Dell Inspirion 1720 Laptop Review - Page 1 of 3
This week, MMORPG.com Hardware Guy Jeremy Star takes a look at his newest machine, a laptop built for gaming. In his search to find the best MMORPG-playing laptop, he brings us this review of the model he settled on, the Dell Inspirion 1720 Laptop.
Sometimes you have to go to places that you don't want to go to and that have nothing for you to do other than sit around and watch the grass grow. Sometimes you have to travel, and your choice is watching the craptastic TV in the hotel room or counting the ceiling tiles. And sometimes, sometimes you just want to kick back on the couch instead of sitting in your office chair at a desk. It's times like those that make a laptop capable of handling MMORPG games very attractive.
I searched high and low for a laptop that would deliver acceptable performance in today's MMORPGs without requiring me to run on the “ugly” setting and without requiring me to take out a second mortgage on my house. I also took into account previous customer satisfaction reports and warranty.
Lo and behold, I present to you the Dell Inspiron 1720.
The Hardware – Dude, I'm getting a Dell!
The Dell Inspiron 1720 is a 17”, widescreen laptop. The review configuration came with an Intel Centrino Core 2 Duo 7300 (A 2ghz, dual-core processor), 2 GB of RAM, a 256MB Nvidia Geforce 8600M GT video card, and a 160GB hard drive. Windows Vista Home Premium was included for the operating system. The laptop also features built in Wi-Fi networking via an Intel® 3945 802.11a/g Mini-card, a memory card reader, a CD-RW/DVD player combo drive, integrated 10/100 Ethernet, and a 9 cell Lithium-Ion battery.
My Inspiron 1720 came in the Spring Green color, because I happen to like green. I elected to forgo a built in webcam.
Dell also has a new policy that prevented my laptop from being loaded with “bloatware”. That is to say, Dell only installs the software that you ask them to install. No annoying trial packages, no AOL ads, nothing. This Inspiron came loaded with McAfee Security software, since having some sort of anti-virus/spyware is a pretty good idea these days, and it's free for 15 months. Other than that, the only software that was pre-installed were Roxio DVD creator and proprietary programs that Dell uses to run the laptop. (For example, Dell Quickset, which shows a graphical representation of volume on screen when adjusting it via the media-buttons, and allows some Dell specific buttons to function.) Granted, if you want to maximize your gaming horsepower, you'll want to disable Roxio and McAfee due to the large amount of processes both of these programs run in the background.
The default warranty includes 1 year of in-home service, parts and labor, and 24/7 telephone support. It also includes 3GB of online backup space for a year, and 15 months of McAfee security suite.
Appearance – Green, mean, Orc-slaying machine!
The Inspiron 1720 is a fairly large laptop. It's about 11 ½” from front to back (without counting the battery), and about 15 ½” from side to side. Closed, it's only about 1½ “ thick, however it weighs close to 8 pounds. For someone who's well over 6' and 230lbs, it's not a problem to carry this thing all over the place, however the size and weight alone might turn some people off. I did consider that this is much larger than the 15” widescreen laptop I used to own, but in the end the price difference between the 15” Inspiron and the 17” ended up being a negative number, so for me it was a no-brainer choosing the larger screen for less than the cost of the small screen.
The laptop itself is primarily a silver color, with the bottom being flat black, and the top being “spring green.” Dell offers a few choices of color for the top, and instead of going with the default black, I chose green. Green added another $50 to the price tag, but I figure if you're already shelling out over a thousand clams, you might as well enjoy looking at your expensive purchase. (As of the time of this writing, the price for your choice of colors has dropped to $25, Doh!)
The keyboard is a full QWERTY device, with a numpad located to the right. The Insert – End keys have been placed above the Backspace key and the numpad, and the arrow keys are below the right shift. The inclusion of the full numpad also factored highly in my choice of this laptop. My old laptop did not have a numpad at all, and I always despised that.
Above the keyboard is the pre-requisite Num Lock, Caps Lock, and Scroll Lock indicator lights, and to the right of the numpad are lights for power, HDD activity, battery low warning, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. All of these lights are done with brilliant blue LEDS. Also above the keyboard is the power button, and the Dell Media Direct Button. (Media Direct is Dell's proprietary media player function.)
Below the keyboard is the touchpad. I despise touchpads, but sometimes there just isn't room to whip out a mouse, and this isn't too horrible for a touchpad. It has clearly marked spaces for scrolling up/down and left/right on the touchpad itself, and two buttons below it for left/right clicking.
On the front of the laptop are media function buttons, such as mute, volume up/down, play, stop, etc. These light up blue as well, but only briefly when you use them.
Performance – She'll make point...oh wait, I used that one already...
To test the gaming performance of the Inspiron 1720, I put it through its paces with World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, and Lord of the Rings Online. All games were played with the native resolution of the laptop display (1440x900).
WoW Performance
| Minimum fps | Maximum fps | Average fps |
|
23 |
43 |
97 |
I set WoW to all the highest graphical options with the exception of color depth/multi-sampling, which was set to 24 bit color, 24 bit depth, and 2x multi-sampling. (The max is 8x, but the game really started hitching when set to this.) The Inspiron ran WoW fairly smooth at these settings. There was some small amount of hitching when there were a ton of players on screen in Shattrath city, but for the most part it ran very well. As you can see, the average fps (frames per second) was 43, a very decent rate for an MMORPG with all the graphical goodies turned on.
Guild Wars Performance
| Minimum fps | Maximum fps | Average fps |
|
0 |
120 |
61 |
Guild Wars was also run at the graphical maximums, with the exception of Anti-Aliasing, which was run at 0. With AA on, GW tends to dip dip down to very low fps too often to make it a smooth experience. With AA off, there weren't any areas of the game that I experienced hitching in. I tried the major cities from all three campaigns, as well as several instances. GW has a much higher average fps than WoW, but that is mostly due to the fact that when you are not in a city, you are in a private instance without any other players around. This takes a large amount of the graphical workload off.
Lord of the Rings Online Performance
| Minimum fps | Maximum fps | Average fps |
|
15 |
57 |
39 |
For Lord of the Rings Online, I let the game auto-detect my graphical capabilities and set the graphics options accordingly. LotRO chose to set the graphics overall setting to high, which means that most of the graphical sliders were set to high, but things like shadows were set to generic blobs, reflections were very low, and there was no Anti-Aliasing or Anisotropic filtering. Overall the game still looked good, but unlike WoW or GW, there were noticeable graphical differences between running LotRO on a high end desktop gaming PC and Inspiron other than just the jaggies from the missing AA filtering.
I did try pushing the graphics sliders higher, but the Inspiron 1720 just isn't capable of giving good fps at higher settings. That's not the fault of the hardware, which performed tremendously well at the default settings, but rather just a consequence of playing a newer, graphically intense MMORPG on a laptop not specifically designed for gaming.
At the settings that the game gave me, LotRO felt smooth and still looked gorgeous. I did have problems in the town of Bree, however, as fps dropped to the low double digits and the game hitched quite a bit. Of course, Bree tends to perform a lot lower than the rest of the game even on a high end PC.
Overall, the Inspiron 1720 performed very well in all of the MMORPGs I threw at it. It may not be a dedicated gaming laptop, but the price vs performance value is definitely there. You can spend a lot more to get better fps and graphics in some games, but for a sub $2000 laptop, this is very good. I even threw the newly released FPS game Team Fortress 2 at the Inspiron, and it handled that just fine. Again, I can't get all of the graphical goodness that my gaming PC affords me, but I didn't have to turn everything all the way down to get decent performance either.
Good review overall.
I run an Alienware desktop but switched last year from a rock laptop to a dell M1700. The weight is always an issue with true gaming laptops but what took me by surprise was the clearview black screen - it is absolutly gorgeaus in quality and depth.
The dell runs very quietly unless you block the vents and the fans wind up but thats kinda the users look out. I think Dell are listening ti the user feedback and this can be seen in switiching the massive rundandant software add ons that used to come as standard to being optional - so much useless ram hungry crap.
I run VG, WOW, EQ2 and TR on the dell an wither medium or high settings and rarely do i get a hitch ( even my mighty Alienware struggles with Bree at times).
Having played a Dell, I cant fault it and would recommend them to anyone.
I am typing this on my 1520 :)
I chose the 1520 for the fact I am 155 pounds
and when I am on the fly I really dont want to be
banging a 8 pound,17 inch monolith around.
I play Eve-Online, WoW, Tabula Rasa (which is
glitchy atm. The game has just been released
so I am rather thinking its the game's fault, not
the PCs).
The keyboard is smaller yes, but I really
didnt want to be staring at a vast section of my
desk being consumed by my laptop.
When I need it, I plug in an extra monitor and keyboard
and presto, Ive got my full keyboard and a very
nice span of screen territory.
If you are looking for a laptop which is staying put most
of the time, then go for the 17 inch but if you are willing
to sacrifice the size for portability then I say go for the 15 inch.
I did look at the size vs money but as my friend found out the
hard way, his 17 inch didnt "quite" fit when traveling on a plane
or at his favorite coffee place.
my setup is:
Dell 1520, 15" Hi-def monitor (1680x1050), 2.2Ghz Core 2 Duo,
80Gb 5400rpm Hdd (have external hdd for storage), 8600m GT 256,
Bluetooth, WiFi, No Camera, Vista Ultimate x64.
ps.
had 3 issues with my vista. Bluetooth doesnt work well at all, installing SATA
drivers was a pain and finding display drivers for the mobile 8 series nVidia card
which would work was and absolute mission. At the moment Dell does
not support Vista x64. I dont know what they will do later but we will see.
I'm playing with a Dell E1705, which is basically the XP version of the 1720. My setup is :
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.16 GHz
2GB 667 MHz RAM
100BG 7200 RPM HD
Nvidia GO 7900GS 256MB
WUXGA Glossy Screen at 1920 X 1200
Creative Audigy SW Drivers
I've really liked this laptop for the games I've played up until Tabula Rasa. For the records, I've played CoX with all the eye candy at max resolution and about 40FPS, 9Dragons, Rappelz, Dungeon Runners, Exteel and LotR (high settings, not very high or ultra, very pretty with good FPS). With TR, however, I have to customize the graphics options highly, however, AND run in Windowed mode with a much smaller screen size to get decent FPS. The game is playable and I have "enough" eye candy via textures , but am missing tons (shadows, lighting, etc...)
Also, there have been reports of problems with the fans not kicking on when they should and--as a result of the fans--video cards burning out. I had to have my card AND RAM replaced after about 1 year. Here are some links:
notebookreview.com forums
WoW Forums
LotR Forums
Thankfully, Dell support didn't give me a hard time, but--then again--I did my homework before calling them. Now, I manage my fans with I8kfanGUI, too. Also, I did manage to get it for ~$1000 off due to a combo of my EPP (Employee Purchase Plan) benefits and one of their period 30% off discounts. At the time I bought it, I couldn't have touched another laptop with near the power for at least $500 more (not including additional warranty costs).
~Ripper
1730 is the box I'm looking to buy.....
Nice review, I've always been a fan of Dell PCs, and just bought a new XPS 710 two months ago. Working as an IT manager I made sure that the PCs and laptops we use are Dell. The laptop I use will need upgrading soon and the Inspirion 1720 looks like a good choice, and I can use it for playing games - during my lunch break of course ;)
BTW the fps numbers for the maximum and average fps for the World of Warcraft are the wrong way round.
WoW Performance
23
43
97
17" HD displays (1920x1200) are not good for gaming, as OP said.
it's nice for HDTV, but it literally burn you
videocard if you don't use Notebook coolers
Edit: btw, I would prefer Acer Aspire 7520G-702G32Mi to Dell Inspiron 1720
or even Acer TravelMate 7720G-302G25Mi - with Radeon HD 2400 :)
I got a Vostro 1700(2Ghz Core 2 Duo, 2gb ram, 8600GT, 160gb HD @ 7200rpm), which is the corresponding model to the 1720(Just the business model, same case, different color/name).
And I'm quite happy with the high resolution, and I play CoD4 in 1920x1200, all maxed out. It does get warm, but its nothing serious. I've turned down some of the details and view distance, since its just 256mb ram on the gfx.
Great laptop, but not the most portable one...
PS: I run vista on mine, and it suits me fine when u get to tweak it.
FYI - there have been numerous complaints regarding the lifespan vs. expected lifespan of the batteries in the E1705 (the laptop I have). I don't know if the same batteries are used in the E1720, but they may be. I had an interaction with Dell Support this morning to have my dead battery replaced (it died at almost exactly one year). Unfortunately, it turns out that Dell batteries only have a 1 year warranty (vs. the 3 year warranty I purchased for my system) and that my battery was no longer covered.
When I went to price the new battery on the Dell site, I noticed two things:
1) The price is outrageous - my jaw dropped. I hve to spend $165 + tax + S&H for a new battery
.
2) The battery had a 2.3 rating out of 5 from 29 reviews. 23 of the 29 reviewers complained about the battery dying from 9 - 15 months. There's clearly an issue with the batteries used for this model.
/grrrrrr
The link for the reviews (on the Dell website) is: E1705 Battery Reviews
~Ripper
My girlfriend wanted a laptop. When I bought the E1705 the Core 2 Duo wasn't out yet.
Other than that the specs are pretty much the same (think ours has a 120GB hard drive).
I've been happy with ours even tho I'm not really into laptops. She plays games on it and they run fine.
We did just about on our 1 year anniversary have the sudden blue screen... corrupted graphics. This was on a sunday and the system was just not going to "come back". It was obviously a video problem and you could boot into safe mode fine.
Contacted Dell support online on a sunday night. The session timed out and the support rep called me. Had me do some diagnostics, was very patient and seemed to really know what they were doing (it sounded very much like a support center in India but I'll admit they were VERY good).
He setup to have a call back.. and this was like 1am monday morning by them. Asked if I'd be awake or if it should be some other time (the call would be like 3am). I said .. I'd be awake.
Anyway to make a long story shorter we had a guy here on tuesday morning and the laptop was back to normal in under an hour. I forget what they swapped out but the tech had everything on hand and we haven't had any issues since.
So I can honestly say I was pretty impressed with the support from Dell.
Speed and quality of the contracted tech etc etc.
Still happy with the laptop and as the person I quoted stated.. for what I got it was price wise a good deal under what anyone else had.
I've had Dells for 8 years. I've never had problems with any of them (and I have 6 of them running in my house right now, 4 I own and two company-owned laptops for my clients) until this laptop. I've now had 3 total failures for one machine and/or it's components/peripherals in ~15 months:
Performance-wise, I've loved this laptop. I'm disappointed in the amount of issues I've had, however.
~Ripper
I currently use the 1720 black ~ Awesome notebook. I went ahead and got the camera option and have found it a nice touch. I've had it for over a year (running almost all the time) with no problems at all. I use it a lot for working on the road and at customer sites and have had a lot of compliments on it.
Waiting for your Alienware notebook review!
Keep up the good work!