It's a bit better. Somewhat faster, and supports SM 3.0, but it's still sub-low end.

You really want an Inspiron e1705/9400 with a Geforce 7800 as a minimum for games. Hopefully those other systems you're looking at don't cost much...

A 7800 as a minimum for games?  Hardly... that's still a high end card.  The X1300 will allow you to play the  majority of games, as long as most of the fancy features are disabled.  I would consider it a low-mid end card, and as long as you have a good amount of RAM (1 gig preferably, although 512 may be sufficient in some scenarios) and a decent processor (which the E1505 definately will have regardless of which of the three options you choose) then you should be happy.  Just don't expect to run Fear with max settings.

A Geforce 6600GT is the bottem of low end now. An x1300 is below it.

While on a desktop system it might make sense to buy a low-end GPU (or even sub-low end like an x1300), it dosen't make sense on a notebook that can't be upgraded. There's no point in spending over $1000 on something that will-at best-barly run modern games, and won't run anything in the future-when for maybe a few hundred more (or sometimes about the same price) you'd get something that will last years.

Actually, you can't buy the e1705/9400 with the 7800 anymore.  You're only option is the x1400 or the integrated 950.  I just bought my e1705 last week with the x1400 (7800 option was already gone).  I'm happy with the performance of the x1400.  I've only played City of Heroes and Age of Empires 3 so far, but both have ran smooth (COH on standard settings, and AOE3 set to 1024x768 resolution).

That's really too bad. The x1400 is a joke next to a Geforce 7800. That means Dell only has one laptop worth considering for games (and if you don't care about games, you might as well just go super-low end).

Weirdly enough, Alienware now has cheaper gaming laptops than Dell.