Several years ago I bought a cool Dell XPS laptop with all the bells and whistles. It had the fastest processor, the best graphics card, flashy LED lights that you could customize, and a cool XPS backpack to carry the laptop in. It was excellent. I was going to use it for OpenGL development. However, since it was a work laptop, and since I work at a federal lab, the Security team imposed all kinds of restrictions. The worst restriction was that I could not have a debugger on the system, since I might attach it to a running kernel and receive “elevated privileges” . That effectively meant that I could not compile any code on the system, which really relegated the laptop to a 12 pound brick. The 10lb backpack was ditched quickly, and the brick laptop was stowed in my suitcase.
In the meantime, Dell let the XPS brand fade away, which is a shame really. The XPS laptop was great; it was the security policies that stunk. With no XPS laptop to choose from, I recently bought a 4.8 pound ASUS UL80 laptop.
Dell has announced today that it is reviving the XPS brand with the launch of three new models. Since the XPS brand means performance, these models come with all the bells and whistles, including an NVIDIA 400M GPU with 1GB of memory. NVIDIA has also bundled its new 3DTV Play software bundled with the laptops, which of course have an HDMI 1.4 output port. AnandTech gives you all the details.
To coincide with the return of the XPS brand, Dell is shipping three new laptops as of today. In a sense, these three laptops replace the old Studio XPS offerings with updated features and performance, and they all look very nice. The three new models all have the same basic features, with size being a major differentiator; you can choose between 14″, 15.6″, or 17.3″ (L401x, L501x, or L701x respectively), and in all cases you should get a high quality, good performance laptop.
Actually the spec does impressed me, but the design is a more towards a cheap inspiron look rather than the better looking studio series. I know xps means performance, but I hope dell work on the look as well, at least a good looker like the studio xps series.
Actually, you can get (in the L701x) 3GB of video RAM. That’s more than my Quadro 5000 has. Too bad the only one to offer a high resolution screen is the L501x, but even it can be had with 2GB.
If I can get over the 2 slot/8GB maximum capacity and the glossy screen, the 15 might be very attractive.