Dell Studio XPS 7100: Good from the Factory?

The tricked-out Studio XPS 7100 desktop Dell asked us to review is an interesting beast. A review of a factory desktop machine that isn't some powerhouse gaming beast with liquid cooling, factory overclock and optional sunroof might seem a little unusual here on a site with a readership full of people who like to roll their own. Yet machines like the Studio XPS 7100 have a reason for being and are worthy of any enthusiast's attention.

For some of us, building a machine can be a lot of fun and very rewarding; for others, it can be an exercise in hair-pulling frustration as parts that “should work” don't. Bad RAM, faulty motherboards, and other potential problems can mar the DIY experience. Other potential users may just be lapsed enthusiasts looking for a decent machine without having to read up on new tech, or enthusiasts that know what parts they want but don't feel inclined to spend the time assembling and tweaking a system. Perhaps you're after a powerful desktop for editing home video, doing photo work, and maybe enjoying an occasional game and you want to keep things as easy as possible.

The Studio XPS 7100 fills a profoundly useful niche by offering some of the latest technology available on the market in an attractive package. With it, Dell seeks to serve all of the aforementioned users and more.

Our review unit is Dell's top-end factory configuration for the Studio XPS 7100 line, and a couple of things on the spec sheet immediately jump out. The first is the brand new AMD Phenom II X6 1055T beating at the heart of it, a native six-core, 2.8GHz beast with 6MB of L3 cache and featuring AMD's Turbo Core technology. Turbo Core is a similar but arguably less efficient version of the Turbo Boost feature found in modern Intel Core processors, but it's capable of bumping core speed up to 3.3GHz on the 1055T under the right conditions. Still, even six 2.8GHz Phenom II cores pack enough muscle to get some serious computing done.

The other eyebrow-raiser in the Studio XPS 7100 is the ATI Radeon HD 5870, ATI's top-of-the-line single-GPU card. Ours is a bone-stock reference version with 1GB of GDDR5. You're undoubtedly familiar with the specs of the 5870, but for the sake of completeness, ATI's monster uses TSMC's 40nm fabrication process and is equipped with 1600 of ATI's stream processors running at a core clock of 850MHz. A 256-bit memory bus is connected to 1GB of GDDR5 running at an effective 4.8GHz. Finally, the card is DirectX 11-class hardware, and is capable of supporting up to three monitors simultaneously or even presenting all three transparently as a single screen in their Eyefinity configuration. While one of these monitors must be connected through DisplayPort (or an active DisplayPort adapter), our review unit was sent to us along with one of Dell's new and remarkably affordable E-IPS panel monitors, and those monitors include native DisplayPort connectivity. (We'll have a separate review of the display in the near future.)

Rounding out the core of the Studio XPS 7100 is 6GB of DDR3-1333 in the form of a pair of 2GB DIMMs and a pair of 1GB DIMMs. The 6GB is an odd choice; we would have liked to see Dell go whole hog and just include 8GB standard, since in order to make the upgrade later on you'll have to remove the two 1GB sticks. When you order off the site, it may be prudent to save yourself the trouble and pony up the $60 for the upgrade to 8GB.

Unfortunately, the chipset the memory and processor are plugged into is a bit antiquated these days. The MicroATX board in the guts of the XPS 7100 uses the 785G chipset with the SB750 Southbridge. The 785G's DVI and HDMI ports are actually blocked off by covers on the back of the tower, and a visit to the BIOS yielded no way to enable ATI's SurroundView. That's not a major loss given the three display outputs on the Radeon HD 5870, but the inclusion of the SB750 Southbridge alongside the shiny new Phenom II X6 is disappointing. The more modern SB850 with 6Gbps SATA ports and generally improved SATA performance over its predecessor would have been much appreciated.

Rounding out the machine are a single 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard disk spinning at 7200 RPM with 32MB of cache and a combination Blu-ray reader/DVD burner. Connectivity comes from an onboard Broadcom gigabit Ethernet port and Dell's own 1525 model PCIe wireless-n card. The wireless card is awesomely adorable, fitting into the PCIe x1 slot without extending at all beyond it and keeping a low profile, and it sits in the slot just above the Radeon HD 5870. Finally, audio duties are handled by a Realtek ALC887 HD audio controller.

Dell Studio XPS 7100 Closer Look

If nothing else, the Dell Studio XPS 7100 desktop is an attractive piece of kit. The case itself utilizes a lot of features that are becoming increasingly common in enthusiast cases. For starters, the power button is on top of the machine and glows with an attractive white LED when the system is on and orange when in standby. Behind it is an indented tray perfectly sized to fit stray CDs, and lining the top edge of that tray are two USB 2.0 ports, a headphone jack, and a mic jack.

The face of the machine is kept spare, utilizing an attractive gray matte plastic with a chrome accent around it. Working down from the top, we start with a series of memory card readers. Below it are two optical drive bays hidden behind folding doors; pressing the gray button to the right ejects the drives. The folding mechanism works well, but if you manually fold down the door on the second bay you may be disappointed to see the metal placeholder of the case interior. It's an odd lack of finish, but will spend its entire life being hidden behind the second door.

Beneath the optical drives is an external 3.5” bay that's opened by sliding the faceplate downward. The bay is empty apart from two USB 2.0 drives, but has a black plastic placeholder in it. Overall it seems curiously empty and most external peripherals for the bay these days would just be card readers (rendered redundant by the card reader at the top of the face), but it's a nice inclusion that improves expandability of the tower. The remainder of the face is the chrome Dell logo and a vent at the bottom, just above the Windows 7 and AMD Vision Black branding stickers.

The sides of the XPS 7100 are as uneventful as the sides of modern cases often are, featuring unobtrusive black paneling, but there's a wrinkle here. Perfectly aligned with the Radeon HD 5870 inside is an oblong vent on the side panel. It's debatable how necessary the vent is, but it's nice without being as conspicuous as a massive window and lets you peek inside at the reference Bat-cooler used on ATI's Radeon HD 5800 series.

The back of the machine is, praise it all, clean and well laid out. The power supply is in its traditional position at the top of the tower above the motherboard's port cluster and the case's 80mm exhaust fan. The port cluster itself is fairly barren but includes the essentials: four USB 2.0 ports, an Ethernet jack, an eSATA port, and the customary six jacks for 5.1 audio, line-in, and microphone. Above these are the aforementioned blocked off HDMI and DVI ports, with an optical port for audio at the top.

While a MicroATX build is great for saving space and the Studio XPS 7100 is certainly an attractive space saver, the major drawback lies in limited expandability. The included Radeon HD 5870 eats up fully half of the available slots, and the wireless-n card chews up another, leaving just a single open PCI slot. If you order down the chain and get a single slot video card it will open another PCIe x1 slot. Dell also only equips the board with four SATA ports, two of which are already in use when the machine arrives. While four are generally enough for most users, the media crowd looking at a machine like this may find themselves choosing between putting a FireWire card or SATA card in the spare PCI slot.

Finally, the included keyboard and mouse are just fine and perfectly serviceable, featuring keys that are about halfway between full-sized keys and slim laptop keys. The keyboard is comfortable enough to use and has the usual suspects as far as multimedia controls and shortcuts, but doesn't include a wrist rest, and utilizes a scrunched navigation block (three rows of two keys) that may take a little getting used to.

Dell Studio XPS 7100 User Experience

The performance of the Dell Studio XPS 7100 is mostly an amalgam of known quantities; we've run some cursory benchmarks but performance generally falls in line with what we know of the Phenom II X6 and the Radeon HD 5870. Suffice it to say, if you're going to be doing any gaming or media work, the XPS 7100 in this configuration is more than up to the task.

Well, almost. It may very well be the SB750 attached to the single Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drive, but the system just doesn't feel as snappy as a machine with a faster storage subsystem might. Anand is a major proponent of using an SSD for the system drive and a large mechanical drive for storage and that's probably a wise investment here. Also consider that for heavy video work, it's extremely wise to use two separate drives anyhow: one to render from, a scratch drive, and one to render to, a project drive. The storage subsystem remains the slowest component of the modern PC, and anything you can do to mitigate that will help.

What's a nice change of pace from not too long ago is the lack of bloat the XPS 7100 ships with. Windows 7 already does a great job of obscuring bloat (between hiding icons in the system tray and just plain running well), but there's very little here to obscure. The included Dell software is mostly useful, offering driver updates, online support, and use of Dell's “DataSafe” online storage service. If there's an odd outlier it's Dell's dock software. The dock offers sets of shortcuts at the top of the screen not totally dissimilar to the dock in Mac OS X. It's attractive and was probably more useful when Vista was shipping, but the revised taskbar in Windows 7 renders it somewhat redundant.

There are really only two troublesome apps that come bundled with the XPS 7100. The first is, ironically, Dell's own update software. Dell's software is certainly useful, but it has a habit of just randomly popping up whenever you're doing something else, right in the middle of the screen. So if you're, say, running benchmarks all day, you might find your run completely ruined by this random interloper. Likewise, the bundled McAfee Security Center isn't at all unusual to see in factory machines, and remains one of the most obnoxious and least useful PC security suites on the planet. It nags you to complete the setup and register it just to be able to uninstall, though you can force-kill via task manager and go into the Control Panel for the uninstall process.

Overall, the experience of using the Dell Studio XPS 7100 was surprisingly a joy. The system is definitely high performance, the factory install was very clean, but most importantly and probably best of all, it just runs coolly and quietly. One might expect a factory computer to be fairly noisy – especially given the 125W Phenom II X6 processor and the 187W ATI Radeon HD 5870 – but even under load the XPS 7100 is actually remarkably quiet.

To give some sense of just how wonderfully quiet the XPS 7100 is, consider this: I have my own custom built desktop running in an Antec P182 case. I use an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650, overclocked, under a Xigmatek S1283 cooler. Hanging out below that is an ATI Radeon HD 5870. All the fans in my case are on low and the processor cooler is configured in the BIOS to run silently and only spin up under extreme load. My case produces the softest of hums, and that hum actually drowns out the XPS 7100. Some reviews – including our own – suggest the Radeon HD 5870 is pretty loud, but I honestly haven't heard it.

Of course, none of that would matter if the insides of the XPS 7100 were marinating in their own succulent juices, but lo and behold, the card and processor run surprisingly cool. Just putting your hand under the bottom vent on the face you can feel a quiet intake fan, and the clean cabling and spacing inside the case likely contribute to the excellent thermal characteristics.

Dell Studio XPS 7100 Performance

No review would be complete without a look at actual performance, and here we have to add a disclaimer: we haven't reviewed any other pre-built systems lately, so we lack reference points. We're going to stick with a simple table of results format for this review and refer to our Bench results if you're looking for more details. Note that we use a fast SSD for our apples-to-apples Bench database, so the XPS 7100 is at a major disadvantage in benchmarks that hit the HDD, but you can always address that by adding your own SSD. Here's how the system performs, starting with general application results.

Not surprisingly, the results match up relatively well with our Bench database, coming within 2% of our test platform. Given the similar performance, you can refer to our full Bench results to see how the Phenom II X6 1055T performs in other tests; our Bench results use an HD 5870, so the gaming performance should be comparable as well.

3DMark scores look to be in line with what we find online, and gaming performance is obviously not a problem for 1080p/WUXGA displays. We measured 41 FPS in Crysis: Warhead at "Gamer" settings, which is definitely playable. Considering that remains one of the most demanding titles around, it's a safe bet that just about every other game will run fine at High settings and 1080p. That said, the performance won't match custom built overclocked systems with similar components. What you're getting is convenience and a single support contact for a good price; no more, no less.

Dell Studio XPS 7100 Conclusion

Dell's Studio XPS 7100 is by many accounts a winner. So far, nitpicks are minor, and the overall design of the machine allows it to run the most powerful configuration Dell offers for it without causing it to overheat or produce obnoxious fan noise. That leaves us with the price tag. Building your own system with the same components would put your build cost more or less right in line with Dell's pricing for the configuration we reviewed. Frankly, $1,150 for a largely tricked-out Studio XPS 7100 is neither an absolute, skull-crushing steal nor a penny overpriced. We priced out a system with similar components—obviously the case, PSU, and motherboard are different—and came up with a price on Newegg of $1200. Dell currently lists a discount of $279, and without the discount the Studio XPS 7100 is a tougher sell, but Dell traditionally has such "sales" on a permanent basis.

For the price, you get the benefits of a consumer-grade factory machine along with the drawbacks. You don't have to put it together, it comes pretty well balanced overall, and frankly it's one of the few factory machines that doesn't beg for a reformat when you first power it on just to get rid of all the bloat. Dell has produced a lean, powerful, user-friendly system and placed it in an attractive, quiet housing with a reasonable price.

The drawbacks are that the system is balanced for the shipping configuration and not future upgrades. The power supply is from Delta Electronics and should do fine for the load of the Phenom II X6 and Radeon HD 5870, but you're not going to stuff a GTX 470 or 480 into the case. Beyond adding a PCI card and a couple of hard drives you're probably nearing the limits of what you want to run off a 460W PSU. Likewise, you do have to deal with McAfee, and 36 complimentary months wouldn't be enough to have to put up with that obnoxious memory hog, especially when there are superior free alternatives available. Our biggest complaint is the use of the older 785G + SB750 chipset, and that's hardly a deal breaker.

Looking at alternatives, Dell's XPS 9000 with similar components but an i7-920 processor bumps the price up substantially: $1759 with the same 1.5TB hard drive and 5870 GPU! For just $50 more, you can move to the Alienware Aurora and similar parts, presumably with a better PSU (but without a keyboard and mouse standard). Newegg sells a pre-built i7-860 CyberPowerPC with minor changes to the HDD and RAM for $1400. The entry quad-core i7 parts generally split the benchmarks with the X6 1055T, with gaming favoring Intel's Turbo Boost but heavily threaded content creation going to AMD. Considering the price difference, AMD definitely has a lot going for it.

Ultimately, as a build-it-yourself die-hard even I walked away from the Studio XPS 7100 feeling impressed. You definitely get your money's worth from it, and it's worlds away from the Dell of a few years ago that loaded its machines with bloat and stuck them in hideous (if fairly easy to service) boxes. Known quantities like the Phenom II X6 and the Radeon HD 5870 can make it hard to stand out from the crowd, but Dell pulls it all together in an attractive package that is easy to recommend, particularly if you don't want to get your hands dirty.