around brownish-grey tunnels for what seemed like days, I gave up and shelved it. Highly disappointed. It's been collecting dust on my bookshelf ever since.
My desktop hardware at the time is an AMD64 with an o/ced Nvidia NU6800 with all 16 pipes unlocked. Pretty decent hardware even by today's standards.

From a technical perspective I know where all that calculations went, but visually, it's just plain ugly imho. Why they insist on the Quake-ish color scheme is beyond me, either that or the designers are color-blind. lol

Farcry or HL2 both look hella better. And in the case of HL2 -- drastically lower hardware requirements to boot!

cheers,

scheiss

 

I wont vouch for the fun factor of the game ...but I definitely would call the game faaaaaar from being ugly. (Well, the demons are ugly...but thats about it). The game made me drool just as much as the other 3 games I mentioned. Do you have a decent monitor?

 

I have the Dell FP2001.
Generally regarded as the best 21" LCD panel out there... hehe

(got it for $800 at the time, couldn't pass up the deal)

cheers,

yass

 

yea...my sticker is crooked 2..it's not that noticible 2 worry so much 4 me tho... and wit CPU-Z it says i have a dothan...but i found out that it is Sonoma..and i have the WXGA+ screen...and i think that it is the greatest..and i have no dead pixels either...the 6800Go graphics card is amazing as well...i agree wit almost everything u said

 

The Dell FP2001 is an awesome LCD....

...but no LCD handles blacks like a CRT...and in Doom3...the shadows (blacks) are the name of the game. Also, if you were not running the game at the native resolution of your monitor (which with a 6800NU...you "may" not have been capable of doing that at high quality)...then your image quality would suffer greatly. That may be why the pallette looked Quake-like...because I didnt see that on my 22" NEC/Mitsubishi CRT.

 

Oh, of course not at native res. lol I was running it at 1024x768 for maximum playability. The game simply isn't vivid enough for me. Compared to Farcry or HL2 it *really* isn't very vivid... The shadow stuff are all kinda cool, but the developer's fetish with the color "grey" and the color "brown" is sorta annoying...

Speaking of which... have you seen the latest unreal samples? hollly cow...

now THAT is what eye-candy is all about. Of course I'm sure my I9300 will probably grind itself to a halt trying to digest that game, but hey it should be one pretty slide show. lol

cheers,

yass

 

Oddly, I checked that registry key most thouroughly, as well as using any other piece of software I could find to try to discren the manufacturer of this LCD...nothing. Everything jsut says "Deafult_Monitor". Hmm...

As for exchanging it? I thought about it, but nah...you kind of get used to the glittery effect (it's also present on just about every HP screen I've ever seen, and to a lesser extent on my AVERATEC...I guess I just expected a 17" screen with such good hardware to be...good). The uneven brightness I expected, it's documented in the other I9300 rveiews on this site.

And it can play DooM3 on Ultra...albiet at 17 FPS. That's OK, "high" looks pretty darn good, too. (Although I agree with yass to an extent, FarCry, Painkiller, Half-Life 2, Chaos Theory - they all look a lot better. The character and object models in DooM3 just don't have the same realism they do in these other games. DooM3 is all about the shadows and lighting, and it excells at that...but not much else, I'm afraid.)

Interestingly, I got the largest performance gain out of Painkiller (it's about 10-30FPS faster than on my Gateway, and I have all of the settings turned up to max now), followed by DooM 3 and HL2. The least gain? UT2004...again.