Dell XPS 630 Desktop
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If you’ve followed the tech sector for any
appreciable amount of time, you’ve no doubt
heard the tale of Dell Inc. - one of those stories
where a guy with a dream founded a company and eventually
built it into a corporate giant. Right from the beginning,
Michael Dell believed that the future of PC sales
involve building and selling customized IBM PC-compatible
computers directly to home users. The first computer
of their own design, labeled the “Turbo PC”
helped the company gross more than 73 million dollars
in its first year alone. And by the turn of the century,
Dell would become the largest seller of personal computers,
with sales reported to be close to $25 billion dollars.
All good things must come to an end, as they say,
and the last decade brought with it a global PC sales
slump, as well as increased competition from manufacturers
including Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and Gateway. When
Dell lost its PC sales lead in 2006 following the
union of Compaq with HP, Dell looked for a new avenue
to increase their ownership base: gamers. Acquiring
Alienware in March of that year, Dell gained some
insight into leveraging their own customizable selling
base with the hardware specs that more discriminating
users craved. To further their efforts, Dell even
partnered up with Vivendi Universal with product placement
in their expansion pack F.E.A.R. Extraction Point
- a move mostly unheard of heretofore.
The past couple of years we have seen Dell’s
focus on gaming desktops with their XPS series sharpen,
and today will see their latest offering, the more
affordable XPS 630. Dubbed the “new challenger”,
the 630 is the beginning of a refresh of the XPS line,
with updated specs and component choices. Available
in black or red, the Dell XPS 630 is a customizable
machine with support for dual graphics cards and the
latest processors, and if we may say so, looks that
kill.
Our evaluation system came stocked with an NVIDIA
GeForce 8800GT and 2GB of Samung DDR2-667 memory.
Although the base unit ships with an Intel Core 2
Duo E8200 processor, we opted to test the XPS 630
with a Core 2 Quad Q6600 running at 2.4GHz. For added
benefit, we also took Dell up on an offer to test
not only some faster RAM in the form of Hynix DDR2-800
sticks, but also doubling up the number of GPUs by
throwing in an extra 8800GT in SLI. The keyboard,
mouse, and mousepad look capable enough for most users,
although the mouse is a simple two-button scrollwheel
variety. As with everything else, these two component
can be exchanged for higher-end peripherals such as
Razer’s Tarantula Gaming Keyboard or a Microsoft
Sidewinder USB Laser Mouse, for an additional cost.
The choice is yours.
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