Dell Improves Its Gaming Prowess

Dell’s XPS line is all about delivering ultrafast 3D performance to gamers. The Dell Dimension XPS 600 is the company’s follow-up to the XPS Gen 5, and it doesn’t disappoint. The XPS 600 packs a serious gaming punch, with a stupendous 1TB of hard drive space, a speedy 3.8-GHz P4 670 processor, and two top-of- the-line nVidia GeForce 7800 GTX graphics cards in an SLI configuration. It also comes with the Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition operating system and two standard-definition TV tuners, making it an ideal living-room companion. Built in the same case as the Gen 5, with a new “armor” front plate, the XPS 600 is imposing. Although the XPS 600 has a multitude of PCIe and PCI slots, they’re all filled. But there is room for more RAM (beyond the 1GB it ships with) and one more hard drive. If you need to add anything else, the USB 2.0 ports are plentiful. The XPS 600 is surprisingly quiet— not exactly silent, but it won’t be an annoyance even during high-CPU-use scenarios. The machine can be configured with virtually any high-end Pentium processor, including the dual-core Pentium Extreme Edition 840. The nVidia-based motherboard chipset (not Intel—a fi rst for Dell) can use two full x16 PCIe lanes for the graphics, as opposed to the x8/x8 or x16/x4 configurations available up to this point. This means you’ll be able to make the most of current graphics cards and newer graphics cards down the line. As expected, the XPS 600 really lets loose on the 3D gaming tests, scoring 7,504 on 3DMark05 (at 1,600-by- 1,200)—more than twice the score of the XPS Gen 5. And it delivered 80 fps or better across the board on our Doom 3 tests. This means that the game is playable no matter what settings you turn on.