Very good deal for an off the shelf computer, Heck very good performance for any current tech computer. Great job dell I love the cooling system but wonder if this thing would perform better with 3 3870 OC's a gig and a half of ddr4 should perform better than 2 gigs of ddr3 should it not? Of course you' lose a GPU to but from what I've seen benchmark wise 3 of the ATI or NVIDIA card generally outperform 4 for some odd reason. The memory is the only thing I can think of unless it's threading and the increased bandwidth of a ddr4 bus related to that of a ddr3 bus on the component.

 i could of sworn dell h2c used coolit... (maybe they used to) glad to see they arent coolit tends to be hit and miss (my fan on my unit sometimes wont start up... not too big of a problem just annoying to have to check it at start up... once its up its good! )

edit- seems that the problem was the wiring... they looped the molex... (hoping that i fixed the problem by puting in an extra molex... hoping...) 

 Only regret that they use 3870X2 instead of 9800GX2 :)

Nice system. Did any of you noticed how Alienware's quality dropped like year ago? They use to have first the newest hardware and everything maxed out. Now, you have to wait like two months to see latest tehnology...

 alienware quality dropped before that when they used bloat ware with their systems and got those UGLY cases. ohh and i remember alienware holding back systems for reviewers unless they were "gauranteed" a favorable review.

alienware sucks. xps is good bang for buck (in high end imo) smoothcreations/voodoo/falcon northwest for premiums! 

ice_73:

xps is good bang for buck

Honestly back a couple years ago I never expected Dell to get into the high end market.

amdcrankitup:

ice_73:

xps is good bang for buck

 

Honestly back a couple years ago I never expected Dell to get into the high end market.

Well I guess what I was getting at that now they are geared more to the enthusiasts! Never thought I see them put out a Modded case with hardware also geared for upper end Gaming!

SqUiD267:

Dell needs more customers, appealing to the high end percentage of pc owners is a good tactic.

Hmm, I dunno about that.  High end enthusiasts are more likely to build their own, I think.  Plus there can't be that many high end people compared to most of the market.

We actually bought an XPS 710 at my work, to use as a flight simulator visualization PC.  This was because we had to buy Dells thru our MIS department, and it was the only way to get a decent graphics card in a Dell PC at the time.

It looks like they fixed the power button on the XPS 730... On the XPS 700/710, if you pushed the power button IN, it would bust off, and fall inside the front panel!  The "button" was actually part of an elaborate lever contraption, which actuated to a small button on an overly complicated circuit board(which also drove all the "cool LEDs") that was mounted higher up behind the front panel assembly... you had to PULL the button UP, not push it in...this was not obvious to ANYBODY.  Really bad design.

The other stupid thing is the locking mechanism... it uses the puny Kensington laptop style locking mechanism, instead of a big loop that would allow a simple padlock... it is easily defeatable by cracking the plastic lip coming off the side cover.   At least the computer is so huge that thieving punks won't be able to carry the box down the street without being noticed.

- Stewart Teaze