Date:
Friday , December 16, 2005
Author:
Brian Boyko
Editor:
Chris Morley
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Dell Dimension XPS 400 Evaluation

Dell's new "XPS Experience" includes bloatware bogging down your system and causing all sorts of gaming problems. Is Dell's support able to undo their mess and actually deliver the gaming system you bought?

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Part I - Product Overview: Purchasing, Packaging, and Presentation

Dell Company History

Most computer users are familiar with Dell, if only because of its sheer size. According to the company description Dell filed with the SEC, and listed on the Nasdaq Web site under the stock listing for DELL:

Dell Inc. (formerly Dell Computer Corporation), with annual revenue of $41.4 billion, is a premier provider of computing products and services. As a result of its direct business model, Dell was the leading seller of computer systems worldwide and the number one seller in all customer segments in the United States during calendar 2003. Dell was founded in 1984 by Michael Dell on a simple concept: by selling computer systems directly to customers, it could best understand customer needs and efficiently provide the most effective computing solutions to meet those needs. Dell’s climb to market leadership is the result of a relentless focus on delivering the best customer experience by selling computer systems and services directly to customers. Dell is a Delaware corporation that was incorporated in May 1984. Dell is based in Round Rock, Texas and conducts operations worldwide through wholly owned subsidiaries.

The Dell Web site

Any company that places that much value on the direct sales to customers, then, should have a very good Web site.

The first thing we noticed when looking at the Dell Web site was that, unlike many Web sites that sell computers, there’s no direct link to the computer systems, just Home & Home Office; Gaming; Small Business; Medium & Large Business; and Government, Education, and Healthcare. To view all of Dell’s offerings requires going to each page.

Any one will take you, eventually, to the XPS area, which is the Dell high performance line.

We noticed that our computer, an XPS 400, looked like it had an identical chassis to the Dimension E510, but that you couldn’t get some options by selecting the E510 that you could with the XPS 400 line – notably, a video card suitable for gaming. Dell offers a wide range of products, but, because of the way the site is designed, it’s hard to compare them technically side-by-side.

Dell then offers four different configurations of the XPS 400 with different hardware, ranging in price anywhere from $899 to $1,858. We chose the lowest configuration with a few tweaks to get the system we ordered.

Dell’s choices seem to be limited depending on which computer configuration you choose. For example, you can choose between a Pentium 4 540 w/HT Technology, or three flavors of Pentium D dual core chips. You’re required to purchase an operating system, included in the price, although you could choose from Windows XP Home Edition or Windows XP Media Center at the same base price. You could add TV tuner cards, although which brand of TV Tuner card they are remains a mystery. Video cards are limited to a 128MB ATI Radeon X300 SE HyperMemory, a 256MB ATI Radeon X600 SE HyperMemory, a 256MB PCI Express NVIDIA GeForce 6800, and a 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 7800GT. You could choose between 512MB, 1GB, 2GB, and 4GB RAM solutions, although they all use 512MB DIMMs except for the 4GB solution.

There are a wide range of hard drive choices in multiple sizes and configurations, including RAID 0. Dell offers “Data Safe” that includes a “main hard drive plus a hidden reserve hard drive,” presumably for drive mirroring.

When it comes to the optical drives, the choices are a bit strange – you can choose from a DVD-ROM drive and a CD-RW drive, a DVD-Rom drive and a DVD+/-RW drive, and a CD-RW drive and a DVD+/-RW drive, but you can’t order a DVD-RW drive by itself.

You can also order monitors with the computer, with a 19” analog flat panel included in the price – or you can opt not to take the monitor and save $100.

You have the choice to use the integrated audio or an add-on audio card; speakers, like the monitor, come with the system, but you can opt not to get them. The computer comes with a keyboard, and an optical mouse, although you can choose to get a ball mouse for $10 less.

Finally, you can choose to buy office software preinstalled – at the low end, the Corel WordPerfect word processor only, on the high end, Microsoft Office Professional.

What does “XPS” stand for anyway?

In this evaluation, we’re going to be looking for value and stability first and foremost – but since this is Dell’s line of “high performance” computers – even at the relatively low price point—we’re going to be looking for performance out of this system. Since Dell markets this both as a high performance system and as a gamer’s system, we’d like to see a little bit of power to back those claims up.

The Boxes

We ordered the XPS 400 the day after Thanksgiving, and it arrived five calendar days later on a Wednesday. We received the speakers first, a few hours before the rest of the shipment. The computer and monitor came together in a big, heavy box branded with the Dell logo. The corners were solid and the box was in good shape.

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Opening it up, we found the PC and monitor were packaged well with custom foam blocks that were snug and secure against the sides. The monitor was on top in a separate box – we opened it up and set it on the table. We then removed a big square “XPS” box that contained the keyboard, mouse, cables, and CD-ROMs – there was much more room in this box than there were components to fill it.

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In total, we got a USB Keyboard and optical mouse, power cable, modem cord, bright blue Dell mouse pad, and a product information guide. As for software, we got a Dell branded CD for McAfee Security Center, a WordPerfect Productivity Pack CD, and an AOL disk, all of which noted that the programs had been pre-installed on the computer. We also got a XPS branded CD wallet, presumably for keeping these CDs in – there were no CDs in this wallet when we unpacked it.

The Product Information Guide didn’t have any specifications in them – just simple computer safety and warranty information.

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Conspicuous by absence: there were no motherboard or video card manuals, no driver discs, and no operating system discs – not even a disc-image based recovery solution – and there wasn’t any documentation we could find that explained how to recover the OS should it become corrupted.