It’s taken a bit of time to get around to blogging this, but Amy and I bought a new home PC recently. My old Dimension 8100 was showing it’s age (bought in 2000), and Dell had a great sale on President’s Day a few weeks back. All told, I saved almost 50% off the normal price on a brand-spanking new Dell XPS Gen 4 machine. Yes, that’s the one with the glowing faceplate, aimed at the gamer market. And yes, the front panel backlight can be changed to any of eight diferent colors. Silly, but cool nontheless. It’s a sweet piece of machinery. The specs:
P4 650 w/ hyperthreading (3.4 GHz, 800 front-side bus)
2GB 533MHz dual-channel DDR2 SDRAM
ATI Radeon x850XT/256MB Video Card
250GB SATA/7200RPM HD
Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
16x DVD/CD Burner, Double-Layer write capable
Anyway, the machine absolutely rocks. Most of the settings were fairly easy to migrate from the old machine (although some of our email seems to be lost to the ether), but boy oh boy – games run like butter on this bad boy. I’ve cranked up Far Cry and the Half-Life2 Demo to their absolute maximium, and there is no lag whatsoever. Battlefield Vietnam is a new-found joy to play. And I cannot wait for Band of Brothers to be released this week.
Related: AnandTech XPS Review
Related: Dell.com XPS Page
