Verdict: SideShow features a screen - but it's nowhere near being MainEvent.
Dell's XPS PCs tend to occupy the middle ground between powerful but otherwise bog-standard desktops, and bespoke behemoths from the likes of Vadim, Armari and Voodoo PC. Their prices tend not to be insane, but then neither are their looks. Only the XPS 720 H2C with its engine-block styling bucks this trend - it's the first PC from Dell that uses a water-cooled TEC cooler and is also pre-overclocked. In the case of the XPS 420, the PC's unique feature is a small screen for Vista's SideShow.
We really mean 'in this case', as the SideShow hardware widget is located on the top and front of the chassis. SideShow was mainly intended as a secondary screen for laptops, letting you play music or check emails without having to fully power up your system. However, apart from a few boring laptops for corporate types, released to coincide with Vista's launch, there hasn't been much uptake.
Apart from the SideShow screen, the XPS 420 is a fairly standard but decently specified PC. The processor is an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600, which runs at its usual 2.4GHz. This isn't an extravagant inclusion these days, especially as our CPU was the B stepping and not the more overclockable G0 stepping. With Dell buying CPUs in massive quantities, we can't be sure when (or if) it will switch to using G0-stepping Q6600s. If you want more CPU power, you can add a Core 2 Extreme QX6850 but this adds about £1,000 to the machine's price. The memory consists of a pair of 1GB PC2-5300 DDR2 DIMMs, which will limit your overclocking. At least Dell uses an Intel X38 chipset in its bespoke motherboard, so there's PCI-E 2.0 support, plus two free DIMM sockets for memory upgrades. The puny 425W PSU supplying the electrons won't be very happy about overvolting though.
The headline core component is the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card; although it's PCI-E 1.1, it's a gaming powerhouse. The motherboard has only one 16x PCI-E slot, so you won't be able to use two graphics cards, but as X38 supports only ATI CrossFire you would need to replace this card anyway.
Dell also hasn't opted for bog-standard storage. Instead of a single drive, our XPS 420 had twin 500GB Samsung SpinPoint T Series hard disks, striped as a 1TB RAID 0 array. The copious storage is fortunate, as there are no free 3.5in bays. The optical drive is a Lite-On 16x DVD-RW, with a free bay to add another drive if you wish. A 19-in-1, Bluetooth-enabled media card reader is also supplied.
Along with Vista Home Premium, which contains the excellent Media Centre software, Dell bundles a hybrid analogue/digital TV tuner in the shape of Hauppauge's WinTV HVR-1200. In typical Dell fashion, it has blanked out the motherboard audio outputs to make sure that you use those of the Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic. This has EAX 5 support for surround-sound gaming, plus all the audio playback enhancements of top-end X-Fi cards.
Performance
With no pre-overclocking action, the XPS 420 was always destined to fare badly against the CyberPower Gamer Infinity Quad Elite and Advance Tec AT-FX Overdrive, and their heavily overclocked Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600s. Considering that the XPS 420 is £250 more expensive than both of them, its overall Media Benchmarks 2007 score of 913 isn't great - the CyberPower and Advance Tec PCs scored nearly 1,400 overall. Particularly disappointing is the terrible multitasking score of 670.
However, thanks to the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card, we expected the XPS 420 to be much better at games. The average score of 45fps in the Supreme Commander test beats the 40fps average of the GeForce 8800 GTS in the CyberPower, although the minimum of 7fps is slower. However, Crysis again proved itself to be more of a tech demo than a game - even at 1,280 x 1,024 with 2x AA and High Detail settings, we saw an average of 23fps and a minimum of 16fps. Unreal Tournament 3 is more friendly to a GPU - at 1,920 x 1,200, we saw a minimum of 59fps.
Conclusion
Compared with the massively pre-overclocked systems of two months ago, the XPS 420 was always going to struggle with Windows-based performance. Considering that Dell wants to sell thousands of PCs every week, it can't afford to spend time applying and testing overclocks. However, this volume of sales means the company can afford to buy in bulk, so we expected the XPS 420 to have luxury inclusions elsewhere and therefore be roughly price competitive.
While the GeForce 8800 GTX is faster than the 512MB 8800GT now used in the CyberPower PC, the price difference between the systems is roughly £250. The 1TB of storage might go some way to justifying the extra cost, but CyberPower uses a 74GB Raptor and a 250GB data drive in its PC. The XPS 420's one unique feature, the SideShow screen, also failed to impress us - it's more of a distraction than something you'd show off to your mates. As such, the XPS 420 doesn't quite merit the money you have to pay for it.
