Rolland Tellzen | October 30, 2007
MOST most of us are probably familiar with Moore's Law and expect that our technology is going to continue to get faster, stronger and more powerful.
You would want a very big and sturdy desktop indeed to fit this behemoth
The answer, of course, is there are always early adopters who are going to want the latest and greatest.
Those in the creative field, for example, will always want fast processors and graphics ability to sharpen their skills.
In many cases, though, it is the hobbyists, and in particular the games enthusiasts, who have the most incentive to go for the greatest and newest tech.
Dell is already offering a number of machines fitted out with quad-core processors.
Tech Check was expecting this week to look at its Dimension 9200, Dell's most powerful, more mainstream offering.
Be it by a stroke of luck or a reflection of who are the buyers for this class of computer, we got our hands on its more games-oriented offering, the XPS 720 desktop.
In truth, desktop is a bit of a misnomer.
You would want a very big and sturdy desktop indeed to fit this behemoth of a tower system on top of it.
The XPS 720 has to be one of the biggest tower cases that Tech Check has ever laid eyes on. Taking it out of its crate, er box, I wondered if we'd been sent a corporate minicomputer buy mistake.
Even under or beside a desk, it would take out a fair piece of real estate in a gamer's bedroom.
Not that you'd want to hide it. It is very stylish and impressive looking, with a sort of retro feel in its streamlined silver casing.
Plugging it in and switching it on, you truly get a sense of the power packed inside.
From the moment the electricity starts flowing, the fans start humming at a pitch and volume that sounds like a 747 engine or a nuclear reactor starting up.
I was a bit bemused by this show of strength and ready to write it off as a negative, but in truth the fans soon quietened down and surprisingly, even after a day's use, the casing didn't heat up too alarmingly at any time.
The front and back are packed with LED lights to enhance its appeal.
It may not be as impressive as many modified or self-built machines, but it sure looks better than the average off-the-shelf model. Aesthetics are all very well (probably especially for its target market), but the true test is the system's grunt.
Our resident PC games enthusiasts took one look at its graphics specs (NVIDIA 880 GTX) and exclaimed "Ripper", and there's no doubt it's a speedy system.
Certainly, on all our various benchmark tests and ratings, it scored at the top of the range of commercially available systems.
But this comes at a price.
At close to five grand it would want to be powerful.
And truth be told, for all its heavy specs, the keen build-it-yourself hobbyists about the place did sniff that they could probably build something even better for less expenditure in a smaller case.
We also had tut-tutting that tweaking it to run faster than its rated clock speed wasn't an option.
Thus we seemed to have a split on our hands between the more conventional users who were agog at this titan, and the tech enthusiasts who were altogether more critical.
That is probably not a good sign, as those tech enthusiasts are basically this machine's target market.
In all, the word that kept coming back to Tech Check's mind was excessive.
In size, performance and specs, everything seemed larger than life.
And then I kept coming back to Moore's Law. Surely, then, we can look forward to seeing such beasts of machines become more compact as the years, or even months, roll by.
Still, if you stick this in your home, it should have a long life span of impressing your gaming mates.
SPECIFICATIONS
Features: Intel Core 2 Quad-core Q6600, 500GB SATA hard drive, NVIDIA 8800 GTX, 4GB DDR2 memory, 16XDVD+/-RW
Price: $4999 (includes 20in monitor)
More at: www.dell.com.au
Rating: 7/10