Date:
Monday , April 02, 2007
Author:
Josh Norem
Editor:
Jason Wall
Google +1

Dell XPS 710 H2C

Dell has talked about competing head-to-head in the boutique gaming PC market for a while now. The company's first factory over-clocked and water-cooled gaming PC is the strongest sign yet that Dell is playing for keeps.

continued...

Part I – Product Overview: Company Overview and Purchasing

The XPS 710 H2C According to Dell

When designing the XPS 710 H2C Edition we set out to create a PC with a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Every feature and component is built to help optimize system performance without compromising style. Front and rear LED lighting and a sleek Midnight Black Paint casing complete the look, making the XPS 710 H2C Edition a desktop showpiece that will make you the envy of all your friends.

On the 710’s liquid-cooling:

The Dell XPS 710 H2C Edition has an innovative, two-stage cooling solution that helps cool the processor even at its highest mode, and does so more effectively than Dell’s air-cooling solution. The H2C hybrid cooling system combines a liquid radiator, a thermoelectric cooling module and control circuitry to optimize CPU cooling with minimal power. Ideal for gaming enthusiasts, the system is designed to help the XPS 710 H2C Edition stay cool in overclocked mode—up to 9 degrees cooler even when you clock it up to a speed of 3.2GHz.

If you would have told someone two years ago that Dell was going to sell overclocked and water-cooled gaming PCs, you might have been laughed out of your own LAN party. But it’s doing it, and the H2C is the clearest sign yet that Dell is not content to be “almost as good” as its rivals in the gaming PC space.

Purchasing from Dell’s website

We’ve evaluated Dell’s website purchasing many times before, and nothing has changed. The process is still a bit unwieldy for our tastes, since there are four pages of components and add-ons, and since Dell often times includes certain components you might not want, you need to check every page to make sure your configuration is exactly the way you want it. Luckily, Dell includes a very handy chart on the right-side of the page that shows your current configuration, so it’s easy to look and see if there are any unwanted items in your configuration. It’s not the worst we’ve seen, nor is it the best – rather, it’s somewhere in the middle.

The PC-building process takes place in four stages, and each has its own tab at the top of the page. There are Build my Dell, Add my Accessories, Choose my Software, and Protect my Investment. Within each tab is a handful of component categories, and clicking one brings up the available options for that category. You can click on any tab at any time, and even click the fifth “Confirm and add to cart” at any time, too, which is helpful if you don’t want to muck around with digital cameras, surge protectors, routers, and the like.

With the H2C, there are very few choices in the main hardware categories, simply because this PC is a very specific configuration and is “high-end” only. For example, you have to buy an “Extreme” processor, either in quad- or dual-core trim. It would be appreciated if there were more CPU options here, but it appears Dell is only willing to overclock Core 2 Extreme processors, which come from the factory with unlocked multipliers, making overclocking quite easy (it’s easier since you just change the multiplier rather than fiddling with FSB settings).

You also do not have a choice for video cards, as two NVIDIA 8800 GTX cards in SLI are the only option available. Oddly, if you click on the link to “Video Learn More” [sic] a cartoon character woman talks about onboard versus discrete graphics and so forth, which seems totally out of place since the only option available on the H2C is SLI graphics. It would also be wise for Dell to customize these sound bites to be actually related to the window you are in rather than being so generic that they can be applied to any PC Dell offers. For example, there is no mention of what RAID is or what it does on the hard drive selection screen, but rather generic sound bites about capacity differences between drives.

In the other categories, the options are plentiful, with one exception – the operating system. Since NVIDIA is still working out the bugs with Vista and SLI, good ol’ Windows XP is the only available option on this PC. Dell notes on its website:

While Dell continues to validate the compatibility of Windows Vista with popular gaming software & accessories, we will continue to offer XPS 710 customers Windows XP operating systems.

Once we had selected the main components, we skimmed through the other tabs and finalized our configuration. We were happy to see Dell had not added any unwanted components to our build, aside from a keyboard and mouse. Once we were finished we confirmed our order and were presented with a lovely spec sheet with all of the components we had selected. We were even allowed to “edit” any of the selections if we had made a mistake.

Also, though we expected to be bombarded with “must have upgrades” or similar, the only “essential add-on” pictured on our order page was a wireless router, which could actually be useful for most people.

Once we had added our system to our cart, we were notified that Dell is offering free ground shipping, and that our PC would most likely ship in ten days, which is lightning fast compared to what you’d get from smaller integrators. From there you must register with Dell, and proceed to checkout.

We received order confirmation on February 15th, it shipped eight days later on the 23rd, and it arrived four days later on the 27th. Overall, a 12-day turnaround is incredible for a system of this caliber, as boutique integrators often require a month, or longer, to build, test, and ship the system. Of course, there’s a big difference in resources between Dell and a boutique builder, and we see the result of Dell’s size in how fast it can get a top-end PC to the customer.