Dell Studio XPS reviews – a powerful desktop PC

Wednesday, January 7, 2009, 6:26
Laptops
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The Dell has introduced a powerful desktop PC which provides excellent performance that completely justifies its price. But the PC has some issues related to its internal design. The Studio XPS is powered by 2.93GHz Intel Core i7 940 CPU and 6GB of DDR3 RAM. The CPU and RAM provide powerful performance in conjunction with each other.

The PC comes with pre installed Windows Vista Home Premium (64-bit) operating system. The Studio XPS provides a storage space of 500GB on its Western Digital Caviar Blue hard drive, which spins at 7200rpm. This is ample space for data storage but the hard drive is not the fastest among the competitors. The XPS will cost you $1999 without the display. You need to pay $349 extra if you go for 23-inch SP2309W display from Dell.

The system is on little slower side when it comes to graphics. Most competitors of XPS offer dual-GPU whereas the Studio XPS uses the 512MB ATI Radeon HD 4850, which not among the fastest graphics card in the market. Another issue with the XPS is its internal design. The system does not offer you any expansion option except space for single hard drive. Moreover, the drive needs to be screwed into the chassis. The system has two 5.25-inch bays, one of which houses the DVD reader/writer and the other one is used for Blu-Ray combo drive. The system has only one PCI Express x16 slot, which features a video card, whereas one TV tuner uses one PCI Express x8 slots out of the three. So, if you are looking for a desktop PC which can be upgraded later in the life, the Studio XPS is not for you.

The system offers you a number of ports and connectors which include four USB ports on the rear and four on the front panel, one FireWire 400 port on front and back panel, 5.1 surround sound, eSATA port, an optical S/PDIF jack, a single, media card reader and one Ethernet port.

You will get the standard Dell media keyboard. The keyboard is slightly smaller than the standard keyboard. The functions buttons can be used for application like Web surfing, media playback etc. A mouse is also included with the system. The mouse features two additional buttons for back/forward. The buttons are located near the thumb rest.