PRODUCT: Dell M90
WEB SITE: www.dell.com
PRICE: Starts at $2,239
- dual core Intel T2600 CPU
- Nvidia Quadro FX2500M
- 7200rpm 100GB drive with SATA’s fast throughput
It’s no secret that I am a fan of Dell’s Precision line. The M70 is perhaps the best computer I have ever owned. So naturally, I was very curious to see Dell’s new mobile workstation, the M90, a healthy step up from the M70. Now, mind you, I have found an incredible amount of use for the M70. I find it was an immense help when I was working away from home, but was invaluable at home as well. I was less and less on my desktop system, favoring the power of the M70 for my work and play. But I didn’t see myself getting rid of my desktop. As a matter of fact, some large fluid simulations for a few shots for a film I worked on had to go to my dual Xeon desktop. But now that I have had some time with the M90, I wonder if I need my desktop at all. The biggest change in the M90 is the dual core Intel T2600 CPU at 2.16GHz, which sees a huge speed boost over the M70’s single core Pentium M 2.13GHz. I rendered a highly motion blurred Autodesk Maya scene about 180 percent faster on the M90. Now we’re talking.
POWERFUL
Dell sent me this M90 fully equipped with 2GB of DDR2 RAM (minimum for effects work), a multiformat DVD-RW drive and Nvidia’s powerful new Quadro FX2500M with 512MB of memory to drive the WUXGA LCD screen at 1920x1200. Its graphics performance drew circles around previous scores. With textures and lighting enabled in Maya 7.0.1, the Quadro FX2500M outpaced the preceding Quadro FXGo1400 by over 40 percent, which is very impressive. Less stressful OpenGL modes (wireframe, basic gray shaded) produced increases of 8 to 16 percent in frames per second playback speed.
The M90 comes equipped with a 17-inch LCD widescreen display, offering a bigger desktop to work with than most other laptops. Its high resolution handled tasks very well and was able to output to a secondary monitor with aplomb. Output options allow you to connect to VGA as well as a digital DVI monitor, so multiple monitors are easily supported.
PORTABLE
Hooking this portable to a 24-inch Dell LCD converted the M90 into a desktop solution easily. Add an Ethernet connection to a Gigabit network, a USB laser mouse, perhaps even a wireless keyboard, and your desktop’s goose is cooked. I supposed you can make it easier with a dock from Dell, but the M90 has everything you need right there. Six USB 2.0 ports, a 4-pin FireWire port, S-Video output, Bluetooth, speaker and mic ports, and a modem jack.
Remember those?
PERFORMANCE
If you’re still hesitant to see the M90 as a desktop killer because of high speed and high capacity hard drives in desktops, check out the 7200rpm 100GB drive with SATA’s fast throughput. I’m sure you’ll need more than 100GB for everything you do at home and work, so that’s where external drives and a home network come in. Who doesn’t have a full network at home these days?
And that brings us to portability. I wouldn’t want to carry this system up a mountain without a good sherpa in toe, and on shoots where I don’t need 3D performance, I’d prefer to take my ultra portable Dell Latitude X1; the X1 is perfect for photographers and on-set surveys, actually. Now that I mention it, it would be jazz-hands cool if you could press an eject button on the M90 and have a little X1 slide out of the side for when you have to run. But I digress.
Starting at 8.6 lbs., a well-equipped M90 comes in closer to 10 lbs. and is 11.3- x 15.5- x 1.6-inches, a bit big to carry all the time on a busy set, but if you have a corner that you can settle into and work on location, then the M90 is perfect.
The M90 is fairly quiet and won’t bother anyone sitting next to you. It sports a few fan vents for the heatsinks inside to keep it running cooler, but the machine does get hotter than a lap should take, as does the M70 and every other notebook even half as powerful, but it’s nothing a $30 laptop cooler (such as Antec’s NoteBook Cooler) can’t keep in check. I ran the M90 without extra cooling with a 2 CPU render while playing back a heavy Maya scene to get it as hot as I could, and it didn’t crash. That’s some stress to put on a system, and I repeated the same strain to test out the battery time. The M90 did OK, clocking in at about 95 minutes at a full load and a fully-bright screen. If you conserve your power and don’t render on both cores while you work on battery power, you should see a lot more time unplugged.
The M90’s styling has it looking closer to Dell’s Dimension systems, though a really nice brushed aluminum back sets it apart as a Precision machine. Media playback controls and speakers are up front now, like the XPS series. I wouldn’t run out and burn down your home theatre, but the speakers sound pretty good for a portable, and the 17-inch screen makes for a great DVD experience.
And that brings me to playing CounterStrike. Not only can this machine play some serious games, it does it with flair. I had no trouble at all running a Counter-Strike CS server playing with four other geek friends while also hosting Teamspeak 2’s voice chat server to hear them all gang up on me.
FINAL THOUGHTS
I don’t see a lot of room for improvement with the M90. It comes very well equipped, though I would love the nicety of a modular drive bay that could double as a second battery port. Getting it down to less than 1-inch thick and 4 lbs. heavy is a fantasy, but a boy can dream. Otherwise, short of a desk and a comfortable chair, I’m not sure what else the M90 can come with.