A look inside
Unlike most other base units, the XPS Gen-4 folds out to reveal the innards. It makes accessing and servicing optical and hard drives that much easier. Speaking of which, both are on drive rails, such that they can be installed and removed without having to use additional tools. Dell chose to include a single Maxtor 250GB SATA hard drive, formatted into a single partition with NTFS filing system, for the review model. RAID options and larger drives are available at additional cost, which invariably is more than it should be. There's space for an extra 3 drives in the caddy to the right, so expandability is more than adequate.
Dell's cable routing is an exercise in simplicity and efficiency. There's ample room at the top, due, in part, from relocating the PSU at the very bottom. Note the huge cooling apparatus; it's kind of hard to miss it. It's Dell's attempt to engineer a quiet system when using high wattage- and heat-producing Pentium 4 Prescott CPUs.
Looking at it from a different direction, you can see just how large the heatpipe-driven cooler is. In this case, it sits on top of an LGA775 Pentium 4 560 Prescott CPU, sporting a 3.6GHz clock speed and 1MB L2 cache. The supporting core-logic, a Dell-branded Intel i925X chipset, is more no-frills than deluxe. It's augmented by 1GByte of Infineon single-sided PC4200 DDR2 RAM. The large green shroud houses a couple of 80mm fans that draw warm air away from the cooler and exhaust it through the vents at the back. The end result is a system that's very easy on the ears. Good engineering from Dell.
XPS Gen-4s are all about enthusiast-orientated performance. Dell has also bundled an ATI RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition PCI-Express graphics card, which is, arguably, the fastest single graphics card currently available. Absolutely no reservations here. The chassis has been designed to accommodate an 80mm fan right across from the GPU, and whilst the X850 XT PE has a modem PCI card right below it, there were no problems to report during gaming.
Continuing the deluxe theme is a Creative SoundBlaster Audigy2 ZS sound card that's been a proven hardware audio solution for some time now. The real bonus feature is in the inclusion of said ATI X850 XT PE graphics card. I'd recommend Dell incorporate a multi-card reader at the front of the chassis and, if possible, lower the base weight to below 15KG. A better-looking front wouldn't go amiss, either. Other than that, this Dell XPS Gen-4 base unit is generously outfitted, immaculately presented, and is a cinch to upgrade.
