Dell XPS 710 H2C Performance Gaming System

The system was left "as delivered" for the duration of benchmarking. Nothing was installed or altered, with the exception of the necessary benchmarking software. A wide variety of custom built test rigs were used for comparison in the benchmarks. The test rigs were divided into two groups; one group was used for the general, rendering and productivity benchmarks, while the second group was used in the gaming tests. Combined, the test rigs cover a wide range of system configurations and should give us a good idea of how the XPS 710 H2C performs.

The HotHardware Test Systems The Reference Rigs

Processors - Motherboards - Video Cards - Memory - Audio - Hard Drive -

Hardware Used: Core 2 Extreme QX6700 (2.66GHz) Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93GHz) Core 2 Extreme E6700 (2.66GHz) AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 (2.8GHz) Intel 975X Express NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS ATI Radeon X1950 XTX 2x1GB Corsair PC-6400 Integrated Western Digital Rapter WD740ADFD 10,000RPM - SATA II - 74GB

Operating System - DirectX - Video Drivers - Synthetic (DX) - DirectX - DirectX - OpenGL - OpenGL -

Relevant Software: Windows XP Pro or Media Center DirectX 9.0c NVIDIA Forceware v97.92 ATI Catalyst 6.12 Benchmarks Used: 3DMark06 v1.0.2 F.E.A.R. v1.0.8 Half Life 2 - Episode 1 Quake 4 v1.3 Prey v1.2 Cinebench WorldBench 5.0 PCMark 2005 LameMT

Preliminary Benchmarks with SiSoft SANDRA 2007 Synthetic Testing

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. SANDRA consists of a set of information and diagnostic utilities that can provide a host of useful high-level information about your hardware and OS. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2007 suite (CPU, Multimedia, Memory and File System) with the Dell XPS 710 H2C.

All of the scores reported below were taken with the XPS 710 H2C's processor running at its shipping clock speed of 3.2GHz, which is a Dell factory-set overclock backed up by the warranty.

CPU 3.2GHz		Multimedia 3.2GHz
Memory DDR-667 (333MHz)		Hard Disk - RAID 0 160GB X 2

Things ran pretty much as expected with SANDRA. The CPU and Multimedia scores were some of the fastest on the list of reference systems, in some cases by a wide margin. Nothing available on SANDRA's comparison list could come close to the performance of the factory overclocked Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 quad core processor. The pair of 10K RPM 160Gig WD Raptor drives also put forth a good show. While the two drives only offer a combined 320 GB of storage space, this is more than sufficient for a gaming machine. If your not satisfied with just 320 GB, you can choose to forgo the ultra fast Raptors for a pair of 500 GB drives in RAID 0, for a total of 1 TB of storage, at only $20 more. Dell offers a very flexible set of storage options for the XPS 710 H2C and everyone should be able to find a configuration to fit their needs.

The XPS 710 H2C displayed its one true weakness in the memory bandwidth test. Dell's implementation of the NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI chipset technically limits the XPS 710 H2C to officially supporting DDR2-667 memory, rather than DDR2-800 speeds. However, it would have been completely within reason for Dell to drive these timings with this chipset and decent performance memory from the likes of Corsair, Kingston or OCZ etc.  Alas, Dell used four sticks of Samsung PC2-5300 RAM with 5-5-5-15 timings in the XPS 710 H2C, hardly what we would call "performance" RAM. These disadvantages cause the overall memory performance to take a hit but how will this effect overall system performance? Lets move on to some more benchmarks and shed some light on the matter.