Dell XPS L501X

Dell XPS L501X

Welcome to a laptop battery specialist of the Dell Ac Adapter

Dell has been peddling its premium XPS desktops and laptops for many years now. Like most products in its line up the L501X we received this month is a good looking, solid little piece of equipment.

The thing I like the most about this laptop with adapter such as Dell XPS 1340 Ac Adapter, Dell XPS PP17S Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 13 Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 1318 Ac Adapter, Dell XPS M1330 Ac Adapter, Dell XPS M1350 Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 1470 Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 14Z Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 1570 Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 15Z Ac Adapter, Dell P04F001 Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 13ZD Ac Adapter is the metal alloy casing. Not only is it attractive and sturdy, but I found it helped keep my wrists cool whereas other units with cheap plastic casing around the keyboard will sometimes cause my skin to stick to it, especially when trying to write long articles (which is painful enough in the first place).

What’s under the hood is probably more important to most people. You can customise the machine on Dell’s website when you order, however the review unit we received came loaded with a quad-core Intel Core i7 820QM processor, 6GB of RAM, Nvidia GT 435M graphics card and a 640GB 7200RPM hard drive, all working together to feed a 15-inch, 1366 x 768 LCD screen.

Whilst the CPU’s stock speed of 1.73GHz isn’t chart-topping, its maximum Turbo speed is 3.06GHz which is fairly chipper, especially for a portable machine. Being from the Core i7 series it also features HyperThreading for a total of 8 processing threads. This is great for multitasking, video editing, rendering and other core-intensive tasks.

The graphics card is also pretty good for a notebook. At medium settings, the L501X churned out an average of around 30 frames per second in Crysis 2, Bad Company 2 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R, which are playable results, plus an ultra-smooth 60 frames per second in Trackmania on high settings.

On paper, the GT 435M graphics chipset is roughly similar in terms of processing power to Nvidia’s decent-but-dated 9600GT desktop cards. Coupled with the fairly low resolution of the screen, it should be able to handle most other modern games at medium settings as well.

To round out the gaming experience you also get 2.1-channel JBL speakers with Waves Maxx Audio technology – that’s right, a laptop with a subwoofer! It’s not going to blow your windows out, but the sound quality is head and shoulders above most other laptop sound systems. In-game explosions are deep and satisfying, plus the audio setup is suited well to music and movies. Our review unit only came with a DVD drive, but a Blu-ray drive is available when customising on Dell’s website.

I liked the keyboard a lot, but hated the touchpad. For some reason it always thought I wanted to scroll up/down or left/right, when I was simply trying to move the cursor around the screen. It also had a habit of making the cursor jump around wildly when I was trying to make minor adjustments to its position.

My other qualm is the resolution of the screen. 1366 x 768 is fine for most games if that’s what you want to use the L501X for (I would even hazard a guess that the graphics card would choke quite badly at higher resolutions), but for web surfing and office applications it can be a major drag. 1680x1050 would have been much more useful.

We weren’t able to get hold of confirmed pricing for this particular configuration of the L501X (the lower-specced base model goes for $1,699). Until we can take value-for-money into consideration, we’ll be holding off a score on this one: check back here for updates.