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Extreme Performance: Dell XPS 730 Desktop

By Aloysius Low - 3 Dec 2008

Extreme Performance

Extreme Performance

We've thrown everything but the kitchen sink at the XPS 730 for our benchmarking tests and the system has held up its end of the deal for delivering extreme performance. The scores do speak for themselves, as can be seen, as the unit scored a very respectable amount in our older PCMark 05 test with a score of 10256 marks. CPU was especially high at 9300 marks, but there's no reason why it shouldn't be high given its an Intel Core 2 Extreme processor.

3D performance was also another area where the XPS 730 stood out. 3DMark06 results were spectacular, scoring 14,477 marks. We even threw in a comparison of one of the fastest current desktop replacement notebooks, the XPS M1730, in to the score mix just to give you another analogy of speed. The XPS 730 desktop monster was also seen doing pretty well on the Crysis benchmark with very respectable score sans anti-aliasing. Do note however, that the scores for the benchmarks are also influenced by the processor and in this case, the XPS 730 processor does play a part for the numbers you see here.

For another comparison on how the latest series of NVIDIA GTX 200 graphics cards fare with the GeForce 8800 Ultra SLI combo on this gaming rig, we've also included the scores from a GTX 260 class graphics card from one of our testbeds with a similar base specification as the XPS 730. As you can see, the top GeForce 8 graphics card in SLI is extremely fast, but it does lap up more watts.

To really experience the unit though, we took the XPS 730 out for a spin on Ubisoft's latest FPS shooter - Far Cry 2 to see how high we could crank up the settings without hampering the actual game play. As always, benchmarking can only score you pretty numbers, but it's really how smooth everything feels that counts at the end of the day.

We cranked up Far Cry 2 at native resolution with Ultra High settings with 8x AA and proceeded to start the campaign mode and found the experience sluggish and immediately set upon to tweak the settings downward until we found our comfort zone at Very High with 4x AA. That's still pretty impressive if you ask us, and the 27-inch monitor provides an immersive experience for the eyes. Also, if you're interested, here are the numbers for our benchmark for Far Cry 2 that really shows there isn't too much of a difference between resolutions with AA disabled; though with 4x AA enabled, the difference between resolutions becomes obvious.

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