Dell Studio XPS 8100 review

Does Dell’s top line of desktops offer top line performance? We check out the stylish and powerful Studio XPS 8100 and reach some conclusions.

Read on to find out what they are.

What we like best

The premium internal specs suit the premium price tag and that Core i7 is fast – stupidly so. Paired with 6 Gb RAM and your flavour of NVIDIA or ATi 1 Gb graphics cards it breezes through photo and video editing, HD viewing and gaming.

For gaming in fact the XPS 8100 puts a lot of flashy specialist machines to shame, and will handle Crysis on medium settings without a hitch.

There’s a nice wide range of ports and connections including Firewire, eSATA and HDMI. Though the latter is only available with G310 / ATi 5450 / ATi 5670 / ATi 5770 graphics cards.

The XPS 8100 has a nicely placed top ports section with audio ports, 2 x USBs and a 19-in-1 card reader. Don’t think we’ve ever used 19 kinds of memory card, but it’ll come in useful one day.

What we like least

It was tricky to find fault with the XPS 8100, beyond our normal gripes about the amount of bloatware Dell has pre-loaded, and a personal dislike of the styling.

Something worth remembering is that your XPS 8100 is sold completely naked. No mouse, keyboard, speakers and most importantly no display.

The latter can come as bit of a shock when you consider that a decent screen to make the most of the components, especially if you’ve gone with the Blu-ray option, is around £200 extra.