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): Metro Last Light And Shadow Of Mordor

Metro Last Light Redux

DirecX11 Gaming Performance

Metro Last Light Redux boasts some of the best 3D visuals on the PC platform and includes a DX11 rendering mode that makes use of advanced depth of field effects and character model tessellation for increased realism. This title also supports NVIDIA PhysX technology for impressive in-game physics effects, though we left them disabled here. We tested the game at resolutions of 2560x1600 and 3840X2160 (4K) with its in-game image quality options set to Very High and DOF effects disabled.

Metro Last Light Redux

Dell XPS Tower Special Edition Metro Last Light 4K

The XPS Tower Special Edition puts up more strong numbers in Metro Last Light, though again it falls behind Lenovo's IdeaCentre Y710 Cube. Dell is using a more compact case, and considering how audible the fans get when the system is under load, our best guess is that, in addition to software / driver differences, the Dell machine is not able to maintain boost clocks as long as the Y710 Cube. That said, performance is still very good here.

If you plan to game at 4K on this system (as configured), you will have to play around the settings, depending on the game. In Metro Last Light, this setup only averaged 18 fps, which is not playable.

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor Performance

Glorious Orc-Slaying Vengeance

Monolith’s surprisingly fun Orc-slaying title delivers a ton of visual fidelity even at the lowest quality settings. So, to maximize eye candy while also heavily taxing the cards, we ran the game's built in benchmark with its Ultra quality settings at a couple of resolutions, topping out at 4K on these tricked-out dragster gaming PCs.

Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor

At first glance, it appears the XPS Tower SE tripped over itself in Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, where it finished in last place at all three resolutions tested. However, we have a smaller sample size to work with here, and if looking closely at the numbers, the performance is not bad. Even at 4K, the XPS Tower SE managed over 55 fps on average. And at 1080p, performance jumped to over 146 fps.