Dell's x400 consumer Inspiron range is quite simple to follow. At the base is the 6400, where it then moves up in size, power and specification to the 9400, and then to the XPS. We hope to finally bring you the 9400 next month as the specification has yet to settle since Dell launched it some months ago. But for now we have the new XPS M1710, which is what the 9400 turns into once the power and features start to push beyond the $4,000 mark. Dell wants its XPS brand to be what Lexus is to Toyota, and on first glance it looks like a success.

It's an imposing beast. This is no ultraportable at 4kg and a with a 17in screen. But it carries its presence regally. The brushed-metallic style lid and adjustable light schemes are nice touches, but the screen itself is fantastic. While we noticed occasional lag and viewing angles didn't quite stretch the full 180 degrees, they're still up with the best.

Colours don't look oversaturated with the glossy screen coating, and watching movies and playing games is a treat. The whopping 1920 x 1200 resolution gives you a huge amount of real estate to play with, too -- it fits a great deal of movie or a number of spreadsheets or documents on it making all any user more productive. It's well complemented by the speakers, which get loud and offer a good dynamic range and punchy bass thanks to an included subwoofer in the chassis.

While Dell doesn't shout about battery life, we were actually impressed. It churned through our intensive test for over two hours and managed two-and-three-quarters under light usage, so you should be able to watch most films on it.

Then there's the speed which, frankly, blew us away. It's not just the fastest notebook we've ever seen, it's only beaten by our A-Listed performance desktop replete with an FX-60 processor. Indeed, the 2.16GHz dual-core Pentium M T2600 combined with 2GB of RAM and the 100GB 7200rpm notebook to score 1.21 in our 2D benchmarks -- 21 percent faster than our speedy reference Pentium D 840 system and just nine percent behind the FX-60 PC. It also blitzed our 3D benchmarks, scoring 99.4fps in Half-Life 2 and 79.4fps in Far Cry thanks to its GeForce Go 7900 GTX graphics. In short, it will play the latest games at high resolutions, and they will look and sound great.

Ergonomics are good too. The keyboard is very crisp and comfortable to work with, while the trackpad and its buttons are near faultless. Other features include dual-layer DVD writer, six USB ports, DVI, VGA and S-Video outputs, a media card reader (SD/MMC, MS and xD) and mini FireWire. For networking there's a modem, Gigabit Ethernet and 802.11a/b/g WLAN.

Not content with giving you its brilliant two week satisfaction guarantee and the standard three year onsite next-business-day warranty, Dell gives XPS customers special 'VIP' XPS phone support and 24/7 email support, too.

Naturally all this comes at a price. This ticks every box for anyone who demands powerful computing on a portable PC.

Dell XPS M1710 Notebook - Buy Now