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Pros
- Smooth and stable.
- Good fit and finish.
- Striking chassis design.
- Relatively quiet even under load.
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Cons
- Doesn't take full advantage of nVidia's 590 SLI chipset.
- Case is very heavy and large.
- Overclockable, but overclocking isn't supported.
- BTX chassis limits upgrade options.
Dell XPS 710 Specs
| All-in-One Screen Size | 30 |
| Graphics Card | AMD Radeon X1950 Crossfire |
| Operating System | MS Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 |
| Optical Drive | Dual-Layer DVD+/-RW |
| Processor | Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 |
| Processor Speed | 2.66 |
| RAM (as Tested) | 2 |
The Dell XPS 710 builds on the company's XPS 700 line, using the same striking red (or black) chassis, a 1,000-watt power supply, and Intel's latest quad-core Core 2 Extreme QX6700 CPU. Toss in 2GB of DDR2/667 memory, a pair of ATI X1950 XTX graphics cards using ATI's CrossFire dual-card technology, and a fast RAID 0 array coupled with a third 750GB hard drive and you have the core of a potentially killer system.
Unlike Gateway, with its
The massive size of the case gives Dell ample room for lots of peripherals. Our unit shipped with two optical drives, a pair of 10,000-rpm Western Digital Raptor drives set to RAID 0, and a Seagate 750GB drive, for storing all that digital media most of us have these days. The motherboard and cooling design are BTX-based, leaving relatively little opportunity for upgrading. That's a real shame for this case design. Most users who want a robust case with lots of expansion options would want to drop in a new motherboard someday, for example, but there are few BTX motherboard options available. On the bright side, the BTX air cooler is an unusually beefy design that minimizes the risk of modest overclocking. It's also pretty quiet.
Unlike some other systems that use nVidia's 590 SLI for Intel chipset, such as
During our performance testing, the XPS 710 exhibited Dell systems' usual well-mannered behavior. All benchmark tests ran without any hitches and without any odd behavior. But the XPS 710's performance lagged a bit behind the Gateway FX530XT, which has a QX6700 CPU overclocked to 3.20 GHz. The exception was certain games that seemed better behaved with Dell's CrossFire implementation. For example, the Half-Life 2 test ran on the Gateway at 153 frames per second (versus 136 fps on the Dell) at 2,560-by-1,600 resolution without antialiasing (AA) and anisotropic filtering (AF). But the Dell did better when AA and AF were enabled, at 51 fps versus 48 fps. Call of Duty 2 ran at 41 fps on the Gateway and at 56 fps on the Dell at the same resolution without AA and AF.
As expected, performance on some tests benefited from having four CPU cores. Media encoding and software 3D rendering were dramatically better. For example, systems with Core 2 E6700 CPUs, which also clock at 2.66 GHz, typically render our 3dsmax7 underwater scene in 613 seconds. The XPS 710 rendered the same scene in 363 seconds. On the media encoding side, our E6700 test system performed a Windows Media Encoder compression test in 120 seconds; the XPS 710 took 98 seconds. On the other hand, the quad-core system showed little gain over a dual-core system on our SYSmark Office Productivity test. It scored 294, compared with 266 for a Dell XPS 700 equipped with a 2.66-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Duo E6700 CPU.
The XPS 710 shipped with a few other amenities aimed at the hearts and minds of its target gamer audience. No TV tuner was included, but in the box were a Logitech G5 gaming mouse and Saitek Eclipse II illuminated gamer's keyboard. The metal-ringed mouse pad with the Dell logo was a cut above Dell's usual pad.
If you're looking for an expansive chassis that looks as powerful as the system inside and offers well-mannered, albeit not exceptional, performance relative to the competition, then the Dell XPS 710 is worth a closer look. But people with limited deskside space or looking for extreme gaming performance might hold off for a bit.
See how the Dell XPS 710 (Quad Core) measures up to similar machines in our
Benchmark Test Results
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