Digital Life 2006: Dell's overclockable gaming laptop

Digital Life, conveniently scheduled right before the big holiday shopping season, is a hotbed of new product announcements. Dell is hoping to get on some wish lists with its latest gaming laptop, which keeps the same model number as its predecessor but adds enough new bells and whistles to warrant a second look.

The new XPS M1710 offers high-end parts such as Intel's overclocker-friendly Core 2 Duo T7600G and the new Nvidia GeForce Go 7950 GTX GPU. Dell won't overclock the processor for you in the factory, but just the fact that the company is encouraging it is a bold step (although not as bold as its overclocked XPS 700 desktop).

There are strobe lights built into the wrist rests that, according to Dell literature, "strobe, pulse, or fade the system's 16-color lights to the beat of a song or whenever a game character fires a weapon, moves, or gets fragged." It works with mainstream music apps, such as Windows Media Player and iTunes, but the compatible game list is still up in the air. The flashing lights are either massively cool or entirely lame, depending on your personal aesthetic sense. We'll leave it up to you to judge for yourself.

The revised XPS M1710 is available now. The tricked-out version with the components referenced above will set you back $3,498.