Dell's XPS 630 is a stylish and competitively priced mainstream gaming PC that can be souped up with extras such as an Ageia PhysX accelerator, a Blu-ray Disc drive, and up to 4GB of DDR2-800 Corsair Dominator memory. And though Dell recently integrated its XPS and Alienware development teams for future products, a spokesperson confirmed that the company will fully support current XPS notebooks and desktops (such as the high-end 730 H2C, the multimedia-themed XPS 420, and the iMac-rival One) for the remainder of what is typically a 12-month life-cycle for these products. The company declined to confirm when the first Alienware/Dell hybrid systems are likely to appear.
Our $3229 XPS 630 system (the price drops to $2889 without the bundled 22-inch Dell SP2208WFP monitor, and lesser configurations start at $1199; pricing is as of June 6, 2008) packed 3GB of RAM and Intel's 3-GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6850 processor--an older quad-core chip that continues to deliver strong performance. Two speedy 160GB, 10,000-rpm Western Digital Raptor hard drives configured in a RAID 0 array provide a modest 320GB storage. The system also carried dual 512MB nVidia GeForce 8800 GT graphics boards bridged as one via SLI (nVidia's Scalable Link Interface).
Our $3229 XPS 630 system (the price drops to $2889 without the bundled 22-inch Dell SP2208WFP monitor, and lesser configurations start at $1199; pricing is as of June 6, 2008) packed 3GB of RAM and Intel's 3-GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6850 processor--an older quad-core chip that continues to deliver strong performance. Two speedy 160GB, 10,000-rpm Western Digital Raptor hard drives configured in a RAID 0 array provide a modest 320GB storage. The system also carried dual 512MB nVidia GeForce 8800 GT graphics boards bridged as one via SLI (nVidia's Scalable Link Interface).
