Product Reviews

Dell has combined an impressive array of new technologies to produce what it hopes will be every PC buyer's dream machine. There is little doubt that the XPS performs exceptionally well, but for over £3,000, every aspect of the system would need to be perfect to live up to expectations.

Dell houses the XPS in a mammoth blue construction of its own design. Drive bays are hidden behind a fragile double-hinged door while internal components are accessed by prising open the clam-like side panel. The power supply is mounted in the base, leaving the cavernous interior free for an enormous heat sink and fan combination that cools the processor.

At the heart of the XPS lies an Intel Pentium 4 560 processor running at 3.6GHz, the fastest processor in Intel's consumer range. This is assisted by 1GB PC4200 DDR2 RAM running at 533MHz in two 512MB DIMMs. Although faster PC5400 memory is available, it's not currently supported and wouldn't increase performance on this PC. That said, with a score

ADVERTISEMENT

of 132 in the Shopper application benchmarks and 5,481 in PCMark04, it's one of the fastest systems we've ever tested.

Games can be played at the highest detail thanks to ATI's X800 XT 256MB graphics card. Although this PCI Express card is one of the fastest, scoring 10,625 in 3DMark03 and 50fps in Doom 3 benchmarks, the installed version lacks advanced overclocking facilities and cooling.

Dell has taken advantage of the i925 chipset's integrated RAID function and installed two 400GB SATA drives in a RAID 0 configuration. The resulting 800GB is incredibly voluminous for today's computing needs and very fast, topping 7,000 in PCMark04's hard disk test. Combined with impressive core performance, this makes the XPS an excellent candidate for video-editing. Should 800GB prove too restrictive, you can always back up on the DVD+/-RW drive - although this is not dual-layer.

Dell opted against a surround-sound speaker system in favour of a robust 2.1 system. This is a serious oversight given the excellent Creative Audigy 2 sound card installed. This is a cutting-edge card with amazing effects that deserve 7.1 surround sound. To get the most from this powerful system, a 20" monitor capable of at least 1,600x1,200 is appropriate. Unfortunately, the supplied 17" display is limited to 1,280x1,024.

The XPS is at the cutting edge of PC technology, but there are some distinct oversights. Only a limited number of people will be sufficiently impressed by a glowing Dell badge and an unnecessarily fancy case. The rest of us will wonder what exactly justifies the price