Dell XPS One 27 All-in-One Desktop, Ivy Bridge-Infused

Futuremark PCMark Vantage Simulated Application Performance

Right off the bat, Dell swiped the all-in-one performance crown off the top of HP's TouchSmart 520 and plopped it on the XPS One 27. It wasn't a dominating display of a changing in the guard in PCMark Vantage, but a solid 300-point difference, which underscores the swagger Intel's Ivy Bridge and NVIDIA's Kepler bring to the mobile and in this case, desktop dance floor. Had we kept running this benchmark, the 32GB mSATA SSD would likely have put even further distance between the two systems as it caches frequently used files.

Much more telling was Futuremark's PCMark 7 benchmark, in which Dell's system topped HP's by nearly 2,000 points (4,625 versus 2,547). The primary reason for this is that Dell used a faster spinning hard drive (7200RPM), along with the 32GB mSATA SSD mentioned above. Whereas Dell's system posted a system storage score of 4,521, HP's managed just 1,743. The use of faster storage will pay dividends almost across the board when it comes to performance, whether it's transferring files, navigating Windows, or loading up applications.

Futuremark 3DMark Vantage Synthetic DirectX Gaming

The latest version of Futuremark's synthetic 3D gaming benchmark, 3DMark Vantage, is specifically bound to Windows Vista-based systems because it uses some advanced visual technologies that are only available with DirectX 10, which isn't available on previous versions of Windows.  3DMark Vantage isn't simply a port of 3DMark06 to DirectX 10 though.  With this latest version of the benchmark, Futuremark has incorporated two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, in addition to support for the latest PC hardware.  We tested the graphics cards here with 3DMark Vantage's Performance preset option, which uses a resolution of 1280x1024

Now would be a good time to look away if you're squeamish. What Dell's XPS One 2710 did to the competition in 3DMark Vantage is nothing short of a blood bath and goes to show how well NVIDIA's Kepler architecture translates over to the mobile platforms that many of these all-in-one systems are based on. The GeForce GT 640M is a mid-range graphics chip with 384 CUDA cores and a 128-bit memory bus. By comparison, the Radeon HD 6450A HP uses in its TouchSmart 520 is an entry-level GPU with 160 shaders and a 64-bit memory bus. Throw in an Intel Ivy Bridge 3rd generation Core processor and a faster storage subsystem and you can see why Dell dominated this category so convincingly.


We wouldn't classify Dell's XPS One 27 as a high-end gaming machine, but clearly this spunky AIO is packing some pixel pushing juice. The score here is nearly four times higher than the TouchSmart 520, which only mustered 541.


The last of our Futuremark benchmarks, Dell goes out with a bang by putting up a very respectable 630 score in 3DMark 11's Extreme preset. NVIDIA's Kepler's a cold blooded killer, folks.