PCPerspective has taken the new Core 2 Duo T7400 processor and slapped it in a Dell XPS M1710 laptop that originally came equipped with a T2600 Core Duo processor. Is it worth the swap or should you just leave well enough alone?

1. The Dell XPS M1710 clearly runs the Merom T7400 without much problem. It boots fine, and there was no system instability I encountered during testing. So it looks promising that the M1710 will be able to take the new Core 2 Duos, hopefully with just a BIOS flash.

2. Not every test showed an improvement where improvements were seen previously on the Asus Z96JS. This all indicates the need of an update on the XPS M1710 as some tests even showed a decrease in performance.

3. Finally, and probably the most important for XPS M1710 owners, there was a significant increase in game performance when going from the factory installed T2600 to the Core 2 Duo T7400 at lower resolutions. However, the differences between the two CPUs diminish as you increase the screen resolution. Since the XPS M1710 is capable of high resolution gaming, I don't see the point in upgrading a CPU solely for playing games.

All in all things are looking upbeat for owners of the Dell XPS M1710. The Core 2 Duo didn't have many issues and had improvements where it counted specifically in the floating point operation and some improvement in games. Hopefully we can get some official word from Dell regarding the availability of Core 2 Duo on the XPS M1710 and what this new CPU means to existing XPS M1710 customers.