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Dell XPS 630

post #1 of 5
2/26/08 at 12:58pm
Thread Starter 
PC Magazine reviews the New Dell Mid-Range XPS 630.
CrossFire or SLI capable and a starting price below $1500.
Includes 750 Watt power supply.
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post #2 of 5
2/26/08 at 3:55pm
From the review:

Quote:

The Dell XPS 630 ($1,269 direct) represents Dell's entry into the sub-$1,500 gaming PC space. Not everyone needs a $5,000+ gaming box, especially if you just want to play the games and don't care much about frame rates. You won't be raving about the Dell's blazing performance at 1,920-by-1,200 resolution, but you will be able to say, "I can play Crysis." The unit can also be fitted later with either ATI CrossFire or nVidia SLI dual-card systems, so this is a gaming box that you'll be able to upgrade to your heart's desire. It's a smidge more expensive than its direct competition, but that extra $170 is totally worth it.

Most gaming boxes at this price point come with only one graphics card, and the XPS 630 is no different. It comes with a dual-core Intel Core 2 Duo E8200 processor and a 512MB nVidia GeForce 8800 GT card—one of the better single graphics cards out there. You can add another 8800 GT (for $300 more) to get nVidia's SLI performance configuration. The XPS 630 is notable because although it uses the nVidia nForce 650 SLI motherboard chipset, it's also compatible with the ATI Radeon CrossFire dual-card solution. This gives both ATI and nVidia fans options for configuring or upgrading.


Quote:
The Dell XPS 630 finally shows that you can get a gaming performance system for under $2,000. Heck, this shows that under $1,500 is the sweet spot for the frugal high-end gamer. Sure, you could build it yourself for less, but then you'd have to assemble it and be your own tech support. That's a lot of time and effort for a savings of maybe $150 to $200. At those rates, you may be better off spending a couple hundred extra bucks for a system that is perfectly workable out of the box and is fully capable of being upgraded later if you want higher frame rates or want to play games with more detail. The XPS 630 is that system.

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post #3 of 5
2/26/08 at 10:09pm
Nice system, I do regret not having the 750w PSU of that system but it's alright, saved probably $500 by just getting the 420 instead of the 630 I guess.


Either way, cooler look rather than the general dimension look they used to have.
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post #4 of 5
2/29/08 at 1:30am
Thread Starter 
20% off XPS 630 $1699 or more 8$2$N24WDSFH1K.
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post #5 of 5
3/8/08 at 11:35pm
Thread Starter 
I has one.

Base model no frills. Got parts to upgrade just waiting on new HDD's and memory to arrive.


Base model gets a WEI of 5.0 due to the memory (667mhz) So that's first to go.
Next is the HDD which was a base 320gb model which gets bounced for two 160GB in RAID 0 and two 1TB in RAID 1.
Comes with an 8800 GT which I'll double up on.
Then I'll run it against last year's PC.
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