Nick Race18 February 2008
The XPS range of PCs and notebooks from Dell represent the cutting-edge of PC tech. Here in Australia, this has seen Dell selling the desktops to gamers and the notebooks to power users — until now.
The new model to hit virtual shelves is the XPS 420, a machine designed from the ground up for video.
As a departure from the giant but impressively monolithic cases of the XPS 700 series, the 420 is shipped in a much smaller case that’s closer in size to the Dimension 9000 series. Keeping the BTX form factor for our review model, the 420 gives enough room for expansion without being too monstrous.
There are some other immediate differences between this and Dell’s standard desktop towers. The 420 includes a recessed area on top of the chassis with a rubber mat, designed for placing portable tech like cameras and MP3 players when transferring or recharging. It’s a little thing, but it makes sense.
The second major difference is the inclusion of a Windows Vista SideShow interface. This small LCD set in the upper part of the front panel allows users to access Gadgets without resorting to the keyboard and mouse. The SideShow system is capable of presenting your emails, weather and stock presentation, along with basic control of Windows Media Player and other, yet to be developed, uses. The problem with SideShow is that the system needs to be on to access and use this information or control. And if it’s on, why not use the keyboard, mouse and monitor?
Another key difference is the inclusion of Dell’s Xcelerator tech, a video encoding hardware solution with front-mounted composite inputs. This is designed to take the load off the default quad-core processor when encoding video. The only issue is that your software choices are limited if you plan on using this add-on. Dell includes Roxio Easy Media Creator 9, which does function with the Xcelerator technology, but if you need this kind of tech due to the quantity or quality of the video you’re encoding, you’re probably not going to use Easy Media Creator anyway.
The demo model sent to APC was powerful. It was equipped with an Intel Extreme Edition Core 2 Quad X6850, with 4GB of RAM and two 500GB hard disk drives in RAID 0. Rounding out the submission was an Nvidia 8800GTX 768MB, PCI-E Hybrid HD tuner card, Sound Blaster X-Fi Extreme Gamer soundcard and a Blu-Ray drive. The memory heavy hard disk drive leaves the total available memory at 3.25GB, so if you’re choosing a build with the 8800GTX you might save a bit of cash sticking with 3GB of memory.
The basic model of the XPS 420 comes in at under $2,000 including a quad-core processor (the Q6600), 2GB of RAM and an ATI HD2600XT with a 20in widescreen LCD — a good deal and a very upgradeable machine including Dell’s XPS supercharged warranty. This SKU doesn’t include the SideShow machine though.
On the bench the XPS 420 did very well. It’s surprisingly quiet for such an over-the-top build, while posting a respectable score of 5,144 in PCMark Vantage. Would we buy one? Not in the high-end configuration. But the entry level offering is a great deal and you can save some money on the questionable benefits of the SideShow screen and the Xcelerator video renderer offer.