Ferrari. Tag Heur. Dell XPS. All brands known for their exceptional products, along with their exceptional prices. But it’s possible to get these celebrity-endorsed brands without the other half having a heart attack; there’s the Ferrari Mondial for the fiscally frugal, the Tag Indy 500 for the trust-fund  thrifty and now there’s the Dell XPS 720 for those who don’t have deep pockets. At $2,299 it’s a damn sight cheaper than the XPS moniker is normally associated with, so what gives? What goodies have been dropped to make this XPS cost little more than most mid-range systems?

It’s certainly not the case. This aluminium monster is simply massive, and has a retro look reminiscent of a 1950’s sci-fi movie. We love the LEDs on the rear, which light up the various inputs and outputs. There’s another array of LEDs on the front of the case, and both sets can change colours to match your interior designer’s colour selections. 

The 24in monitor isn’t too shabby either, although it is only a 6-bit panel. But what about the bits that really matter for the gaming audience that this machine is targeted at; without a powerful CPU to drive an equally zippy video card, and enough RAM to feed them both, it’s going to flounder on the virtual battlefield.

From a marketer’s perspective, quad core sounds like a must-have inclusion. Four cores means four times faster games, right? Wrong – we don’t know of any games that get a performance boost from four cores, meaning that dual cores are still the weapon of choice for gamers. Having two cores makes them adept at multitasking, and you’ll save a decent wad of cash by not going for the quad cores. So four cores is a bit of overkill, but at least the Q6600 included in our review setup is known for being a decent overclocker.

The BIOS options to unlock the potential of this chip are a little mediocre, but at least it’s got basic voltage and bus speed controls. With a little tinkering we managed a 25% overclock without breaking a sweat, reaching 3GHz in a matter of minutes. To counter the additional CPU voltage, we had to up the CPU fan speed though, resulting in a case that sounded like the Little Birds in Black Hawk Down.

How about the graphics card then? Sadly, it’s here that the 720 receives a big fat F (for faltering framerates) from us. The NVIDIA 8800GT is the sickly sibling of the 8800GTX, itself a chipset that is now on the cusp of obsolescence thanks to NVIDIA’s new GTX 200 series. All is not lost though; you can upgrade this when purchasing, but your options are very limited. According to the Dell site, when we tried to tweak our machine the only options were one 8800GT, two 8800GTs in SLI, one RADEON HD3870X2 or dual HD3870X2s. Not a lot of choice considering there are better options out there for extreme gamers.

A total system memory of 3GB is a smart amount, obviously taking into account the 32-bit limit of 4GB that Vista 32-bit edition is limited by. It’s relatively slow stuff though, with the DDR2-800MHz memory having rather conservative timings.

Still, regardless of our issues with the CPU and video card, the XPS 720 offers a solid gaming platform, albeit at a not very competitive price. There’s no disputing the rugged build quality of this machine, and the extensive support offered is great for novice computers. But at the end of the day, if you shop around we think you’ll be able to find a faster PC for $500 less. It just won’t have such a pretty case...