Dell Latitude X1 review

[ivar]

So, I found finally that X1 is made of magnesium alloy indeed. Great!
http://www.dell.com/downloads/emea/p...AT_X1_emea.pdf
"durability with magnesium alloy display cover and base".

[Coolin]

Weird, it feels like plastic to me.

[ivar]

Here there is a new review of X1:
http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/artic...,122039,00.asp

I find this one important to know:
"The X1 is fully upgradable, even if the process is not documented in the users' manual (a hard-to-search Acrobat document without hyperlinks). One memory slot and the unit's 4200-rpm hard drive--60GB in our test machine--are within easy reach under the keyboard. Just remove seven small screws on the bottom of the laptop, pop a couple of keyboard latches and extract a few more screws beneath to free the hard drive and a metal plate over the DIMM slot."

[ivar]

"Samsung currently makes Dell’s high-end ultralight 12.1-inch Latitude X1 model, but the US vendor has awarded Quanta Computer the contracts for the Latitude X1’s follow-up models"
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20050810A1001.html


btw: Dell™ Latitude™ X1 Service Manual
http://support.dell.com/support/edoc...n/sm/index.htm

[fenara]

Great link to the service manual, thanks.

I bought an X1 on Dell Outlet in May, everything's great with it, I love it .

I use RMClock for voltage and clock multiplier manipulation, and setFSB (Acer 1694 download) for fsb (obviously), and I8kFanGUI to monitor temps (there are no fans of course).

I run:
0.7v @ 600 Mhz (6x100, the minimum voltage available in RMClock) - more than adequate for Word, browsing, DVD watching etc, normal temp = 49C

0.892v @ 1100 Mhz (any combination of clock and fsb)

0.908v @ 1342Mhz. Super Pi 2million places = 2M 14s - pretty impressive scaling of the CPU with fsb I reckon.

Max stable fsb (any multiplier) = 122fsb (suggests to me that memory or chipset is bottleneck) for a max speed of 11x122 = 1.342Ghz, but on full load e.g. UT2k4, temp is as high as 78C.

BTW, the screen backing feels metallic and sturdy, and I get no rippling if I try to twist the screen. Lighting is stronger at the bottom and slight light bleed is noticable with a black background, but it's a minor thing.

Someone mentioned the lack of integrated drive - it only adds 400g, plus I like the fact I don't have to carry as I don't need it most of the time.

[ivar]

fenara,

thanks for the post. Finally I got answers to the questions I have been asking on several forums!

So, it can be overclocked to 1.3MHz. Not bad, though I hoped it can reach 1.5.
Good news that setFSB works on X1!

There are 5 speedsteps between 600MHz and 1.1GHz, as expected, right?

Did you try to work on the laptop for like 6-8 hours in office applications and browsing. Does it overheat?

I still worry about the display quality. What is your impression, in particular about the brightness, the contrast, and the vertical viewing angles?

Do you know if it is posssible to upgrade 1.1GHz chip to 1.3GHz ULV (comming soon) in this model?

The undervolting capabilty of ULV chip doesn't look impressive at all. For comparison, I am able to undervolt my
2GHz PM755 chip to 0.780V at 1.1GHz! Do you know if ULV chips can be just replaced with PM, so that the latter
would work in underclocked and undervolted regime even more effectively than ULVs (sounds crazy but this is what your undervolting result suggests), are there pin compatibility issues?

-----------------------

Added: Let me just add a link to a very nice review of X1 published yesterday:
http://homeoffice.consumerelectronic...e.jsp?id=34176
"Dell Latitude X1 is Just Right"

[fenara]

I think that the CPU could go much further - 122fsb is the max even at the lowest multiplier, so I think it's the memory holding it back - all the memory's rated at 400Mhz, 22% extra isn't too bad!

There are 5 multipliers between 600 and 1100Mhz, but I've noticed that when running on battery, the fsb is also dynamically throttled. In RMClock you can set whether to throttle the fsb, and if so by how much, but I find it ruins performance for no temperature benefit.

To be honest, I only overclock it playing games - UT2K4 @1100Mhz = c.23fps, but it @1340Mhz it's c.28+fps @1280x768 with all details on low, which makes it playable. HL2 is too jerky but older FPS games e.g. Jedi Knight2 run well @1024.

I've only had an overheat after 2+hrs of UT2k4 @ 11x122fsb - can't argue! The base gets REALLY hot on full speed though, as there are no fans in this thing and the base is one big heatsink - although the keyboard and palmrest seem well shielded and don't transmit the heat themselves, you can feel the heat from all around the sides of the case! Definitely do NOT use it on the lap on full throttle - it's fine on battery though.

I've no idea about the CPU technical questions, but if you install more powerful CPU's you'd need to be really careful of heat issues. I must say it'd be tempting though...

The screen is good, but not exceptional - it's got a standard matt finish (no gloss, I'd actually prefer gloss e.g. Samsung Q30), it's very sharp, no dead pixels, no ripples when twisting or touching the screen surround & back, brightness and contrast seem even, although as with any TFT I've seen, if you really concentrate you can see it's marginally brighter in the very centre. The default brightness and contrast seem well set to me, but adjustment is easy within the Intel graphics properties.

Horizontal and vertical viewing angles are excellent for text, but contrast reduces very quickly away from the ideal angle, paticularly vertically - DVD's are therefore terrible when viewed off-centre vertically, but look fine if 2 people are watching together e.g. in adjacent plane or train seats (this I know from experience) - you won't notice much lack of contrast with internet & office work, although I do subconsciously adjust it to the optimum vertical angle. DVD's also benefit from a slight contrast boost, but the contrast is fine on default otherwise. The only other (minor) gripe is slight light bleed on the bottom edge which is noticable on a black background (e.g. watching DVD's), but you won't see it in normal use.

BTW, other impressions / info -
- very light all round - main unit = 1005g, mains adapter = 160g, std battery = 165g, extended = 315g, external DVD = 410g - these are hot off the scales
- very flexible setup with external dvd & extra battery
- subjectively feels very fast, even @600Mhz - in general it feels noticably much faster than a Sony S2XP that I had for a couple of months (1.8Ghz Dothan, 512MB RAM) - it had a shockingly slow HD, the HD in the X1 is noticably faster e.g. loading UT2k4 levels - and the S2 had the worst bloatware I've ever seen (>360MB RAM of total crap on first boot). Was nice having Radeon 9700 though!
- X1 has hardly any bloatware - only Dell Quickset, WiFI config app (these 2 are useful), and Norton Internet Security trial were running on first boot.
- running a long dvd through the external drive non-stop lasted just over 1hr on the small battery, just over 2hrs on the extended one.
- with light use (internet browsing, Excel, Word) with WiFi on, after c.15-20mins the small (standard) battery went down by 10%, so you could expect 2.5 hrs, and probably 5.5+hrs use from the extended battery - I had as many power-saving features as poss on though.
- you can hot-swap batteries in hibernate mode - this is great - not tried hot-swapping in other modes
- really excellent keyboard - firm and positive action, with good travel - I've tried a Dell D610 and the keyboard's shocking, like a sponge, the X1 is nothing like that!
- it's a bit of a pain losing a USB port when the DVD is plugged in as there are only 2 on the machine, I had to buy a USB hub
- I personally find the mouse glide pad sketchy and too small, I have it on maximum sensitivity and maximum pointer speed

This has turned into a bit of an X1 brain dump, apologies for rambling...

[Necrosis]

Fenara, thanks for all the information! That was very useful and answered a lot of questions that I had after reading all the reviews.

I'm surprised you found the speed comparable to a 1.8ghz dothan, but then again, I think CPUs are overpowered these days. I'm sure the lack of bloatware was also helpful. The bottleneck on laptops are the slow hard drives! When I played around with some compaq systems at Best Buy, systems with a Turion and Sempron felt the same, speed wise, despite the class and price difference. Apps were a bit slow to load, but I think that's because of the slow 4200 rpm hard drive.

Did you find improved battery life after undervolting? Or temperatures? I'm mainly worried about the short battery life of the standard battery and the temperatures due to the fanless design.

Also, did you try watching movies (DVD or divx) off the hard drive? I assume performance would be fine (divx/xvid). I'm wondering because the external optical drive means copying a DVD or divx movies to the hard drive and watching them from there would be more convenient (especially when traveling). I believe battery life would also improve (1hr is dismal), since the optical drive needs so much power. Do you know how long the standard battery can last playing a Divx?

And ivar, I'm pretty sure it's impossible to upgrade the CPU on the X1. According to what I read on intel's website, the ULV processors come in the FCBGA (flip chip ball grid array) package instead of FCPGA (flip chip pin grid array). FCPGA chips can be pulled out and replaced (normal dothans), but I believe the ball grid ones are surface mount chips designed for ultraportables (surface mounting saves space compared to having a socket). So, my guess is that the processor is soldered onto the motherboard and therefore cannot be upgraded (which is a shame). Please correct me if anyone knows otherwise.

[fenara]

Necrosis, I agree, most "normal" tasks just need much CPU power, so a slow HD can often be the culprit for what one perceives as slow performance, but that means I'm even happier the X1 feels doesn't feel slow, given the HD is the lowest nominal speed available (4200rpm).

Binning bloatware & streamlining XP setup makes a big difference, but the S2XP still felt slow to me even after I disabled as many processes & services as poss, uninstalled all the crap, and disabled virtual memory. There was still a noticable pause just pressing Start and navigating the menu, and as I say, UT2K4 took ages to load levels - I'd always find myself entering new levels well after everyone else, at least a minute or 2 late - I'm always there at the start of hostilities with the X1.

In my X1 I have 1.25GB RAM and virtual memory disabled, so this helps it feel responsive - but frankly, I think 1.25GB RAM is overkill for this laptop and I'd say 768MB would be plenty - I got lucky with this one with the full spec appearing on Dell Outlet at the right mo at a great price.

The X1 is also running on a newer and faster chipset, so I suppose there are several factors adding up in its favour for performance.

I went looking for voltage & clock manipulators as soon as I got it, so I've never run on battery with default voltage and clocks, so can't compare to standard battery life. I travel a lot (I appreciate the low weight & separate components) but mostly use it plugged in so I can't comment much further than in my previous post.

I'm sure that watching DVD's from the HD should always be better than using an external drive. I've not yet copied DVD's to the HD or converted to DivX, that's my next step - in fact, can you recommend a good (and ideally free) DVD to DivX converter? I agree that battery life will improve running from HD as you say. Given 1hr using external drive and 2.5+hrs on "light use" browsing with WiFi on, I'd guess at c.1.5 hrs of film playback running from the HD.

FYI, 3DMark 2001SE @ 1340Mhz = 3200 - but in use it feels much faster than this suggests - I've found it copes fine with any games pre-2003 and a few post-2003 too, running @ 1280 or 1024x768. HL2 and MoH:Pacific Assault are too choppy to be enjoyable though, even on minimum detail and after tweaking.

[ivar]

Interesting enough, my earlier concerns about the display brightness and contrast (based on the data from a German review) are refuted by another recent German review:
http://www.vnunet.de/tests/portables...050812031.aspx

According to this review, the display brightness is 219 cd/sqm (vs. 170 cd/sqm in the previous review) and the contrast and the viewing angles are evaluated as "very good". The noise level under the full load is 24 dB(A) i.e. hardly heard.