Ultimate Buying Guide to Dell XPS Desktops

The Dell XPS series desktops offer high performance options for targeted at media power users. The 8300 and 9100 series come equipped with Intel’s powerful i5 and i7 series processors while the 7100 comes with AMD’s Phenom and Athlon processors. 

With sleek looks and substantial expandability the Studio XPS series offers a great prebuilt option for the power user that isn’t ready to make the jump to building their own computer. Selection of video cards is better than average with a wide range of available hard drive configurations. 

Most of the optional add-ons are a little overpriced, but that doesn’t stop the computer itself from being a good value. Standard with 7.1 audio and a modest dedicated graphics card the Studio XPS series is a solid multimedia machine even in stock configuration.

Graphics and Gaming Option

The graphics options on the Studio XPS are fairly expansive and can prove somewhat confusing. On the 8300 you have the option of four different ATI (otherwise known as AMD) Radeon cards as well as one NVidia card while the 9100 adds an even lower end NVidia to the lineup. 

To simplify a long wordy explanation we can just summarize the lineup by giving specs for the highest and lowest end card, and of course then everything else falls in between. At the bottom of the barrel we have the Radeon HD 6450. It offers modest business graphics and video acceleration capabilities. It can handle newer games on medium-low settings with lower resolutions so it’s not a bad option if you’re a light gamer or someone who doesn’t care about graphics as much. This card is for someone looking to playback 1080p video smoothly or have Photoshop be a little more peppy. 

On the other end the Radeon HD 6870 is a pretty powerful card. Far from the most powerful but very capable you should expect to be playing games at full 1080p with medium-high settings. The Radeon HD 6770 proves to be a pretty good value in the lineup. At almost half the price of its bigger brother the 6870 the 6770 proves to be a very capable card with about 75% of the power of the upgraded model putting it right in the sweet spot. If looking at upgrading graphics on the 9100 I would avoid the upgrade to the 6450 as the performance gains are marginal for the cost.

Studio XPS 9100

Being labeled the studio model you might think the 9100 comes with some magic extras over the 8300 but this is not really true. It does look somewhat flashier with a bolder stance and red accents, but they both offer the same media ports on the top as well as a sleek finish. 

Standard Core i7 is a nice touch but it comes standard with a weaker graphics card than the 8300. The pricing differences on graphics cards are strange in that the upper range graphics cards are the same price for both, but the lower end cards are more expensive of an upgrade on the 9100, certainly something to think about if you’re debating between the two. Up to a 6 core Intel i7 processor sounds pretty impressive but it doubles the cost of the base 9100 making it a little impractical unless you have to have the two extra cores.

The monitor add-ons aren’t the greatest deal unless you get them in a package deal of some sort, although they do get you that nice XPS swagger with styling that matches the tower a bit better than one of the shelf at Best Buy might offer. The base configured 6GB of memory is quite a good start even for the modest power user, although if you plan to do lots of CAD and Photoshop, constantly having tons of windows open and server software in the background the upgrade to 8GB would be advised. 

Hard drive configurations are fairly plentiful with options for RAID 0 or RAID 1. RAID 0 wouldn’t be recommended for most media solutions in which data security is important because failure of one drive causes complete data loss, so it’s like double jeopardy. For sensitive information RAID 1 is a nice thing to have, essentially an auto backup of everything that is on it. It is a disappointment that RAID is not an option on the additional hard drives because then you could split the best of both worlds. Either way you shouldn’t have too much trouble packing a lot of storage onto the XPS 9100.

XPS 8300

The 8300 is supposed to be the lower end model, although in this case I think it is the better deal. The primary differences between the 9100 and 8300 are their processors and their only real distinction is that the i7 is hyperthreaded. Yes, it is a nice feature to have, especially for the multimedia power user but if you don’t strictly need it then it can save you some cash. The only other real deal breaker is that you can’t have a second drive on the 8300 so if you need the storage you’re stuck with the studio model. But the i5 and i7 will really only show a difference in things like advanced video encoding or other processor intensive applications. Other than that they are very similar. Same graphics card options, very similar memory options, and similar upper end graphics card options.

The Bottom Line

Dell’s XPS desktop line comes with sleek styling and hardware targeted at the media user that make it a great power user PC or even a nice gaming rig if you don’t want to shell out for Alienware. With exceptional processor and graphics card options the XPS offers powerful options in a package that is significantly more professional and subtle than the Alienware alternatives.