XPS 625 Desktop

 

Technology journalists love to evaluate high-end, bleeding-edge rigs like the HP BlackBird 002, the Alienware Area-51 m15x, and the Dell XPS 730 H2C. It's the geek equivalent of taking a half-million dollar sports car for a test drive. That said, when the drive is over we're reminded that we're still just consumer rabble stuck choosing between the Kias and Mazdas of the PC hardware world.

Which is why it's so nice to see a machine like the Dell XPS 625, an awesome little gaming rig that delivers both style and performance for just over a thousand bucks by eschewing frivolities such as liquid cooling systems, Blu-ray drives, and tool-less design in favour of the three pillars of gaming performance: processor, graphics, and memory.

Well, sort of. The tower's core components aren't exactly breathtaking, but they're powerful enough to let you run any game around on either medium or high graphics settings and at a decent resolution.

The entry level XPS 625 goes for about $1000 USD, $1200 Cdn. It has a 2.9 GHz AMD Athlon X2 5600+ processor (built on AMD's new Dragon platform), an ATI Radeon HD4850 graphics card with 512 MB of discrete RAM, and 2 GB of memory running at 800 MHz.

It won't set any performance records, but it does the trick -- especially once you start tinkering with a trio of handy pre-installed utilities that allow users to do things like overclock components from the desktop, shut down background Vista apps to free up processor cycles, and monitor fan speeds and interior temperatures.

In testing, the XPS 625 handled every game we threw at it. We eked out a satisfying 40 frames-per-second from World in Conflict on a mixture of medium and high graphics settings and running at a resolution of 1680-by-1050. Call of Duty: World at War ran flawlessly with visual settings set to high and at full 1920-by-1200 resolution. Even Crysis: Warhead, one of the most visually sophisticated games of all time, hummed along nicely with graphics and resolution set to mid levels.

And the box looks slick, to boot. Its brushed aluminum case is highlighted by the buyer's choice of either black or red grills, and fully customizable AlienFX lighting illuminates the front and back panels -- handy for hooking up cords in the dark. It's not garish or gaudy, but there's no mistaking the XPS 625 as anything but a gaming rig.

As usual, Dell offers all sorts of customization options, ranging from dual graphics cards and quad-core processors to memory and network solutions designed specifically for gaming, but these options can jack up the price of the rig to well over three bills, which sort of defeats the purpose of a budget gaming machine. Conversely, you could probably build your own tower with similar components for a couple hundred dollars less than the XPS 625, but that's a hassle and it probably won't look as pretty or have innards that are as neatly organized as Dell's machine.

Simply put, if you're looking to buy a gaming rig right now, the XPS 625 deserves consideration. Its performance-to-price ratio is wholly satisfactory (though if you have a few extra bucks to spare you might buy a couple additional gigs of RAM), and its innards are fully customizable for future growth. There aren't many better options for budget-conscious PC gamers.

Details
Reviewed: Feb. 16, 2009
Type: Computer, Gear
From: Dell


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