Dell Dimension XPS 600 review

When you've climbed close to the top of the mountain, why not go the whole way? This is certainly how Dell felt when it installed the hard disk on our review machine -- it was a terabyte (1TB or 1,000GB). Physically, our machine had two 500GB drives, but these were set up in a stripe configuration (also known as RAID 0), making the logical drive size a contiguous 1TB. This arrangement improves drive responsiveness significantly. Instead of one drive mechanism seeking and writing, two drives in a RAID 0 system collaborate with each other. Alternatively, paranoid users can set these two 500GB drives up in a mirror configuration (RAID 1) so that the second drive is used to automatically back up data from the first. However, this approach will effectively reduce usable space from one terabyte to 500GB.

The graphics card on our XPS provided only DVI connectors. If you're looking for a monitor for use with the Dell (£3,000 doesn't get you one), we'd advise you to choose a DVI model. The crisp picture and colour clarity of the new digital screens can't be beaten. If you need to use an old VGA monitor, a DVI to VGA converter can be purchased from most electronics shops, this is a small, relatively cheap cable adaptor.

As with the majority of modern tower PCs you can replace hard disks, motherboards and PCI cards by opening the XPS's swing door. For the moment at least, you'll find it difficult to upgrade the XPS 600 -- simply because most of its components are the fastest currently available. Anyone who really wants to push this machine might consider overclocking the processor and adding extra cooling facilities, but the complication and expense of these additions make them hardly worth the effort. The XPS is already too fast for even the more demanding of today's games to catch and trip up.

Performance
We tested the XPS 600 with Peter Jackson's King Kong -- the brand new tie-in game to the forthcoming movie. This is an extremely demanding game that uses sophisticated texture mapping, high levels of anti-aliasing, resolutions up to 1360x768 and some of the most awe-inspiring 3D environments we've seen in any game to date.

To see what the XPS could deliver when pushed as hard as a drunk out of The Ivy, we attached the PC to a 40-inch Samsung LCD television. Because this TV is so big, it's very unforgiving of poor quality input -- it's natively high definition. We expected King Kong to look impressive on the LCD, but we didn't expect it to make us whoop with fear and delight. Whoop we did. It's true to say we've never seen anything this impressive in a first-person adventure game before.

The XPS is fortunate that King Kong makes such spectacular use of its dual graphics card. You will find your jaw slowly slackening as a 15m T-Rex gallops after you like a big glistening bully -- and your jaw will stay slack until you shut the XPS down. Shafts of light fall down through the perfectly texture mapped polygon jungle on screen. Did we say polygons? We couldn't tell these were polygons, there were so many faces to the things they looked essentially smooth. Stare too long at the individually rendered tendrils of foilage and your Kong character loses his grip on a vine and plummets into an infinite (though beautifully detailed) chasm.

We had similar experiences playing Half-Life 2 and Battlefield 2. Hardcore gamers with fat wallets looking for a boxed solution to their needs should definitely consider the XPS 600 alongside current offerings from the specialist games-machine companies. Dell is slowly proving itself to be formidable in a territory that has not traditionally been a strong one for it. May velociraptors tear us limb-from-limb if we tell a lie: this is a brutally fast gaming machine.

Edited by Nick Hide