The XPS Gen2 is a fairly high end gaming laptop from Dell that was introduced in February of 2005. What was high end? In this case, it was a 2 GHz Pentium M, 2 GB of RAM and an nVidia GeForce Go 6800 Ultra. The nicest aspect from my point of view is the beautiful 4:3 aspect high resolution screen with a 1920×1200. Specs include:
- CPU: Intel Pentium M 720 @ 2 GHz (Dothan)
- GPU: nVidia GeForce Go 6800 Ultra (NV41M)
- RAM: 2 GB DDR2-266
- Screen: 17-inch @ 1920×1200
- Optical Drive: TSSTcorp DVD+-RW TS-L532B
For a more complete hardware inventory, see the output of HWiNFO or CPU-Z.
As you can imagine, at 17-inches, this is a large laptop. It also features Alienware like lighting effects. There are three lighting zones that can be set via the Dell QuickSet app. Even without the app, there are a variety of preset colors in the BIOS that can be used. The zones include the speakers (front), fans (rear base), and back panel (XPS logos on the back of the LCD). However, there is no keyboard backlighting which would have looked nice AND been useful. In any case, it definitely stands out in a see of generic looking laptops.
The Pentium M seems to less commonly be used in gaming laptops than other CPU choices of the time (mainly the Pentium 4 or Pentium 4-M). I’m not sure why. The Pentium M was faster on a MHz per MHz basis. I suppose at the time the fastest Pentium 4s (especially if we are talking desktop versions) were a bit faster than the fastest Pentium Ms but not by much and at the cost of a whole lot more power. Personally, I think the Pentium M was a better choice for a laptop, even for gaming. In fact, the XPS Gen2 appears to be the successor to the original XPS which was Pentium 4 based. The XPS Gen2 was originally available with an option of only two different processors. Either the 2.13 GHz Pentium M or the 2 GHz Pentium M (which is what this one has). Both included the nVidia GeForce Go 6800 Ultra.
The nVidia GeForce Go 6800 Ultra was essentially the same as a regular GeForce Go 6800, just clocked higher. At its release it was probably the fastest laptop GPU available. It definitely makes this laptop great for some old school (circa 2003-2008) gaming.
My particular unit has a couple of odd quirks. That may come down to the fact that this appears to have been an early engineering sample. At least there is a sticker on the bottom that says “This machine is for DELL internal use only. This machine has not been tested for compliance with FCC radio emission standards. This machine is not, and may not be offered for sale or lease, or sold, or leased.” Another indicator is the BIOS revision. Generally, Dell’s BIOS versions start with an ‘A’ (e.g. A2, A17, etc.). The BIOS version in this laptop is ‘X2’. It also features a ‘debugging’ menu to enable.
There’s also an odd behavior that may or may not have something to do with the early (perhaps beta) BIOS version. When I first got this laptop it had no hard drive so I put one in and loaded it up with a fresh install of Windows XP SP3. I also installed official Dell drivers for the video, chipset, and everything else. However, for some reason, the CPU was running at an extremely slow speed. Something like 600 MHz on average. No matter what BIOS options I chose or what else I did, it was stuck at the lowest multiplier and even seemed to be throttling the bus speed. I thought it might be a thermal issue but this laptop seemed to be lightly used and there was almost no visible dust in the fans. Plus, the Pentium M is a fairly cool running processor so something would have to be pretty off to make it overheat. However, this laptop is pretty old so the thermal paste (or whatever they used) that’s on the heatsink probably isn’t in that great of a condition.
Still, I doubted this was a thermal issue so I looked online to see what others have done with similar problems. I followed a couple of suggestions like loading BIOS defaults and disabling Speedstep but nothing changed the behavior. Then I tried downloading Throttlestop which is an app that can be used to manually control things like voltages and certain throttling and power saving options. However, it does not seem to support Pentium M processors. After some more searching I found an app called RightMark CPU Clock Utility. Though the options were a little confusing, after a few minutes I found that I could change a profile to use the maximum “P-state transition” (basically the multiplier) and then apply that profile. Now the processor was running at the expected 2 GHz. It’s been running this way for several days doing CPU intensive tasks so I think I can rule out thermal issues. It’s just that I need the app to make it do so.
One last quirk (that I’ve noticed so far) is that the fans seem to run at full speed (or at least they are pretty loud). It did this even before I got the CPU speed to its normal rate so again I don’t think this actually has anything to do with thermals. I know there are utilities that let you control fan speed out there but I haven’t tried those yet. But for all I know, this is the norm for this laptop as I don’t have another to compare it to.
I don’t know for certain that these oddities are caused by the apparently early BIOS version but I suspect it. I initially tried to upgrade the BIOS but it refused to update because the battery is non-functional. There is a force flag that you can use that is supposed to bypass that check but it does not work for some reason. Since I have a workaround for the problem anyway, I probably won’t try to update the BIOS. This ‘X2’ revision is probably fairly unique anyway so it’s nice to keep it to play around with.
Once I got everything settled and working properly, I installed BOINC and attached to all of my usual projects (the ones that would work anyway). BOINC on Windows XP still works with a surprising number of projects. So far it has successfully completed work for Einstein@home, World Community Grid, and Asteroids@home. There are probably other projects I don’t participate in that would work also. You can see how this laptop is doing overall at FreeDC.
