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Dell Dimension XPS 600Serious gamers with cash to spend will love this desktop's speed, but may balk at its limited upgradability.
Rick Rizner, Chris Manners
At first glance the $5024 Dimension XPS 600 appears to be Dell's answer to the souped-up, superexpensive gaming PCs made by boutique manufacturers like Alienware and Voodoo. The XPS 600 is packed with high-powered hardware and provides very good performance, and its silver tower case with corrugated metallic plate and blue backlighting is reminiscent of Alienware's stylish, distinctive case designs. But the XPS 600 isn't really for the dedicated hard-core gamer so much as it is suited to the gamer or multimedia enthusiast who rarely opens a computer's case and wants both a fast gaming system and a Media Center PC.
Any good gaming system needs lots of processing power, and the XPS 600 doesn't disappoint. A 3.8-GHz Pentium 4 670 processor, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, and two 500GB hard drives striped for speed in a RAID 0 array delivered a WorldBench 5 score of 104, the second-fastest score we've seen from an Intel-equipped system. Notably, the CPU isn't a dual-core processor,...