Dell Studio 17 review

Dell Studio 17 Review

Reviewed by: Rory Reid

Reviewed on: 4 August 2008

A variety of graphics cards are available with the Studio 17. There's the default Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100 -- which is pants -- plus a variety of Nvidia and ATI cards. Ours shipped with the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650. It's by no means a gaming best, but it is a very capable card for tasks such as watching HD movies and even playing the odd game -- at low resolutions.

There's a pretty good array of software included with the Studio 17. It comes with the 32-bit version of Windows Vista Home Premium, plus Microsoft Works 9.0, and the Dell Dock -- a blatant rip-off of the Dock in Apple OS X. This sits at the top of the screen and gives you fast access to common applications such as media players, Web browsers and the like.

Performance
The Studio 17 is a true desktop replacement, so it's fair for us to assume it'll offer good performance. Unfortunately it failed to run our PCMark 2005 and 3DMark 2006 benchmarks, despite our efforts. Based on anecdotal testing, however, we believe it performs close to the similarly equipped MacBook Pro. We'll update the review if we manage to get the benchmarks to run.

One of the things that impressed us most about the Studio 17 is the way in which it runs -- very cool and very quiet. You can actually put it against your naked flesh without it burning your skin off. Likewise, you can use it in a quiet room late at night without the cooling fans waking your loved ones. Battery life isn't great -- just 2 hours, 20 minutes in our BatteryEater reader test, but then again, we can't imagine many people trying to take a laptop this size on a train.

Conclusion
The Studio 17 is by no means as attractive or desirable as an XPS laptop (excluding the gaming XPSs, they're pig-ugly), but it is slightly more appealing than an Inspiron. With that in mind, it achieves its objective: to be cheaper than an XPS without sacrificing too much in the way of looks.

Laptops such as the Asus M70 offer more in the way of storage and connectivity, but the Studio 17 just about holds its own.

Edited by Nick Hide