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

Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a couple of final data points— namely, power consumption and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored acoustics and tracked how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter.

Total System Power Consumption And Acoustics

Tested at the Outlet

Our goal was to give you an idea of how much power each configuration used while idling and also while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet.

We measured the load wattage on this system by running a combination of Prime95 and Furmark for an extended period of time and then taking note of peak usage. This gives us an idea of a worst case scenario. In this case, the XPS Tower Special Edition hovered around 27W at idle and peaked at 324W under a load. Those are favorable numbers, considering the hardware.

The load wattage is also roughly in line with what Outer Vision's online power supply calculator estimates (using a Core i7-7700K, as it has not yet been updated with Coffee Lake selections), which is 354W with a recommended PSU wattage of around 400W. Dell went with a compact 460W PSU inside the XPS Tower SE, so there is a bit of headroom to play with.

XPS Tower SE Noise Profile

The XPS Tower SE is a quiet machine when bouncing around the web and doing other things that are not resource heavy. However, when gaming or otherwise stressing the system, things can turn noisy in a hurry. Even while running our gaming benchmarks, it did not take long for the fans to whir and generate quite a bit of noise. The system is currently loud enough to hear over headphones during quiet scenes, though will not drown out explosions or other louder in-game effects. Perhaps Dell can remedy this with a firmware update and new fan profile but currently, when the machine spins up, it's noticeable.

Tags: Reviews, Dell, XPS, geforce gtx 1070, coffee lake, xps special edition

Paul Lilly

Paul is a seasoned geek who cut this teeth on the Commodore 64. When he's not geeking out to tech, he's out riding his Harley and collecting stray cats.