10. Performance Analysis

The XPS 720 H2C Edition PC is designed for extreme performance across several disciplines, with overclocking and graphics targeted especially at immersive gaming. So let's start out by considering the game performance difference both between its Windows XP and Windows Vista configurations, and between them and our own lower-cost "High-End" PC.

A 21% average performance increase in games is huge, considering that the games we tested can't take advantage of two processor cores on the Dell system. But that large gain can only be found in Windows XP: Windows Vista gets the XPS 720 H2C an average 108% performance gain over our "high end" system and actually loses in average Oblivion frame rates. We can't stress enough how poor a performance selection Microsoft's flagship operating system is for many current games.

Applications that can use four cores hand a huge lead over to Dell. Games won't usually benefit from the added expense, but most gamers don't use their systems exclusively for this purpose. Yes, the inability of Windows Vista to support our video encoding software will hurt this configuration's final score.

Tom's Hardware Guide's synthetic test suite shows similarity to game and application suites, including the odd benchmark that simply wouldn't run on Vista. The XPS 720 H2C wins big over our own system when using Windows XP.