Dell Officially Announces Precision M4300 and Latitude D430

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Last week the Latitude D430 was leaked on a Dell Taiwan website, but today they have more officially announced this notebook along with a new workstation style laptop, the Dell Precision M4300.

Dell Precision M4300

The Dell Precision M4300 will replace the Precision M65 as the 15.4&quot; screen style mobile workstation for engineering and design professionals. The M4300 is powered by the latest Intel Santa Rosa platform and is available with up to a T7700 2.40GHz Core 2 Duo processor. The M4300 can be configured with a beefy 250GB SATA hard drive, or if you prefer a small and fast hard drive a 32GB SSD drive is available.

Most importantly the M4300 comes with a very capable Nvidia Quadro FX 360M OpenGL graphics card designed for 2D and 3D applications and graphically demanding animation, video editing and CAD design. The card offers 256MB of dedicated memory and can borrow up to 256MB from main memory, it's equivalent to the existing Nvidia 8400m graphics card.

The M4300 improves on the previous M65 with not only a better processor and graphics solution, but also adds in more screen options. You can get the M4300 with a WUXGA+ anti-glare display, WSXGA+ TrueLife (glossy) display, or WXGA anti-glare display.

Base configurations of the M4300 start at $1,399 with the Nvidia FX 360M and Core 2 Duo T7100 being standard starting options.

Dell Latitude D430

The ultraportable Dell Latitude D430 is now available from Dell.com as the upgrade to the previous 12.1&quot; screen Latitude D420. The Latitude D430 brings Core 2 Duo, 802.11n and 1GB of fixed RAM on board, an improvement over the Core Duo , 802.11g and 512MB fixed RAM in the previous Latitude D420. Other than that, not much new is offered with the Latitude D430 over the D420. HP will be releasing their ultraportable 2510p soon that features LED backlighting and a Santa Rosa ULV processor. In addition to this Lenovo already released the Intel Santa Rosa powered ThinkPad X61s ultraportable so it seems that Dell is a bit lagging with this offering compared to the competition.

 

FX 360M = GeForce Go 8400, FYI.

 

As is typical since the Precision M70, which has the Quadro FX Go1400 (~=Go6800) in a 15.4" screen. The M65 had a rather disappointing graphics card as well.

 

Cool, thanks for that insight, I'll update the original post with that.

 

I don't get it. Other than some minor improvements, what is the point of releasing the D430? One of the problems D420 couldn't compete against other 12.1 laptops such as the ThinkPad X60/X61 is the slow processor on the D420. D420 was only 1.2GHz while ThinkPad had options allowing for up to 2.0GHz. Moreover, I also heard Dell is NOT using the Santa Rosa platform for the D430. This is a really pointless upgrade.

 

I suppose the m4300 is not meant to be a primary workstation so they figured the 360M would be a balance between mobility, battery power and sufficient graphic power.

Having said that, I guess i would go for the 8510w instead.

 

I believe the NVS 1xxM series was the 8400s (the 140M in the T61 is the Quadro version of the 8400M GT). I think the 360M is based off the 8600M.

 

Hmm pricing on the new lattitude still not available on the canadian website.

 

What is WUXGA + ? Something over 1920x1200 (WUXGA) ?
Technically yes, there are new screen options but where has the WSXGA+ anti-glare option gone?
FX 360M - probably a 8400M-GT because nVidia's site specs the memory bus width as 64bit, so it can't be a 8600M, which all have a 128bit bus.

http://www.nvidia.com/page/quadrofx_go.html

 

I registered just to post this very same question - this is what I would like to know. I read about the D430 a few days ago on Small Laptops, and then they posted this yesterday:

http://www.small-laptops.com/fujitsu-lifebook-p8240/

First the D430 has very few improvements, then Fujitsu puts out an update to the P1610 that is even less than an upgrade than the D430, if it can be believed (and it's solid state drives, something that does not deserve a new name/release). Are these companies saying "we can make more money with a few alterations than if we put Santa Rosa in"? I don't know the intricacies behind their decision making, but these are not small companies that can afford to milk a lineup for as long as possible.

Slapping a few minor updates and giving it a new model number seems....bizarre, especially when Lenovo does go and put Santa Rosa in along with a nice selection of CPUs, and HP does the same.

I can kind of understand on the P1610, as I said on another forum, since space is so critical with an 8.9" display, but there's no excuse for the D430 not to go to Santa Rosa.

Makes me wonder about the Dell Tablet XT, which is supposed to be close to the D430. If it's just a D430 with a touchscreen, hello Lenovo or HP, you'll be getting my money instead of Dell.