Dell Latitude D610 Series Review

The Dell Latitude D610 is not available through the Home & Home Office section on Dell's site, but through the Business sections of the site. This particular one was purchased through the Dell Small Business section. The Latitude D610 Series is basically your mainstream, thin & light, business notebook. The D610 is ready for any road you may travel. This mainstream business notebook is built for serious mobile performance, incorporating Intel's latest-generation Centrino platform. It's also fairly light (5.4 pounds) and has very good battery life (4 hours)—a winning combination for busy road warriors.

The Latitude D610 is designed for enterprise customers who want flexibility, mobility and convenience in the workplace. These are customers looking for a durable notebook offering the ideal blend features and performance. Starting at less than five pounds, the D610 delivers all the performance you need. Nothing You Don't. All at your fingertips.

Dell Latitude D610 Review Unit System Specs

• Pentium M 760 (2.00Ghz w/ 533Mhz FSB)
• 512MB (2×256) PC3200-DDR2 (400Mhz)
• 14.1″ SXGA+ (1400×1050 resolution)
• ATI Mobility Radeon X300 w/ 64MB dedicated RAM
• Fujitsu 60GB HD (5400RPM)
• 8x DVD+/-RW (dual layer)
• Intel Pro 2200 wireless (802.11 b/g)
• Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet; Conexant 56K modem
• SigmaTel C-Major audio
• Extra AC adapter & extra modular battery
• System total was $1940 after shipping & WA state sales tax

Processor & Performance

The latitude D610 incorporates the latest "Sonoma" version of the Intel Centrino.   I had high hopes that this machine would fly, and indeed, the D610 seems very responsive & performs well for what I do.  As mentioned above, I'll often have powerpoint, photoshop, deepview (molecular image viewer), word, several instances of firefox, thunderbird, winamp, and a few other applications thrown in for good measure open at the same time.  The old Presario would definitely bog-down, especially with graphics intensive apps such as deepview and specific powerpoint slides.  So far the Dell Latitude D610 Series battery has sailed through everything I've thrown at it.  It hasn't crashed yet — although windows explorer hangs from time to time (doesn't it always).  I'm not much of a gamer, although I did download a copy of the Quake3 demo to see how it would run.  I'll list the Quake3 results in the benchmarks section below.

Another common use for my notebook is to rip and encode music.  I prefer Exact Audio Copy configured to encode with the LAME engine.  My "benchmark" here is that the supplied DVD RW drive seems to be able to rip at up to about 7.5x (although it takes a while to get going that fast), and the encoding occurs at a "play/CPU" of about 10x (meaning a 10 minute song is encoded in about 1 minute).  All together an hour-long CD is ripped & encoded to high quality VBR mp3 files in about 15 minutes.

Hardware specifications

1. Model: Dell Latitude D610
2. Processor: Intel Pentium M 760 - Dothan - 2 GHz - 2 MB Cache - 533 MHz FSB
3. Chipset: Intel 915GM - ICH6 - Sonoma Centrino
4. Memory: 1 GB 533 MHz DDR2 Dual Channel in 2 SDRAM modules
5. Hard-drive: 80 GB - 5,400 RPM - Fujitsu MHV2080AH - UDMA133 via S-ATA controller
6. Optical drive: Single Layer DVD±R/RW burner - Sony DW-D56A (OEM Liteon SOSW-852S) via S-ATA - 8X DVD - 24X CD
7. Wired network: 10/100/1000BaseT Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5751 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express
8. Wireless network: Intel PRO/wireless 2915 A/B/G
9. Bluetooth: Dell Truemobile 350 via USB
10. Video:Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900 with up to 128MB shared1 graphics memory
11. Display: 14.1″ SXGA+ (1400×1050) active matrix (TFT)
12. Audio: Intel AC'97 with Sigmatel STAC9750/51
13. Internal modem: Intel AC'97 with Conexant chip
14. Ports: 4 USB 2.0; S-Video; VGA; Serial; Parallel; Infrared; Ethernet(10/100/1000); Modem; Audio In/Out; 1 Type I/II PCMCIA
15. Security: Integrated Smart Card Reader and integrated TPM Security Chip
16. Desk docking: D-port with DVI video and D-view
17. External screen: Dell 2405FPW LCD, 1920×1200
18. Battery Cell: Rechargeable li-ion 6-cell latitude d610 series battery