Dude I got a Dell
Yes, I ended up buying a Dell Dimension XPS Gen 4 for my gaming PC. Why would I do that, especially after writing a blog about building your own computer? I think it's best to answer these questions in a mock Q&A session:
So what happened to the custom AMD Athlon 64 system I thought you were going to build?
Quite frankly it was due to the extremely poor availability of the parts I wanted. Since I only upgrade my PC every three or so years I wanted to buy parts that had some longevity built in. This meant getting a motherboard that supported PCI Express video cards, SATA hard drives and DDR-2 RAM. That meant in order to go with an AMD Athlon 64 system I would have to pick the only motherboard chipset that supported PCIe at the time, the NVIDIA nForce 4. It turns out that NVIDIA paper launched another product with the nForce 4 chipset and it wasn't available for purchase until several months later but only using the expensive SLI version. Since available was so tight and demand so high, vendors were charging $330+ for motherboards based on this chipset. I thought that was a ridiculous price to pay considering the AMD Athlon 64 +3500 processor I wanted was only going for about $210 at the time. Another component I wanted was the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT PCI Express video card, but again extremely limited availability and high demand brought the street price of this card way above what I thought was reasonable. Because of this and the fact that I couldn't wait any longer to play the latest games (Doom 3 and Half-Life 2) I ended up buying from Dell.
But why Dell and not from another OEM manufacture?
Believe me I looked around. I checked out similar configurations from HP, Compaq, Sony, Alienware, Falcon Northwest, BoXX, IBM and various other OEM companies and nobody came close to the Dell pricing and part configuration I was looking for. Dell really is the mass market king as they buy in huge volumes and pass the savings onto the consumer. They were also one of the few OEM's to even offer a version of the video card I was looking for, the Nvidia GeForce 6800 GTO (The performance of the GTO lies in between the standard 6800 and the 6800 GT). I'm well aware that Dell has a reputation of being a mainstream producer of PC's for people that don't know how to build their own systems but having built my last 3 PC's I'm really tired of the hassle. I just wanted a quiet, lean, fast system with a decent looking case.
Front view of the Dell Dimension XPS Gen 4
But aren't you concerned about not being able to overclock the system?
No, not really. I've never been a fan of overclocking. For one reason it immediately voids the warranty of your system. I didn't want to buy a brand new system to get no support on it. It also increases the need for more exotic cooling and thus would increase the sound level of the computer. For me silence is golden and what ever minor speed increase I would get from overclocking wouldn't be worth it for me.
What about upgradability, I heard Dell uses proprietary parts?
Yes Dell does use proprietary cases, motherboards and the power supplies but I did my research and knew this before I bought it so I was willing to accept this risk. I tend to upgrade my entire system anyways so I will probably buy another box during my next upgrade cycle. This doesn't mean I can't upgrade anything as I can add two more hard drives for additional storage and configure them in a RAID 0 or 1 setup. I can replace the graphics card down the road if I need to using the 16x PCI Express slot. I can upgrade the processor to Intel's latest Prescott based CPU. I can add an additional two 5.25" optical drives. I can't imagine myself needing to upgrade to a bigger power supply anytime soon since the XPS comes standard with a 460 Watt model and if I need a new motherboard down the road I can always pick the latest Dell one from eBay.
These are the specs I ended up getting:
Intel Pentium 4 550 (3.4GHz Prescott processor)
Intel 925X chipset
1GB DDR-2 RAM
nVidia GeForce 6800 GTO 256MB video card
160GB 7200 RPM SATA Hard Drive
16X DVD-ROM Drive
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS (D) Sound Card
17" Dell UltraSharp 1704FPT Flat Panel Display
Dell had a free color printer promotion along with a free 17" LCD display which I upgraded to the better UltraSharp model. It offers a 13ms reponse time which is great for games. I also took advantage of a 30% off coupon I found online.
So, how's the performance?
Simple awesome. Bear in mind my previous computer was a Intel Pentium III 1GHz system with a 64MB GeForce 3 video card so jumping to a 3.4GHz P4 with a 256 MB GeForce 6800 GTO was huge jump. I run both Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 at my display's maximum resolution (1280x1024) with all the eye candy turned on and the performance is excellent.
Is it quiet?
Yes compared to my old PC it is very quiet, but not as quiet as my G5 or iMac, and definitely not as quiet as Rob's HP workstation but I'm happy with its lack of noise nonetheless.
Any problems so far?
None that I consider significant although the front bezel door doesn't seem to close very gracefully, it seems to take a hard snap before it closes. Also the case really is just plastic although it appears to be metallic from the pictures. The inside has a bit of clutter especially when I compare it to my PowerMac G5. I've also noticed that Doom 3 experienced some tearing artifacts with fast moving scenes but I discovered that this was due to the limitations of LCD technology and was not a driver issue.
Any upgrades you want to do in the near future?
I'm currently saving for some 5.1 speakers so I can listen to the upcoming Doom 3 expansion pack in all its Digital Surround Sound glory.
One more thing, Rob asked about the multicolored front bezel. Yes it can display any of the colors you see below, but I think it looks cheesy so I decided to just turn it off.
Pretty colors
So what happened to the custom AMD Athlon 64 system I thought you were going to build?
Quite frankly it was due to the extremely poor availability of the parts I wanted. Since I only upgrade my PC every three or so years I wanted to buy parts that had some longevity built in. This meant getting a motherboard that supported PCI Express video cards, SATA hard drives and DDR-2 RAM. That meant in order to go with an AMD Athlon 64 system I would have to pick the only motherboard chipset that supported PCIe at the time, the NVIDIA nForce 4. It turns out that NVIDIA paper launched another product with the nForce 4 chipset and it wasn't available for purchase until several months later but only using the expensive SLI version. Since available was so tight and demand so high, vendors were charging $330+ for motherboards based on this chipset. I thought that was a ridiculous price to pay considering the AMD Athlon 64 +3500 processor I wanted was only going for about $210 at the time. Another component I wanted was the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT PCI Express video card, but again extremely limited availability and high demand brought the street price of this card way above what I thought was reasonable. Because of this and the fact that I couldn't wait any longer to play the latest games (Doom 3 and Half-Life 2) I ended up buying from Dell.
But why Dell and not from another OEM manufacture?
Believe me I looked around. I checked out similar configurations from HP, Compaq, Sony, Alienware, Falcon Northwest, BoXX, IBM and various other OEM companies and nobody came close to the Dell pricing and part configuration I was looking for. Dell really is the mass market king as they buy in huge volumes and pass the savings onto the consumer. They were also one of the few OEM's to even offer a version of the video card I was looking for, the Nvidia GeForce 6800 GTO (The performance of the GTO lies in between the standard 6800 and the 6800 GT). I'm well aware that Dell has a reputation of being a mainstream producer of PC's for people that don't know how to build their own systems but having built my last 3 PC's I'm really tired of the hassle. I just wanted a quiet, lean, fast system with a decent looking case.
Front view of the Dell Dimension XPS Gen 4
But aren't you concerned about not being able to overclock the system?
No, not really. I've never been a fan of overclocking. For one reason it immediately voids the warranty of your system. I didn't want to buy a brand new system to get no support on it. It also increases the need for more exotic cooling and thus would increase the sound level of the computer. For me silence is golden and what ever minor speed increase I would get from overclocking wouldn't be worth it for me.
What about upgradability, I heard Dell uses proprietary parts?
Yes Dell does use proprietary cases, motherboards and the power supplies but I did my research and knew this before I bought it so I was willing to accept this risk. I tend to upgrade my entire system anyways so I will probably buy another box during my next upgrade cycle. This doesn't mean I can't upgrade anything as I can add two more hard drives for additional storage and configure them in a RAID 0 or 1 setup. I can replace the graphics card down the road if I need to using the 16x PCI Express slot. I can upgrade the processor to Intel's latest Prescott based CPU. I can add an additional two 5.25" optical drives. I can't imagine myself needing to upgrade to a bigger power supply anytime soon since the XPS comes standard with a 460 Watt model and if I need a new motherboard down the road I can always pick the latest Dell one from eBay.
These are the specs I ended up getting:
Intel Pentium 4 550 (3.4GHz Prescott processor)
Intel 925X chipset
1GB DDR-2 RAM
nVidia GeForce 6800 GTO 256MB video card
160GB 7200 RPM SATA Hard Drive
16X DVD-ROM Drive
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS (D) Sound Card
17" Dell UltraSharp 1704FPT Flat Panel Display
Dell had a free color printer promotion along with a free 17" LCD display which I upgraded to the better UltraSharp model. It offers a 13ms reponse time which is great for games. I also took advantage of a 30% off coupon I found online.
So, how's the performance?
Simple awesome. Bear in mind my previous computer was a Intel Pentium III 1GHz system with a 64MB GeForce 3 video card so jumping to a 3.4GHz P4 with a 256 MB GeForce 6800 GTO was huge jump. I run both Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 at my display's maximum resolution (1280x1024) with all the eye candy turned on and the performance is excellent.
Is it quiet?
Yes compared to my old PC it is very quiet, but not as quiet as my G5 or iMac, and definitely not as quiet as Rob's HP workstation but I'm happy with its lack of noise nonetheless.
Any problems so far?
None that I consider significant although the front bezel door doesn't seem to close very gracefully, it seems to take a hard snap before it closes. Also the case really is just plastic although it appears to be metallic from the pictures. The inside has a bit of clutter especially when I compare it to my PowerMac G5. I've also noticed that Doom 3 experienced some tearing artifacts with fast moving scenes but I discovered that this was due to the limitations of LCD technology and was not a driver issue.
Any upgrades you want to do in the near future?
I'm currently saving for some 5.1 speakers so I can listen to the upcoming Doom 3 expansion pack in all its Digital Surround Sound glory.
One more thing, Rob asked about the multicolored front bezel. Yes it can display any of the colors you see below, but I think it looks cheesy so I decided to just turn it off.
Pretty colors
posted by Marcos at February 26, 2005
2 Comments:
I was hoping you would talk about all the default apps and services that came preinstalled from the Dell factory. Did it ship with a "clean" desktop? I was worried my HP would be full of bloatware but was surprised that it came with a few performance utilities, but that was it. Nonetheless I reformated my harddrive a few months later. Lean and mean I say.
So what was the final price of the Dell? Have the AMD/Nvidia supplies improved since you bought the Dell? As an interesting side note, now even HP has finally broken the chains of Intel and is offering a top of the line xw9300 using the dual Opteron/NVIDIA nForce Professional platform.
Dell ships a boatload of useless apps with each home system. I played with them for about 2 hours before I performed a clean install. Lean and mean is the way to go.
I can't seem to find my original invoice for what I paid. I think it was around $1700 for everything.
I checked today for the parts I wanted. Asus now has a cheaper non-Deluxe SLI board for about $160 but the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT PCIe video card is still hovering around the $400 price point while its AGP brother is around $320. Both prices seem rather high considering NVIDIA says the retail price point for both these cards are $299.
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