Verdict: Form should follow function, but sadly, this isn't the case for the XPS 700
The industrial revolution was characterised by a focus on efficiency. Leading architects such as Louis Sullivan in Chicago followed the strict mantra that 'form follows function'; no aesthetic ornamentation was allowed to get in the way and mess things up. The Dell XPS 700 gaming PC, on the other hand, adheres to very different design principles - almost the reverse, in fact, because it's cumbersome and can sometimes be horrible to use, but it looks fantastic.
The thick, very heavy aluminium shell and black, grated front make the XPS 700 look and feel like an engine from a sci-fi battleship. Two banks of LEDs shine down onto the optical drives and front air intake, and you can change the colour of the lights in the BIOS. The huge case leans forward menacingly and looks great on top of a desk.
Under the hood, a 512MB GeForce 7900 GTX supplies the 3D graphics performance, while the CPU is a 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6700. This CPU and GPU combo is impressive, but it's noticeably weaker than the Core 2 Extreme X6800 and GeForce 7950 GX2 found inside the similarly priced Scan 3XS HC2-7950. The motherboard is a proprietary Dell affair, using the as-yet-unreleased to the masses Nvidia nForce 590 SLI chipset for Intel, so we were eager to see how it would perform in our tests. However, the 2GB of rather cheap-looking PC2-5300 DDR2 RAM was a slight concern.
Internally, the Dell is arranged to satisfy the BTX design spec, which has some neat features when it comes to cooling. As BTX originated from Intel, the CPU is obviously the priority. In the Dell, it's covered by a huge grey plastic funnel that guides cool air from its integrated 120mm fan over an aluminium heatsink, and onto the passively cooled Northbridge and Southbridge on the motherboard. As this heatsink is so heavy, it's supported by a metal arm, which also serves to secure the graphics card firmly in place.
BTX changes the internal layout of other components too; the motherboard is on the left-hand side of the case, and the add-in cards are inverted, so that the fan on the graphics card points upwards. The Dell's GeForce 7900 GTX is supported by a metal frame and green plastic plating. These add to the internal clutter but help to guide airflow from the second front 120mm fan into what would otherwise be a dead spot underneath the graphics card, so there's no chance of the Dell's powerful X-Fi Xtreme Music sound card overheating.
Two 250GB 7,200rpm Western Digital Caviar hard disks in a RAID 0 configuration are tucked into the top of the case. The drives are out of the way of the case's main cavity, but this layout isn't perfect. The heat from the system is likely to collect in the roof of the case, as there's no active cooling there. A vent would have been helpful - without one, this whole area relies solely on the PSU fan to move air. That said, the system was stable throughout testing.
The internal layout might be innovative and the exterior good-looking, but both are ruined by the flimsy plastic front panel. The buttons to open the optical drives are clunky and awkward. The stealth cover for the 13-in-one memory card reader bends and creaks, and, if you're not careful, it could snap off its hinges. The most frustrating aspect, though, apart from the lack of a reset button, is the amount of pressure required to depress the power button. Simply turning the XPS 700 on is an almost painful experience. Dell should be commended for breaking away from the norm in terms of styling, but a £2,500 gaming PC should offer more in terms of ergonomics and build quality.
We also found that the hard disk motors caused the Dell's aluminium chassis to vibrate, and contributed far more to the noise level than the fans. There's room for a further two hard disks, though, and there are two optical drives, a DVD-ROM and a DVD-RW.
PERFORMANCE
The 512MB GeForce 7900 GTX proved to be a great performer, providing a smooth frame rate at maximum detail in Need for Speed: Most Wanted at 1,920 x 1,200, the native resolution of a 24in widescreen monitor. That said, we would have preferred a GeForce 7950 GX2 for this amount of money. Dell charges £105 more for this card though.
The dual-core 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo E6700 also helped the system to rip through our Media Benchmarks. The Dell's overall score of 1.80 is fast, and helps to justify the huge price tag. However, the Scan system, with its pre-overclocked Core 2 Extreme X6800, comfortably outperformed the Dell with an overall score of 1.98 out of the box.
The Dell's BIOS looks flashy, but it lacks any tweakable system settings for overclocking. Instead of BIOS-based overclocking, the Dell is designed to be used with Nvidia's Windows utility, nTune. The latest version of nTune that's compatible with the Dell didn't offer the manual overclocking we've seen it offer for AMD-based nForce 590 SLI boards, but it allowed for automatic fine tuning. After three hours of self-diagnosis, the Dell awarded itself a 10 per cent increase in CPU speed (not bad), a massive increase in the GPU's speed in Windows (pointless), a slight increase in the GPU's 3D speed (negligible), and aggressively tweaked RAM timings (which made Windows unstable).
Once we told nTune to only tweak the CPU speed, it raised the FSB from 266MHz to 303MHz, which meant that the E6700 ran at 3.03GHz. While we expect that the E6700 would go much faster than this, both ClockGen and SysTool wouldn't work fully with the Dell, so we were limited to the overclock that nTune provided. It's disappointing that we couldn't see how the nForce 590 SLI for Intel chipset handles overclocking. It appears that Dell has deliberately made it difficult to manually overclock the XPS 700.
The tweaks significantly improved performance. Image editing improved from 1.80 to 1.99, video encoding rose from 1.58 to 1.79 and the multitasking jumped up from 2.02 to a substantial 2.28. The overall score of 2.02 means that the Dell ran faster than the Scan PC. However, the Scan system that we reviewed would probably have overclocked were it not for its early motherboard BIOS.
CONCLUSION
The Dell is close to being a great system. It looks tremendous, and internally, half of it is well laid out. However, it has many frustrating flaws, which means that we wouldn't want to own this PC. The build quality isn't good enough, and the lack of overclocking options limit your ability to exploit the hardware's potential. Dell's online configuration system leaves a lot to be desired too. If you want to upgrade the spec to a Core 2 Extreme X6800, as in the Scan, it will cost you £493.50 extra. An additional 500GB hard disk costs £275, which is £120 too expensive. In this price range, we expect a superbly crafted, easy to use and near-silent PC. The XPS 700 is none of the above.
