Dell's XPS 720 gaming machine reviewed

The folks at Extremetech got a chance to put the Dell's newest gaming rig, the XPS 720, through its paces recently, and although the price is still stratospheric at $7K, the test results came back mostly favorable. The crew tested a unit with a 2.93GHZ Core 2 Quad QX6800, 4GB of RAM, two SLI NVIDIA 8800 Ultra graphics cards, and an Ageia PhysX physics card, and found that the 720 consistently pumped out solid framerates even when the various test games were set to 1920x1200 with all details turned up, 4X anti-aliasing, and max anistropic filtering. Interestingly, turning on SLI resulted in a noticeable performance gain for DirectX 9 games, but DirectX 10 games received only a small boost -- something Extremetech chalks up to driver issues. Other than that, Dell seems to have built quite a monster with the 720 -- now if it only it could do something about that price tag.

[Thanks, mikemuch]