The very first Sonoma-based notebook to arrive in our office for testing, the Dell Inspiron 9300, is slightly different to ASUS’ in the choice of hardware – but both capitalise on the multimedia capabilities of this new generation of portable computing. The 9300 is reminiscent of its predecessor, the Inspiron 9100, which was pitched squarely at power users and gamers looking for plenty of grunt. This product refresh takes it one step further by using a mobile processor rather than the desktop CPU found in the 9100.The form factor is similar, geared more towards the infrequent movers after a desktop replacement, rather than an ultra portable. That’s not to say this notebook is immobile, just a bit on the bulky side.

The form factor is large enough to accommodate for the 17in widescreen LCD, and the keyboard has been squashed, rather expanded, to take advantage of the luxurious wrist rest space. Typing on this notebook is less than ideal – ASUS’ M6000 makes much better use of its 15.4in widescreen display footprint with its wide and comfortable keyboard.

Dell’s strength, however, is undoubtedly its performance. This bad boy chewed through our stable of benchmarks thanks to its 2GHz CPU and top-of-the-line NVIDIA GeForce Go 6800 PCI Express.

The notebook was able to return a whopping 4189 PCMarks and was just shy of 19,500 marks in 3DMark01 SE and 15,518 with four samples of anti-aliasing enabled. Not only can you play your games smoothly, you can do it with those high quality effects normally reserved for desktops – and all without a massive performance hit.

Plenty of thought has gone into the other port layout, with a pair of USB ports handy on the left of the chassis, and there are an additional four ports found on the rear. Unfortunately, as this was an engineering sample, there were some stability issues where Mobilemark2002 was unable to complete a run on several occasions. However, the estimated time remaining read three hours, and the test ran for two hours before giving up – already longer than the Inspiron 100.

This notebook has it all, but unfortunately comes with a high price tag and, for a unit this size, a general lack of mobility. But for those users who simply must have power on the go and don’t mind sacrificing portability and have deep pockets, the 9300 might just be the ticket.