Dell Inspiron 8600: Mobile Multimedia goes Wide Screen

Conclusion

The Dell Inspiron 8600 was a delight to use, as it performed great as a mobile multimedia notebook. Its size, however, make it inconvenient to make it an on-the-go solution. For those who don't mind the weight, it will come up to par with what Apple can offer. To be honest, we were very tempted to tote this along with us to watch movies on our business trips.

As a matter of target marketing, the 8600 hits two-fold: mainstream desktop replacement and as a high-end mobile notebook. Due to its weight that is just shy of 7+ pounds, the 8600 falls well into the desktop replacement class, but due to the use of Centrino parts, it can classify as a high-end mobile notebook. In Dell's press release, it states, “The Inspiron 8600… offers features for those who play video games, enjoy digital entertainment and edit video… enables increased productivity with side-by-side display of documents and Web content.” This shows Dell's willingness to market to both personal and business users. Either way, the 8600 is a far cry from being a ultraportable, and for those looking for one, we would suggest other solutions (like the IBM X31).

Purely as a performance notebook, the 8600 will have mixed results, depending on its use. For gamers, the NVIDIA GeForceFX Go5650 will perform fine in DX8 titles, but for the moment, it will not give competitive frame per second ranges in DX9 titles (at least in the scenarios we tested). For multimedia enthusiasts, this will give the range of performance and mobility needed for digital entertainment and editing video. As for business users, the ability to view documents side-by-side is a great feature that can be used to negate the need for two monitors. Just take a look at the screenshot below, which shows the 8600 in native WUXGA (1920x1200). This ability alone is something that we can't get enough of because it did increase our own productivity in browsing and writing.

Click to enlarge.

The mixed results we mentioned earlier come from the lack of performance when paired to Mobility Radeon 9600 based notebooks. VoodooPC's Envy 460 and other thin and light notebooks that use the Mobility Radeon 9600 may take some steam off of Dell's Inspiron 8600 for those looking for the cutting edge when it comes to mobile gaming. As for business and multimedia users, the Inspiron 8600 certainly has shined its stuff.

So far, we have no word from Dell when it comes to the use of Mobility Radeon 9600 on their notebooks. We have already passed word along that this combination has shown interest by our readers, and we are sure they are investigating this possibility. Dell doesn't seem to be treading too lightly on the DX9 scene, since they were sponsoring the ATI event at Alcatraz; we do expect to see Dell continue to use mobile ATI graphic processing parts in the future. Right now, we are still waiting to hear more about NVIDIA's next generation of mobile graphics parts, specifically NV36M. NV38 seems more promising than its predecessor, which leaves us curious about the mobile side...