XPS M1330 Review

[sesshomaru]

The XPS M1330 is a 13.3” thin and light offering from dell, configurable with top of the line specs for a notebook this size. It's based on Intel's Santa Rosa platform. I wouldn't call it an ultraportable, due to the travel weight, which come to around 2.5 Kg,
with the adapter and sleeve.




The unit I ordered has the following specifications.
Intel Core 2 Duo, T7300 Processor.
● Intel 965PM mobile chipset.
● Nvidia Geforce 8400M GS(128 MB GDDR3 dedicated, upto 1 GB shared) VGA.
● 2048 MB DDR2-667 Mhz System RAM.
● LED backlit 13.3” WXGA display(glossy) w/ VGA webcam.
● 8x Super Multi optical drive.
● WM3945ABG WLAN
● Internal Bluetooth.
● Fingerprint Reader
● Express Card slot
● 8 in 1 Media card reader
● 9 Cell 85WHr Battery
160 GB, 5400 RPM HDD(Seagate)

The Price, as configured came to around Indian Rs. 80,000.( US$ 2000 ).


Reasons to buy.

I had sold my Asus F3Jp a while back, since I got a very good deal for it, and was on the lookout for a new notebook. I was initially looking at the Asus F3Sv-B1, and had even ordered it, but due to a combination of reasons, I never received the
notebook. At around this time, the XPS M1330 was launched, and the looks and the LED display enamoured me to quite an extent.
I also considered the Asus F8Sv, and the V1S, but since they have not yet been released to retail, as of writing this review, I went with the XPS M1330.

Build And Design

The XPS series started off as a spin off to the low end inspirons, but in time has evolved to become the premier consumer line offering from Dell.
The 1330 is constructed out of magnesium alloy and aluminium, for the chassis, and the lid is either magnesium alloy or plastic. It feels more plasticky. The palmrests are constructed of brushed aluminium, and feel pretty strong. I can lift the notebook by a corner, and there's absolutely nothing that makes me concerned for its safety. There are no creaking sounds, or flex, under such a stress. Mine has the 9 cell battery, so the weight is not inconsiderable. Nevertheless, it holds up pretty well. One of the many gripes I have with the build quality is the generous amount bof plastic. The left and right sides of the keyboard are plastic, as are the the bits to the sides of the media panel. Also, the bit on the left of the XPS logo on the panel is rather loose. More on that later.
There is a fair bit of flex on the screen, and I twist it by quite some extent by holding the top left and right corners. There is no rippling, though, and the the lid seems durable.
The hinge is strong and seems sturdy. How much that is true can only be seen after a year or so.

Overall, the build quality is satisfactory, but I do have some issues, to which I'll come back later.


The design of the notebook is certainly good. It has turned heads wherever I've taken it out, and nearly everyone has commented on how sleek it looks. Some people dislike the 9 cell battery ruining the lines of the design, but to me it is a non-issue. The battery is never visible to me when I'm using it, and besides, the longer battery life, and the beautiful typing angle more than compensate for it.

The silver of the aluminium and the black of the lids and panel complement each other very well. My mother told me the red looks better, but I guess it comes down to personal choice. The black looks much more understated, and businesslike.

Screen

The screen is beautiful. I have the LED backlit display, and it's stunning, as far as colour reproduction is concerned, even without calibration. The horizontal viewing angles are good, and at full brightness, there's little washing out of colours +- 50 degrees. The vertical angles are about +40 to -30, which is rather poor, before colours begin to wash out.

There's absolutely no light leakage, which is to be expected since the LCD is illuminated by 32 LEDs behind the panel, rather than the standard ccfl lamps above and below.

However, there is a funny feeling, when using the display. At full brightness, I have an urge to turn the brightness up a notch or two. I can't explain it, since it is brighter than my previous laptop anyway.

The minimum brightness setting is comfortable to use, when in the dark. In the daylight, at full brightness, the screen is barely visible. It still is usable, though, in the shade.

Speakers

There are two speakers, located above the keyboard. They are nothing to write home about. As with all notebook speakers, they are tinny, weak, and useless, other than for listening to warning beeps. There is some distortion at high volumes, as well.

The sound from the audio jacks is good. There's no detectable static, at low volumes. To check for static, I plugged in my external speakers(Altec Lansing MX5021), turned on the amp to full, and even then, there was barely any hiss. To listen to the hiss, i had to hold the speakers next to my ear. The audio jacks support 5.1 audio.(Did not test it, though)

Performance
(All benchmarks were done on a clean install of Vista, no O/C unless mentioned)

PCMark05

At stock settings

With Video card oced to 450/620


Windows Experience Index

At stock settings

Video Card OCed

Processor
CPU-Z


Super Pi- 58 Seconds, for 2 million decimal places

W-Prime


HD-Tune


3DMark06

At stock

OCed


Heat and Noise

The XPS M1330 has one fan on the bottom left corner. There are two vents- One on the underside of the chassis, for sucking the air in and one on the rear, for throwing hot air out. The fan is barely audible even when running full tilt. In fact it isn't the fan that's audible at all- It's the hot air being expelled, that Chaz so very well describes as a “rush of air”.
The cooling is efficient, in so much that I haven't seen the CPU temperature go over 65° C, even while playing games. However, some parts of the laptop do get warm to considerably hot, when under load . The hottest area I've felt is the heatsink vent, followed by the front left of the underside of the chassis, which houses the HDD. The palmrests also are warm to the touch after using it for a while. The touchpad is warm but never uncomfortably so.

To be fair, the heat is not an issue when it's on battery and the profile is set on Low performance.(I underclocked the GPU to 85/80, and limited the CPU to 800 Mhz, using NHC). It's responsive enough for normal tasks at those settings, and runs cool too. At those settings, I've rarely seen the fan come on.

Keyboard

The keyboard, while certainly not a thinkpad contender, is not too bad either. It is a full size keyboard, compared to any 15.4”. While there's no number pad, Dell's included a virtual Number pad which can be activated either by pressing the key in conjuction with the Fn key, or it can be configured to act as the Num Pad when the Num Lock is on. It does come in handy in some situations, although I've gotten out of the habit of using a number pad.
There is some flex under normal typing pressure. The keys to the right of “G” do show quite a bit of flex, although it cannot be felt. Only if I am looking at the keyboard as I type, am I able to see it.

The keys are reasonably quiet and pretty responsive. They don't need to be depressed fully to register a keypress, which I like.

The bad thing about the keyboard is that the keys themselves feel flimsy, and it often seems that they would be easy to pop off. However, it's not a very big issue.

Touchpad

The touchpad is a standard touchpad with horizontal and vertical scrolling capabilities. It is rather small, and with the sensitivity set to full, and pointer speed set to maximum(and even Enhanced pointer Precision off), it takes more than one sweep to traverse the desktop. Coming from a touchpad twice the size of this, it'll take me some time getting used to.

The touchpad buttons are good, in my opinion. Most people wouldn't like them, since they are soft and offer next to no feedback. There's no “click” sound, even on depressing them fully. I personally like these soft buttons, which are exceptionally quiet.

Touch sensitive media panel

There's a touch sensitive strip above the keyboard, which provides media controlling functionality and the slot loading drive eject button. It does what it purports to do, but so far i haven't been able to get the media buttons to work with anything other than Windows Media Player, which I never use.


Input and output ports

Left

1.Power port
2.VGA out
3.10/100 ethernet
4.USB 2.0 x1
5.HDMI out
6.IEEE -1394(Firewire)

Right

1.Kensington Lock Slot
2.Slot Loading DVD drive
3.Express Card 54/34 slot
4.Wireless/ Bluetooth On/Off switch
5.WiFi Catcher
Front

1.Audio Outputs
2.Status LEDs
3.Memory Card reader
Rear


Just the battery and vent.

Bottom

Wireless
My unit cam with a WM3945ABG card, which was the only option at the time of ordering.
I had a 2Mbps connection available, so the results are of no consequence. Nevertheless, both signal strength and reception were clear.

The bluetooth adapter that came installed was the Dell Internal bluetooth adapter 355. There was no problems in detecting my phones, headsets and setting up file transfers.

Battery

I ordered a 9 cell 85 WHr battery. It lasted about 5 hours and 45 minutes under tasks like word processing, surfing, etc. The screen was set at minimum brightness about half the time. The processor was underclocked to 800 MHz using NHC. The maximum brightness I used during this period was 5/7. (There are 8 steps to the brightness setting, I have assumed numbering from 0-7).
While watching a dvd at brightness 7/7, the battery game me a 5% remaining warning at 3 hours and 21 minutes.
While watching a h264 compressed movie at full brightness, the battery ran out(0%) at 3: 57
All these tests were conducted with 62 processes running in the background.

I must add here, that whenever i was watching a movie, i used the windows power profile “power saver”, and set the brightness manually.

The battery takes about 4 hours to charge fully, when not using the laptop.
Operating system and software

The laptop came preloaded with Windows Vista Home premium. Surprisingly, there was absolutely no bloatware installed. Not even Norton.
I did a clean install anyway, since I didn't like the way the Hard disk was partitioned.

Games
FEAR.
Fear is a pretty taxing game to run on any weak graphics card. The screenshots speak for themselves.


With all eye candy turned on, AA/AF set to maximum the game is virtually unplayable at 1024x768. The frame rate was mostly between 18-22.


With settings at maximum, 1024x768 resolution, but AA, AF turned off, the game is pretty much playable.


NFS Most Wanted


At highest settings, and AA, AF cranked up, the game's a slideshow.




With AA, AF turned off, it's somewhat playable

Webcam
The webcam is decent, better than some other laptop webcams I've seen. it captures video at 16 FPS.
Here's a picture I took using the webcam at my college, on a somewhat cloudy day.


Customer care.

XPS technical support is said to be very good, and I've had reason to test it. My optical drive is faulty. It has a jagged metal edge visible which is scratching the upper surface of any disk which I put into it. It has not been replaced yet. The reason being given is that since it is a new model, the replacement parts aren't available yet.

Accessories

The notebook came with a sleeve, and a pair of Creative ep630 in ear headphones. The sleeve is of good quality, though the same cannot be said about the headphones. They have lots of static, sound muddy, and are bad in general. Also included was an infra-red remote, which fits into the express card slot.








Final Thoughts

The XPS is a good notebook, for those who are looking for a small, powerful, and good looking machine. It has lots of style, is not a pain to carry around, and is easy to handle.
However, those expecting to game on it should keep their expectations low-very low. It barely passes muster in dx9 games, and i didn't even bother runnning a dx10 title on it. The 8400GS is almost the lowest end dedicated graphics card, and it shows.
For general computing applications, and even CAD/CAM applications, though, it is extremely satisfactory. I loaded complex 3D Autocad models, and there was no lag. The rendering was also fast enough for my needs.

Pros and Cons

Pros-
1.Good screen.
2.Good Battery Life
3.Good Looks, very sleek.
4.Strongly built for a consumer line notebook.
5.Small Power brick

Cons
1.Lack of USB ports(only 2)
2.Some pieces of plastic are loose, and/or don't line up.
3.Keyboard Flex
4.Some Gap between the LCD and bezel
5.Only 10/100 Ethernet
6.Low Res Screen. I am used to higher resolutions, so it seems kind of large. However, 13” LCDs only come in WXGA
7.Audio Jacks in the front.
8.Screen opens only upto 135º
9.Small Touchpad

Some more pics

[Zetto]

can't you resize the pics? They make the text too wide, making to necessary to scroll horizontally. Makes it a pain to read.

[sesshomaru]

Oh, sorry, I was using a 24" screen, and didn't notice....

[vhawkx]

Yeah, I had a hard time reading it too, so if sesshomaru can resize the pictures, that would help everyone. Not all of us have a screen with like 1920x1200 resolution! But other than that, good review! I wish the 8600m GT would fit into this machine as well as the Inspiron 1420...

[sesshomaru]

Um, since resizing and uploading the pics would take too long, may I reformat the page, so that the text fits onn the screen , and the pics reamain the same size?

[Zetto]

Originally Posted by sesshomaru

Um, since resizing and uploading the pics would take too long, may I reformat the page, so that the text fits onn the screen , and the pics reamain the same size?

Bad idea imho, since the pics will still affect it. Why don't u link'em with thumbnails, that'd be the quickest way me thinks.

[sesshomaru]

Reformatting done.. The text's wrapping around fine, on my screen.

[Zetto]

Uhm, adding a bunch of carriage returns whenever you see fit ignores custom settings on a bunch of other screens. But whatever, it's your thread, if you can't make an extra effort to make readable, it's your choice.

[sesshomaru]

Well, I shall resize the pics, whenever I have some time free to upload all those again.. You are right though, that's exactly what I did.

[Zetto]

Well, you just make it harder on urself. If you just added all the pics as thumbnails with links to full sized version, everything would've been fine. Now you not only need to resize/reupload pics, you also need to restore your text structure 'cause right now it looks very odd on my screen and, I bet, on many other screens.