MaximumPC 2005 11

UNDER THE HOOD

BRAINS

BEAUTY

66 MA XIMUMPC NOVEMBER 2005

reviewsTESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED

D

ell can recognize a hot market when

it sees it. With its sixth-generation

supreme gaming box, Dell is out to prove

that it’s damned serious about gamers.

Don’t believe it? Check out the hardware

in this rig.

Dell’s XPS is

the first review

system we’ve

tested that sports

two x16 PCI

Express graphics

lanes, which is

impressive—even

though the Dream

Machine had dual

x16 slots months

ago. We’re not

surprised Dell

adopted SLI

for this version of the XPS—the fifth-gen

XPS and its single Radeon X850 XT were

smacked around by the SLI rigs in our July

review—but the XPS delivers SLI with sur-

prising panache.

The secret sauce in this XPS is the

dual nVidia GeForce 7800 GTX cards. The

cards are full-length for added stability, and

feature custom, double-wide heat pipes to

keep them cool even on hot summer days.

Thanks to the new nForce4 SLI Intel Edition

X16 chipset, both cards can run in a full

x16 PCI Express configuration. Previous

iterations of SLI (on Intel and AMD) allowed

only x8/x8 or x16/x4

channel configurations.

Although dual x16

PCI Express makes

sense, it means little for

today’s gamers. Current

games don’t use the

8GB/s of bandwidth

provided by an x8 PCI-E

slot. That doesn’t mean

tomorrow’s games and

cards won’t take advan-

tage of the bandwidth,

but for gaming today,

we’re more excited by

the custom-designed 7800 GTX boards.

The XPS also includes a P4 670 with

2MB of cache, 1GB of DDR2/667 RAM, a pair

of 500GB Hitachi Deskstar drives in a RAID 0

array, a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum

card, and a dual TV tuner card. Dell loaded

our XPS with Windows Media Center 2005.

Why MCE? Dell says the machine is a multi-

purpose box, not just a gaming machine.

While it didn’t blow the competition out

of the water, the XPS did manage to hold its

own in benchmarks. We weren’t sure where

the XPS would fall in the applications test,

SYSmark 2004, but it chimed in with a score

of 231. That’s the fourth highest score this

year and about 15 percent faster than our

zero-point FX-55 box—not too shabby! In

Premiere Pro, the P4-equipped XPS sailed

past all the Athlon boxes, including the

FX-57 machines. And in our Divx compres-

sion benchmark, the XPS is the fastest stock-

clocked machine we’ve ever tested—if you

discount the Falcon Northwest Mach V and

its downright illegal overclock of 4.25GHz.

Overall, the Dell is sitting pretty in appli-

cations. But what about games?

Even though the Monarch and

Hypersonic systems we reviewed this fall

featured the same 7800 GTX cards, the

XPS turned in scores about 10 percent

slower. Why? We blame the Pentium CPU.

The Athlon FX-57 is a monster in gaming

and the 3.8GHz P4 is no match. The scores

aren’t bad—in fact, the XPS nudged past

our Dream Machine 2005 in Doom 3—but

they’re certainly not the fastest we’ve seen.

The XPS 600 marks the first time Dell

has used a non-Intel chipset in a consumer

PC, which is significant, but the company

will have to boot the Pentium 4 for an

Athlon 64 if it wants to truly get serious

about gamers.

—CLAUDE MCIVER

Dell XPS 600

Dell equipped its premier gaming rig with the new nVidia X16 chipset

Version six is Dell’s lucky number. With SLI support and a pair

of GeForce 7800 GTX boards, the latest XPS is whisper-quiet.

231

454 sec

275 sec

1635 sec

87.7 fps

BENCHMARKS

SYS mark 2004 201

ZERO POINT SCORES

Premiere Pro 620 sec

Photoshop CS 286 sec

Divx Encode 1812 sec

3D Mark 05 29.3 fps

Doom 3 77. 1 fps

0 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

Our zero-point reference systems uses a 2.6GHz Athlon 64 FX-55, 2GB of DDR400 Crucial Ballistix RAM, two nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra cards in SLI, a Maxtor 250GB

DiamondMax10, a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS, a PC Power and Cooling TurboCool 510 Deluxe Express, and Windows XP Pro with SP2.

49.33 fps

$TK, http://www.dell.com

DELL XPS 600

NEXT GEN

nForce4 X16 chipset, fast

single-core processor, and

super quiet.

GEN X

9

A plastic case doesn’t keep

this rig from being heavy.

BOOT: 30 sec. DOWN: 13 sec.

CPU Intel Pentium 4 670 (3.8GHz,

2MB L2)

MOBO Custom Dell nForce4 SLI Intel

Edition X16

RAM 1GB DDR2/667

LAN Gigabit Ethernet

HARD DRIVES Two 500GB Hitachi 7K500

Deskstar in RAID 0

OPTICAL DVD+RW NEC ND-3530A,

DVD-ROM TSST TS-H352C

VIDEOCARD Two GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB

in SLI (430MHz core, 600MHz

GDDR3)

SOUNDCARD Creative Labs Audigy 2 ZS

CASE Custom clamshell case