Dell XPS 625 Phenom II Gaming System

Nice looking case a little cramped inside!I just glanced over the reveiw but is it me or is the motherboard installed where the CPU is at the bottom!

It is installed that way.  If you didn't notice, the system is essentually a BTX layout, down to the passive cooling.  I noticed that there is a place you can put a fan on the back panel behind the CPU.  I wonder if putting a fan there in pull format would help with the overall cooling off the system, though I'm sure a low rpm fan on the CPUs heat exchanger would help as well.

I have actually liked the way that dell machines have been looking the last few years, though I think some of that comes from Alienwares influence on their designs.

Overall, I think it is a nice looking system with only a change of cooling and a slightly lower price needed.

Nice article!  One correction I saw though, I think this is AMD's new "Dragon" platform though since it uses the Phenom II, not the "Spider" platform.

Hmm  For 1600 you can get the same system  with 8 gigs of ram ,640 gig hdd, and two 4850's in crossfire. Right on dells site.

Actually you cant get it configured the way your test rig was configured at all.

We have a Sun workstation at work and it has a similar looking heatsink on the CPUs.  At first I thought they were fanless but there is a fan sandwiched in the middle.  And it looks the same here.  All I can go off is the pictures but it looks like there is a wire coming out of the heat sink.  Plus it has the arrow pointing in the direction of the airflow.  If there was no fan in it, it wouldn't really matter what direction the heat sink was mounted.

Also, the fan on the motherboard looks like it's on the chipset, not the VRMs.  The VRMs should be under the heat sink right below the fan that is connected with the heat pipe.  It is too bad that they used a fan here when most other motherboards using the same chipset are fine without a fan.

As for the layout, It's just a standard ATX motherboard mounted upside down.  Lian-Li has some cases where they do the same thing.  BTX puts the CPU at the front of the motherboard right in front of the intake fan and would have the expansion slots at the bottom.

Also for 41549 i can get a dell studio xps 435 with a core i7, 6 gig ddr3 ram , a 24 inch widescreen monitor, and a 750 gig hdd drive.

So honestly its not really that good of a deal either. Its just a preference if you want amd or the faster core i7 which you can get in a dell machine for the same price or cheaper.

I could bouch for that XPS system since i got his sister the XPS630i and is a kick@ss machine!

is the same layout and in term of reliable well i haven't had a problem since they got their driver reconfigured...