Dell XPS Tower Special Edition (8930) Review: A Coffee Lake-Infused Sleeper Rig

Name: Dell XPS Tower Special Edition
Brand: Dell

by Paul Lilly — Thursday, October 19, 2017, 11:34 AM EDT

Dell XPS Tower Special Edition (8930): 3DMark, Unigene Heaven And Valley

Page 5: Dell XPS Tower Special Edition (8930): 3DMark, Unigene Heaven And Valley

Futuremark’s graphically intense 3DMark Fire Strike is designed specifically for gaming PCs. It has both Normal and Extreme modes: Normal runs at 1920x1080, while Extreme runs at 2560x1440 and is intended for high end gaming PCs.

Futuremark 3DMark Fire Strike

Simulated Gaming Performance

The benchmark uses tessellation, ambient occlusion, volume illumination, and a high quality depth of field filter. We tested the Dell XPS SE 8930 on the Extreme preset.

Dell XPS Tower Special Edition 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme

Dell XPS Tower Special Edition 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme FPS

The XPS Tower Special Edition is running a stock clocked GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card with 8GB of GDDR5 memory. With that kind of GPU firepower underneath the hood, this system is able to outpace a few multi-GPU solutions based on previous generation hardware. It also runs neck-and-neck with Lenovo's IdeaCentre Y710 Cube, which is using the same tier GPU.

Unigine Heaven and Valley

DirecX11 Gaming Performance

Unigine's Heaven 4.0 is a GPU-intensive benchmark that hammers graphics cards to the limits. It features hardware tessellation with DirectX 11 and focuses solely on the GPU with real-time global illumination, screen space ambient occlusion, volumetric clouds, and adjustable settings. Valley offers a similar evaluation, and like Heaven it can be used both as a benchmark and a stress testing tool.

Unigine Heaven 4.0

Dell XPS Tower Special Edition Heaven FPS

Turning our attention to Unigine's Heaven benchmark, we see more of the same, though this is slightly wider gap between the XPS Tower SE and IdeaCentre Y710 Cube. This could be chalked up to differences in drivers or variations in how long each system is able to run the graphics card at its fastest clockspeed. Either way, this is a strong showing by Dell's system.

We see more big numbers for the XPS Tower SE in Valley. Here Dell's system blast past the 100 frames per second threshold, averaging 110 fps and peaking at around 224 fps. The performance here is not far off from Dell's Alienware Aurora R5 with a GeForce GTX 1080 inside.