Dell XPS 600

For a number of years my computer buying habits followed a fixed schedule: I would buy a new computer every two year, give my 2-year old computer to my wife, and throw out the 4-year old computer. My wife being new to computer games was mostly playing older, slower games, and thus didn't mind using a computer that was slightly outdated. But since a couple of months we are both playing WoW. Her computer is now 3-and-a-quarter years old, an Athlon XP 2000, 512 MB RAM, with a ATI Radeon 9600 Pro graphics card. And in spite of WoW being less demanding than EQ2, that configuration isn't powerful enough any more. In monster-hunting mode, with graphics details set low, the game runs fine. But using the auction house and mail box in Orgrimmar is a torture. By running the same scene simultaneously on both computers, I was able to make 100% certain that it is really a hardware problem, only the older computer was lagging badly. The newer Athlon XP 3000, 1 GB RAM, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro only had little lag, even in Orgrimmar, with graphics details set to high. Both computers are on the same ADSL router, so it wasn't a connection problem either.

Now I could have bought for about €1000 a computer about as powerful as mine and just replaced the wife's computer with that. But that would probably result in both computers being outdated simultaneously in 2 or 3 years. And even on my 1-and-a-quarter year old computer I do experience hardware related lag sometimes, for example in Alterac Valley battleground. Due to the development of PCI-Express replacing AGP, graphics cards have made a big leap forward. Processors haven't gained all that much in clock speed, but have learned new tricks like hyperthreading. And memory requirements have shot through the roof, the 1 GB that I considered generous one year ago I would now think of as essential.

So I decided to buy a new, more powerful computer, and give mine to the wife, as usual. So next question was where to buy it. Now I was quite happy with the laptop I bought from Dell, and a friend of mine bought a desktop PC from them and was satisfied as well. Furthermore Dell hits my sweet spot of ability to configure my PC. I do get options on their website, but I don't have to choose between millions of options. I neither want a pre-built computer I can change nothing in, nor do I want to assemble the thing myself out of the components. Dell is a good compromise there, and they do give good value for money.

So looking at the Dell website, I noticed that here in Europe they have a new offer, a special computer for gamers, the Dell XPS 600. You *could* put a dual-core CPU in there, two Geforce 7800 graphics cards working in tandem, 1.5 Terrabyte of hard disk, and buy it with a football-field sized flat screen for measly €5000. *Cough* Fortunately you can also get it with just a normal Pentium 640 3.2 GHz CPU, a single Nvidia Geforce 7800, 2 GB of RAM, and 250 GB of hard disk, no screen, for €2200. And that is what I ordered.

That follows an old philosophy of mine that I would rather spend more money on the "infrastructure", as in power supply, motherboard, cooling, and not take the most expensive CPU and graphics. Then I can always add more stuff later. The XPS 600 comes with a 650 W power supply, and lots of cooling fans. By not using the most heat-producing CPU and only one graphics card I will never run into power problems, and the fans will run relatively silently.

Nevertheless, in spite of taking nearly the minimum configuration of the XPS 600, the thing will be a lot faster than my current one. The Pentium 640 is a bit faster than the Athlon 3000, and its hyperthreading is supposed to help with firewalls and virus scanners running in the background while you play games. Doubling the RAM from 1 GB to 2 GB should help with WoW lag. And the Geforce 7800 is one of the fastest cards available right now, should be more than twice as fast as my Radeon 9800 Pro. I expect Dell to deliver the machine in about 2 weeks, and will probably be unable to keep myself from bragging about its incredible speed then. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 7:58 AM Permanent Link