Final thoughts
Dell's positioning its Inspiron XPS Gen 2 laptop as a gamer's delight, and truth be told, it is just that. Dell's jumped ship over to NVIDIA (it often does - the same family of laptops often have concurrent ATI or NVIDIA options) for its flagship gaming laptop and the GeForce 6800 Go Ultra doesn't disappoint. There's just something inexplicably wonderful about running a good-looking game at 1920x1200 on a laptop with a decent 17-inch wide-aspect display. Running it at the speed that a desktop GeForce 6800 GT 256MB card would do, no less. What's as satisfying is just how quiet the Inspiron XPS Gen 2 is when running at maximum power, in terms of CPU and GPU load. It's barely louder than default speeds, and much, much quieter than DTR laptops that use Pentium 4 CPUs. Battery life is also good, ranging from 2-4 hours depending upon application, but I suspect most buyers will have it tied on to the mains.The chosen combination of Pentium M 770 and GeForce 6800 Go Ultra 256MB make for, without doubt, the fastest gaming laptop ever to grace HEXUS Labs, and I keep repeating this, ad nauseum, but it's just so damn quiet. The screen's pretty sharp, the keyboard's above average, and the chassis looks pretty cool. With the £2099 asking price and gamers in mind, I'd urge Dell to pre-configure a model with a 7,200RPM hard drive for faster loading and, perhaps, look into a better base warranty. Other than that, though, I'm struggling to find bad points about it without resorting to nitpicking.
In summary, Dell's Inspiron XPS Gen 2 laptop becomes our current #1 desktop replacement laptop. It's not cheap but it sure is helluva fast.
Buy one here
