Dell XPS 720

Dell’s pre-packaged beast box goes into the ring with Josh Collins.

The XPS 720 looks likes it fell off the back of Doc Brown’s time-travelling, fusion-powered DeLorian DMC-12. Of course, no DeLorian, sci-fi or conventional, was built with a quad-core processor or USB ports.

Lending strength to its sexy first impression is the front and rear-mounted LEDs. With two sets of tiered lighting on the front fascia and a single set of LEDs over the rear IO ports, the lights not only add character to the system, they’re very useful when it comes to plugging in connections at the back of the unit. These LEDs can be programmed from within Windows to change colour, strobe, and more. This definitively adds to the ‘bling’ factor.



Packed with a Core 2 Quad Q6600, 4GB of DDR2 memory and an NVIDIA 8800 GTX, one would expect this system to be a beast in the performance stakes. With styling reminiscent of an 80’s sports car, you can’t help but think of the performance as being reminiscent of an 80’s computer.

The 3DMark06 score reached 11049 marks. This may not seem bad – the 8800 GTX pulls the system over the line in the graphically-intensive tests and the Q6600 covers the CPU tests with its almighty four cores. Once the memory is isolated from these components, however, the system performs much like an E6600 dual-core in single-threaded applications. Horrifying stuff.

In the Super Pi 4M calculation the XPS 720 returns an utterly humiliating and shameful score of 2min 6.890s. This is a solid thirty seconds slower than an equivalent system built by the average enthusiast. The reason for this massive performance gap is down to the configuration and specifications of the RAM.

To get the ball rolling down a steep hill of ‘OMG, why?’ the 4GB of memory is supplied in the form of four individual modules. Any enthusiast is aware of the downfalls from such a configuration. These include, and are not limited to: increased strain on the chipset; the potential to lose tight timings; potential to lose the ability to run high frequencies; loss of overclocking headroom; and poor memory access. And just as the doctor of bad performance would suggest, the Dell XPS 720 is hit by many of these configuration issues.

Unfortunately, the bad news doesn’t stop here. With the system packed with 4GB of memory, but only running a 32-bit version of Vista Home Premium, the 4GB, by default, cannot be accessed by the operating system. Therefore Windows shows 3GB due to the memory address space taken by other components such as the 768MB on the 8800 GTX. There is a workaround for this issue, though Dell did not appear to have implemented it.

In addition, not only is the memory limited to a lowly DDR2-667 frequency, it runs on extremely slack timings of 5-5-5-15 2T. No worries, we thought, we’ll just jump into the BIOS and pull the pants up on the slackers.

We almost died inside when we found the BIOS utterly empty. Feeling as if we’d just walked into an abandoned Wild West town, complete with tumbleweeds, we poked our head around the place to see whether anything could be salvaged.

Much to our dismay, there was still nothing. We couldn’t change the CPU multiplier or FSB, let alone touch the voltages. Not just the CPU, though – the voltages of anything. Not a memory divider or latency setting in sight. The BIOS was, without a doubt, the most barren BIOS we have ever ventured into, especially for a system marketed at the enthusiast.

Replacing the motherboard with something more potent will also prove a pain, thanks to the BTX form factor.

Adding to the feeling that the design wasn’t thoroughly thought out was the fact that the two 160GB Western Digital Raptors were set in a striped RAID array using the motherboard chipset’s in-built support. This configuration creates great concerns for the safety and security of any of the data stored on these drives. An additional storage and backup drive would have complemented the Raptors nicely.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. What Dell manages to do well, it does very well. The internal case structure, as well as the hardware placement and wire management, is superb. Everything is precisely secured to present an overall tidy and visually impressive system, both on the inside and outside.

The system does have some strong points, but as an enthusiast gaming system, it simply falls short of expectations.