Dell's High End PC comes back in a brand new version : XPS 720
If you like your PCs big and brutal looking, then Dell’s XPS H2C gaming system will be right up your street.
The offer is as simple as powerful, including the very best components, and the best graphic solution (GeForce 8800 GTX SLI with an Ageia Phsyx card), Intel Core 2 Duo Quad core Extreme processor, BluRay disc player and the latest Nvidia Nforce SLI chipset
If you were looking to buy an overclocked, liquid-cooled, fire-breathing gaming system, whose name badge would you expect to see on it? Very few would opt for Dell, but that's exactly what Dell's flagship XPS 720 H2C Edition is: a monster of a system, built into a monster of a case, with a monster of a price tag (well, that's how we'd describe nearly three grand for just the system box).
The top half of the case holds the power supply (in this case a custom 1,000W unit) and the four side-mounted 3.5-inch drive bays. In two of the bays in our review system sat Seagate ST3750640AS, 750GB drives in a RAID array to give 1.36TB of storage; more than enough to be getting on with.
The Dell XPS 720 H2C Edition offers an innovative, two-stage cooling system that helps keep your processor cool, even when it's overclocked. The H2C hybrid solution combines a liquid radiator, a thermoelectric cooling module and control circuitry, optimising CPU cooling with minimal power consumption. The result is a processor that stays cool3 when it's overclocked.
The overclocked CPU in question is one of Intel's QX6850 Core 2 Extreme quad cores running at 3.46GHz rather than the standard 3GHz clock speed. Backing this up is 4GB of PC2 6400, 800MHz, DDR2 memory overclocked to 1066MHz, which is enough to keep the pre-installed Windows Vista Ultimate happy. And, as you can imagine, it's a bit quick - 11,000 marks in PCMark05 is blisteringly fast.
The XPS 720 H2C is built on NVIDIA® ’s nForceTM 680i SLI chipset, giving you the flexibility to load your system with dual high-performance NIVIDIA or ATI® graphics cards. To support the additional power draw, the XPS 720 H2C includes a 1kW power supply, giving you the juice you need for a full-throttle graphics experience. For maximum effect, your XPS 720 H2C features the world’s first DirectX® 10 GPU – the NVIDIA GeForceTM 8800 GTX
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