Dell Inspiron 1720 Benchmarks and Observations

[MDK]

Hi all,
I recently joined this forum after some of my friends told me about how knowledgeable the members of this forum are. So hopefully I can add a little bit.
I received my Dell Inspiron 1720, two weeks ago and given how generally rare laptop benchmarks are I decided to run a batch of tests and post the results. This is by no means a professional review but here we go:


Specs

CPU: Intel T7100 (1.8GHz)
Bios: Shipped A02, flashed to A03
Chipset: Intel 965M
Memory: 2GB DDR2-667 @ 5,5,5,15 (Samsung)
Screen: 1920x1200 Max
Video: nVidia M8600GT 256MB
nVidia Driver: 7.15.11.6367 (Forceware 163.67) (X-Treme G)
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate, openSuse 10.2, openSuse 10.3
HDD: Fujitsu 120GB 5400RPM
HDD Controller Mode: AHCI (Default)
Acoustic Management Disabled (in Bios)

Benchmarks:
Usual suite of synthetic benchmarks here, if you want to see a specific one let me know and I’ll run it if I can get my hands on it.
Overall CPU Score
3DMark 05 5714 9315
3DMark 06 2965 1579
PCMark 05 4632

http://img89.imageshack.us/img89/5601/cpukb4.th.png (http://img89.imageshack.us/my.php?image=cpukb4.png) http://img139.imageshack.us/img139/8056/mbcs6.th.png (http://img139.imageshack.us/my.php?image=mbcs6.png) http://img89.imageshack.us/img89/8982/gpuzij9.th.png (http://img89.imageshack.us/my.php?image=gpuzij9.png) http://img135.imageshack.us/img135/6990/weiah1.th.jpg (http://img135.imageshack.us/my.php?image=weiah1.jpg) http://img152.imageshack.us/img152/6862/hdtunegq6.th.png (http://img152.imageshack.us/my.php?image=hdtunegq6.png)


Games:
You can forget about gaming at 1920x1200. The 8600GT simply doesn’t have the horsepower to deal with it. I gave world in conflict a try and after a decent amount of tweaking I got it to run at ~25fps at 1280x800 with most of the details turned to high or medium high, it looks pretty good and it’s playable.
more game benchmarks will be posted once I get through midterms :)

General Observations:
Windows: The unit shipped with 2 hidden partitions and a load of bloatware which was excepted. After formatting the HD and deleting the extra partitions the home button does not work anymore and its functionality is not assignable.
I went ahead and partitioned the drive into 2 partitions for Windows and Linux. Installation went smooth for both OS.
On another note while turning off Acoustic management in bios gives a noticeable performance boost it really does make the HD much louder.

“Creative Audigy HD Software Edition”:
I do audio recording as a hobby and I’ve been using discrete audio cards forever. This being the first time ever I’m going with onboard audio I went ahead and ordered this along with the laptop. My feelings about this are mixed. It adds ~5-10% additional CPU utilization when used and the EAX environment effects are not as good as the ones on discrete creative soundcards, but it’s nice having at least a basic 10 band graphic equalizer even if it’s in software.
Creative is going down the drain these days and rightly so. Why don’t they make a proper onboard solution is beyond me...

Linux:
For you Linux fans out there both openSuse 10.2 and 10.3 installed without a hitch. In 10.2 there is no audio from the speakers but the headphone jack works (Apparently bug in ALSA), but an upgrade to 10.3 fixed that. nVidia drivers installed without a problem and comparing that to my last year’s attempt with ATI drivers was a night and day difference.
I tried Compiz-Fusion and Beryl, both worked perfectly fine after a few tries. On one note, as much as I hate Vista, Linux takes significantly longer to boot. Though looking at the HD Tune graph above might explain the reason behind that as the Linux partition will end up at the last 40Gb of the drive.


HD Video tests to come
Cheers!

[cyclo]

I am curious to find out how Linux compares to Vista when it comes to power management. Have you tried configuring the laptop to go into S3 (Hybrid Sleep or Suspend to RAM) and S4 (Hibernate or Suspend to HD) while using Open Suse? Also, can Open Suse take advantage of your processors "adaptive" capabilities... for example the ability to slow down when idling?

Power management is one area which I thought Vista has improved significantly compared to XP. I am just wondering if the same progress has been made in the newer versions of Linux.

[MDK]

I am curious to find out how Linux compares to Vista when it comes to power management. Have you tried configuring the laptop to go into S3 (Hybrid Sleep or Suspend to RAM) and S4 (Hibernate or Suspend to HD) while using Open Suse? Also, can Open Suse take advantage of your processors "adaptive" capabilities... for example the ability to slow down when idling?

Power management is one area which I thought Vista has improved significantly compared to XP. I am just wondering if the same progress has been made in the newer versions of Linux.

If you are referring to Intel SpeedStep then the support is there, under KDE with KPowerSave I can see the CPU running at 800Mhz at idle. It's hard to quantify it at the moment but I would say in general battery life seems to be ~50-75% of when I'm in Windows. Suspend to RAM does not work but suspend to disk is ok.

[cyclo]

MDK, that's nice to know... I remembered the time when I was using Linux and the power saving modes were the sore point... at least it appears there is progress on that front.

[dicecca112]

I'm shocked that Suse Booted, Ubuntu and Fedora's cds won't even boot, due to a problem with the Kernel.

[MDK]

Yeah, I've come to really like Suse. About a year ago I gave pretty much every major distro a shot and ended up settling on Suse. I was expecting at least a bit of a headache with wireless but even that was working out of the box.

[Shaggy]

I have the 1520 speced out the same as your 1720 except for a bigger hard drive and of course a smaller screen. It's really a straight up gaming notebook.

Selling mine though, as I do not use it.