12. Dell XPS 710 H2C

by Ed Tittel

It's not often that you see a big-name PC producer offering a seriously overclocked PC to the top end of the buying audience - especially not when the company in question owns the Alienware boutique operation, already famous for servicing the needs of extreme computing buffs. But the H2C in the product name, which stands for "water-cooled", is your first clue that the XPS 710 H2C aims somewhere above and beyond the ordinary PC user audience (the price tag is dead giveaway too, but more on that later). A quick look at the box doesn't tell the whole story, either.

The XPS 710 H2C looks like a high-end PC, but not so terribly extreme.

It's only when you start digging inside the box, or reading some specifications, that a sense of anticipation starts to grow. To begin with, you can choose between an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 quad core overclocked to 3.2 GHz (stock rate is 2.66 GHz) or an X6800 dual core overclocked to 3.46 GHz (stock rate is 2.93 GHz). You also get a motherboard with an Nvidia nForce 590 SLI chipset and dual 768 MB NVidia 8800 GTX graphics cards to match. Minimum memory configuration is 2 GB, and you can install up to 4 SATA hard disks (Dell will install only 3) with up to 2 TB of storage, RAID or not, as you chose. Phew! Things are starting to heat up already. Then there's the built-in water-cooling unit...

Even in high end PCs, you don't find that many water coolers; the XPS 710 H2C features a two-stage cooler that combines a liquid radiator, thermoelectric cooling, and control circuitry to keep the CPU cool and this unit quiet.

All in all this is a formidable machine, designed to make the most of available processor and graphics technology for a high-end gaming experience. You also get a 1,000 Watt power supply, lots of expansion slots, plenty of ports (10 USB, 7.1 high definition audio), 3 PCI slots, plus an additional PCI x1 and PCI x8 slot above and beyond the two PCI x16 slots for SLI graphics. Quite an awesome combination of capabilities, in fact.

Alas, you'll have to dig deep into the general exchequer to fund the acquisition of a Dell XPS 710 H2C. These units start at $5,500, and go up from there, depending on how you configure them. But any grad or dad lucky enough to wind up with one of these babies for a gift won't need to worry about adding CPU or GPU cycles for some time to come.