Dell XPS 630

Verdict:

[+] ATX

Very quiet; upgradeable

[-] BTX

Outdated motherboard chipset; limited cooling; not very overclockable

You have to wonder, looking at the Dell XPS 630, in which capacity the company expected the computer to be used. Did it perhaps see the XPS 630 as the gaming PC for post-apocalyptic road warriors? Or maybe it foresaw a need for its system to be able to resist the amorous advances of a mechanical bull. Either way, Dell has opted for an armoured brute of a case for the XPS 630, and it creates a formidable first impression.

SPECIFICATIONS

Underneath the thick steel skin of the XPS 630 is the sort of no-nonsense yet potent system you'd expect to find in an XPS gaming machine. The CPU is an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 running at its stock clock of 2.4GHz, with a modestly sized cooler made to Dell's specification. A pair of 1GB PC2-6400 (800MHz) DIMMs provides plenty of memory.

The CPU and RAM form a sound basis for a fast PC, and there's a lot of power in the expansion slots too. A Creative X-Fi Xtreme Music card provides the audio, offering all the benefits of the X-Fi range for music, but not the EAX support that you'd want from a gaming PC.

To power these games, a brace of Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT cards in SLI gives the system a lot of raw graphics processing power.

Storage is provided by a RAID 0 array of two 500GB drives in the lower front section of the case. The array is partitioned so that your system drive is 921GB, while the system recovery partition is only 10GB. Oddly, Dell has used a mismatched pair of drives - a Western Digital Caviar SE16 and a Samsung SpinPoint T HD501LJ.

While both drives run at 7,200rpm and have similar specifications, generally, the best practice is to only pair up identical components - whether they're RAM sticks, graphics cards or hard disks. That said, we didn't experience any hard disk-related mishaps during testing.

MOTHERBOARD CONCERNS

While this all sounds like a decent setup, there's a fly in the ointment. It's actually a fairly big fly, though not quite as large as a semi-morphed Jeff Goldblum man-fly. The motherboard is a Dell-specified custom board - as is usually the case - but it's based on the Nvidia nForce 650i SLI chipset.

Even when this chipset launched in April 2007, it was the budget cut-down chipset for acquiring SLI on the cheap. A year later, it's a very odd choice for a brand new high-performance gaming PC.

DELL DITCHES BTX LAYOUT

Unusually, the motherboard used conforms to the ATX layout rather than the BTX designs we've seen from Dell over the past few years. In fact, the XPS 630 is the first ATX PC Dell has made for ages. This is, according to Dell, to accommodate end users who want to modify their PCs with new parts, since upgrading the XPS 630 is far easier than any other modern BTX Dell PC. Dell installs the board upside down, but this won't impede upgrades.

BUILD QUALITY

While the motherboard is a concern, the rest of the system is mostly well built. Apart from the obvious robustness of the case, the components are soundly secured in place. For example, Dell has used a piece of dense foam between the floor of the case and the CPU cooler to ensure that there's no gap, and therefore no chance of the cooler being wrenched free during transit.

The S-ATA and power cables to fit a third hard disk into the caddy are already in place and adding a third disk takes only a few minutes. The motherboard has just four S-ATA ports - one of which is used for the S-ATA optical drive - so you can only add one more hard disk. However, with almost a terabyte of storage already present, the need to add more storage is minimal.

DESIGN CONCERNS

However, there are a few niggles with the XPS 630's design. The overhanging lip of the outer shell of the case partially blocks the uppermost optical drive when its tray is ejected, so DVDs are annoyingly tricky to remove.

The card's cooling arrangement is designed to be adequate and nothing more; with no true exhaust fan (only the PSU and the CPU cooler), we're concerned about heat build-up.

We're also concerned that the lower of the two 120mm front intake fans may be impeded by the perpendicularly mounted hard disk cage, so air may not flow into the case as effectively as it might otherwise.

Dell could have alleviated our cooling worries by installing the hard disks with a spare bay between them, and placing the sound card in the top PCI slot rather than squished up against the second graphics card.

Overall, the XPS 630 relies more on the ability of its components to run hot yet remain stable rather than its powers to keep them cool.

PERFORMANCE

With its pair of high-performance graphics cards, the XPS 630 should punch its weight for gaming. However, our testing of two GeForce 8800 GTs in SLI shows that this is one of the worst multi-GPU configurations available at time of testing. Unfortunately we didn't have access to the latest Nvidia ForceWare 175.19 driver, which has been claimed to improve the performance of two GeForce 8800 GT cards in SLI.

With the ForceWare 169.25, some games run slower with two cards than with only one, while games that can use the second GPU won't run much faster anyway. In this PC, Call of Duty 4 (a game that's very friendly to multi-GPU setups) ran at a minimum of 37fps at 1,920 x 1,200, while Crysis stuttered along with a minimum of 13fps, even at 1,680 x 1,050 using only the High quality settings.

With the CPU in the XPS 630 running at stock speeds, the PC performed modestly in the CPC Media Benchmarks (which you can download for your own comparsion by clicking here). With an overall score of 929 from the XPS 630, the Dell's Core 2 Quad Q6600 begged to be overclocked.

Substantially overclocking the nForce 650i motherboard proved to be a struggle, however. We know that a Q6600 should be able to manage 3.4GHz with a good board, but we initially aimed for a 3GHz overclock. We raised the voltages on the CPU, RAM and Northbridge, with a 1,300MHz FSB (the BIOS displays the FSB at its effective speed).

However, the XPS 630 refused to POST. We gradually lowered the overclock and the voltages until we ended up with an FSB of 1,150MHz. This provided a paltry extra 187MHz, and we were unable to wrangle any more speed out of the nForce 650i chipset motherboard.

With this modest overclock, the speed boost was pretty poor, and the XPS 630 delivered a final overall score of 979 in the Media Benchmarks, with an extra 1fps average in Supreme Commander.

CONCLUSION

For £1,200, you seem to be acquiring a lot of PC: there are two high-performance graphics cards, X-Fi audio, a quad-core CPU and almost a terabyte of storage. However, when we tested the pair of GeForce 8800 GTs didn't run well in SLI and we also found that the motherboard Dell has used badly limits the overclocking potential of the Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU.

Since overclocking the current configuration is clearly out of the question, you'd have to change the motherboard and graphics cards to get more speed, and then install better cooling. Naturally, this would invalidate the warranty, but as it is, the limited speed of the XPS 630 detracts from its appealing looks and good build quality.

You can buy the Dell XPS 630, and learn more about it, on Dell's website

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