I had high expectations for the fully-loaded review unit Dell sent us. The Core 2 Extreme X7900 is a rare and special processor in that it will not work in most Santa Rosa notebooks; its TDP is higher than most notebooks’ cooling solutions can handle. The standard Core 2 Duo mobile processor has a 35W TDP in comparison to the X7900's 44W. A heavy-duty heatsink is needed to handle its high heat output.

The real advantage to the Intel Extreme processors is their unlocked multiplier, so overclocking is simple. I ran each benchmark that involved scoring the processor twice; the first time with the processor at its stock 2.8GHz clockspeed, and the second time overclocked to 3.4GHz via the BIOS. The maximum overclock is 3.4GHz. Dell allows the end user to set 2.8GHz (stock), 3.0GHz, 3.2GHz, and 3.4GHz via the BIOS, but they recommend that the machine be run with 2.8GHz.

Testing notes: Prior to testing, I defragmented the hard drive and did a Windows Update. I installed the latest Nvidia drivers (169.04) for the video cards. All frames per second (FPS) benchmarks were done with FRAPS.

System Performance Benchmarks

Windows Experience Index

Performance Difference (Stock vs. OC) (Processor): 0.00%

Oddly enough overclocking the processor did not help the WEI score at all. However, 5.7 is dangerously close to the highest-possible score of 5.9.

PCMark05

PCMark05 Comparison Results

Performance Difference (PCMark score): 9.15%

The overclocked processor improved overall performance by about 9%. The M1730 is already blazing fast so it is doubtful whether the extra increase in CPU power will be noticed while running everyday applications. For more processor intensive applications, a nearly 10% gain is significant.

Processor Performance Benchmarks

wPrime

wPrime is a program that forces the processor to do recursive mathematical calculations, the advantage of this program is that it is multi-threaded and can use both processor cores at once, thereby giving more accurate benchmarking measurements than Super Pi.

Performance Difference (32M): 00.77%

Performance Difference (1024M): 10.44%

The effect of the higher-clocked processor is slightly more pronounced in wPrime, which is almost entirely CPU-dependent.

Hard Drive Performance

HDTune 2.53

The HDTune result for the dual 200GB 7200RPM Hitach hard drives in RAID 0 is stellar. This is the fastest hard disk performance we have seen in a notebook to date. Both drives were inaudible, even while reading and writing.

Synthetic Gaming Performance Benchmarks

3DMark06

3DMark06 Results and Comparison:

Performance Difference (3DMark score): 2.52%

Performance Difference (CPU score): 13.22%

While the overclocked processor did not make a large impact on the 3DMark score as a whole, it did increase the CPU score by over 13%.

Ageia PhysX RealityMark

The M1730 is unique in that it has an Ageia PhysX physics processor card. Ageia's RealityMark is a physics performance measurement tool which, according to Ageia, can be used to gauge overall gaming performance during a game with a high amount of physics calculations. It is based on Artificial Studio's CellFactor: Combat Training game and its Reality Engine.

Performance Difference (PhysX Hardware): 8.80%

There is a huge performance difference between software rendering and hardware rendering as the benchmark shows.