Review: Dell XPS 720 H2C desktop computer

If you like your PCs big and brutal looking, then Dell’s XPS H2C gaming system will be right up your street.

But you’ll need deep pockets, since another feature of this PC is the eye-watering price tag.

So what do you get for your money? For starters it’s one of the fastest systems we ever had the pleasure of manhandling onto a testing bench.

It’s water-cooled, comes with three graphics cards (if you include the Ageia Physx card), and can be set up to produce a light display.

If you are used to opening a PC case to find acres of free space, the internals of the XPS H2C will shock you. Once you get the side panel open the first thing that hits you is the huge enclosure for the water cooling system and the fact that you can’t really see anything of the motherboard.

Under the cooler sits an Intel Core 2 Extreme Q6800 quad-core processor overclocked from the default 2.9GHz to 3.73GHz ­ a good example of just how far you can push a CPU when you use water cooling.

However, it turns out that our review sample of the XPS 720 H2C was one of the last to use this particular CPU. If you buy a XPS 720 H2C now, it will come with the newer QX6850 quad-core processor. Again it will be overclocked (this time from the standard 3GHz to 3.4GHz). Backing up the CPU is 4GB of PC2-6400 800MHz DDR2 memory that, as we expected, is overclocked to 1,066MHz.

The overall system performance from the 720 H2C is nothing short of stunning, scoring a massive 10,742 in PCmark05.

Just like the overall performance, the graphics performance is lightning fast ­ but if you pay this much for a gaming machine you would hope it would be.

The graphics are driven by a pair of Nvidia Geforce 8800GTX cards, each with 768MB of GDDR3 memory built in and installed in SLI configuration. Supporting the cards is an Ageia Physx physics accelerator card, which boosts performance when playing supported games (see www.ageia.com/ physx/titles.html for current and future titles).

The graphics combined with the processor to product a score of 22,304 in 3Dmark05, while it notched up 17,630 in the more intensive 3Dmark06. Synthetic benchmarks aside, the 720 H2C produced an average frame rate of 252fps (frames per second) in Fear. All graphics tests we performed at a resolution of 1,024 by 768 pixels and, in the case of Fear, all detail settings were set to full.

Dell ships its 2707WFP screen with the PC ­ a 27in monster of a display. The native resolution of 1,920x1,200 lets the powerful graphics cards really show what their capable of, but it also adds nearly £1,000 to the price ­ those looking to save money may want to ask for a smaller screen.

For storage our 720 came with two Seagate ST3750640AS, 750GB drives in a striped Raid array to give provide 1.36TB of storage. A Blu-ray reader also sits alongside the standard DVD writer.

Due to its sheer size, it’s not a PC you’ll be able to tuck under a small desk, but at this price it’s likely you’ll want to show it off ­ and with the LED able to pulse to music, it’s a real eye-catcher.

If gaming is your thing, Dell’s XPS 720 HTC certainly delivers all you could want. However, all but hardcore gamers will be able to save money by opting for a lower-specified PC and still get adequate performance.