Bit-Tech.net reviews and dissembles a Dell XPS 700 computer to see if Dell’s new top of the line gaming PC has the performance power to make build your own obsolete. With a sporty aluminium case and user configurable blinking lights the PC meets the required bling factor and it massive cooling system keeps it near silent but its performance is held back by slow memory. There is also a high cost to upgrade common parts such a second video card for SLI gaming.
The XPS 700 desktop line has been problematic for Dell so far. As a result of delays associated with its cooling system the availability of the XPS 700 was pushed back so far that Dell has offered free upgrades to Intel Core 2 Duo chips for its earlier purchases. New purchases may have to wait months for their machines.
There have been questions about its chipset, which Dell says is the result of the system’s NVIDIA 590 chipset being misidentified by the commonly used nTune and CPU-Z utilities as older NVIDIA 570 units. There are also questions about the Sound Blaster X-Fi card that comes with the XPS 700 and its level of support for Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS sound compared to that of the retail Sound Blaster X-Fi package.
PC World has a quick review of a Core 2 Duo E6700 based XPS 700 system that uses the dual GPU NVIDIA 7950 GX2 graphics card combined with a 24-inch wide-screen 2407WFP LCD monitor. It also had 2 GB of RAM, and two 320GB drives in a striped RAID. Total cost $3985.