After talking about the Asus Lamborghini VX3 I shall now shed some light on Dell's latest notebook offering in the Indian market, the XPS M1730. The first laptop launched by Dell to target the gaming market in India, has a few tricks up its sleeve.

The M1730's special features according to the company are the AGEIA PhysX card, which is the first notebook to incorporate it. It also comes with Logitech’s 17inch, 1920×1200 GamePanel LCD that allows gamers to view game stats and track system information while playing. Whats even better is the NVIDIA SLI DirectX 10 graphic card it comes with!

But there's more, you can even customize your laptop with a solid state hard disk drive, although that will set you back an additional Rs.32,000 for 64GB. The main technical specifications of the XPS M1730 are:

Intel Core 2 Duo T8300 to the Core 2 Extreme X9000
2.4GHz, 3MB Cache, 800 MHz FSB to 2.8GHz, 6MB Cache, 800 MHz FSB
4GB DDR2 RAM @ 667MHz
200GB 7,200 RPM up to three hard disk drive, with two in RAID
Dual 256 MB GeForce 8700M GT Nvidia SLI to a Dual 512 MB GeForce 8800M GTX Nvidia SLI
AGEIA PhysX Mobile Technology Physics Card
DVD Writer to a Blue Ray Double Layer Writer

Amit Kaushal, working for Billdesk.com, said, "I would not mind buying the XPS M1730 strictly for its gaming capabilities. Although I would like some minor customizations. I would choose the Core 2 Duo T9500. I would not yet move in for the solid state hard disk as I would like to check some performance reviews before that."

The basic M1730 is priced close to a lakh, although if you customize the laptop you can work yourself into a mean machine at Rs.3,00,000. That's an insane price to pay by a gamer, but that's only the end version of this product.

I still wonder why the notebook manufacturers are bottle necking their products with RAM running at 667Mhz when RAM manufacturers have already begun selling chips running at 800MHZ. Perhaps the price is not yet right, although if I spend even close to a lakh I would hope my motherboard can support RAM working at higher frequencies.

Overall I think this is a step in the right direction, lets just hope that dell can stop forcing an operating system on us, it will help lower the prices as well.