Dell Inspiron 9400 Review

The design of the Inspiron 9400 is almost exactly the same as the 9200 and 9300, so the chassis is starting to look a bit dated. It's a sturdy desktop replacement, but compared with the styling of the Inspiron XPS, it's a bit naff.

Due to the high-end desktop replacement products, Inspiron 9400 body shells are all made of aluminum-magnesium alloy, strength and heat dissipation are very good. Its exterior design is also a serious change from Dell laptop traditional style dark lines, with a silver and white trim with the main body design, looks more than a little fashion sense. However, silver and white itself does not match, causing some superfluous white plastic trim it explicit(HP Business Notebook 6720t).

The 9400 is a world ahead of the 9300 as far as specifications are concerned, though. Gone is the Pentium M processor, replaced by the dual-core T2500 chip, seriously increasing the 9400's power and helping it to a WorldBench 5 score of 94. We've seen quicker overall results, but in our multitasking tests the Dell was second to none.

Operating system

Another difference between the 9400 and its predecessors is the choice of operating system - XP Home has been replaced by XP Media Center 2005 Edition, indicating a greater emphasis on making the 9400 an all-round entertainment centre. The screen is good, giving a sharp, colourful image, but we'd have liked to see a higher resolution than 1,440x900(IBM ThinkPad X60).

In terms of graphics, the 9400 really falls down - that onboard Intel processor simply isn't up to the standard established by ATI and nVidia. The frame rates we got in our Doom3 and Halo tests weren't very good at all. Believe us when we say that this laptop isn't for gaming. We suspect that a better graphics chip would have boosted the Inspiron's WorldBench 5 result.

Noise, heat and battery life

Dell Inspiron 9400 is equipped with two cooling fans, one for the CPU, one for the video card GPU. Two fans will automatically adjust speed according to the temperature of the chip, so the system is running idle almost hear the fan noise. When playing games with GPU and CPU heat is high, this time to reach the maximum fan speed, noise can be heard clearly. Therefore recommend using headphones when playing games. Because of the strong force is equipped with NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GS graphics cards. So the bottom and right position when asked to play the game there is a significant body heat phenomenon, but still tolerable range(Acer Aspire 5320).

Dell Inspiron 9400 is equipped with high-capacity 9-cell lithium-ion battery, which is very rare in the 17-inch screen notebook. When fully charged, the screen brightness set to maximum, turn on Wi-Fi wireless capabilities, the execution of daily tasks, you can continue to run for about 2 hours and 15 minutes. If the screen brightness set to minimum, turn off Wi-Fi wireless capabilities, to perform the same task, you can continue to run for about 3 hours. This has been achieved for a desktop replacement notebook has been very good(HP Mini 110-3018cl).

Conclusion:The Dell Inspiron 9400 is equipped with the latest Intel Core 2 Duo T7400 processor, is currently the most high-end processor for laptops. Is second only to the 7900 GTX Graphics card NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GS, coupled with high capacity 2GB DDR2 memory, fully meet the requirements of most of the game, for the latest Windows Vista operating system can cope? And most importantly, the price is not too expensive, Japanese books the same configuration may be more than 20,000 yuan.