Gadgetory

hi I'm rich brown senior editor for CNET today we're gonna take a look at the Dell XPS 8500 so this is a higher-end mid tower for Dell this config comes in at about $19.99 the highlight feature is probably its Core i7 3770 CPU that's one of Intel's new third generation Ivy Bridge chips and it makes the system one of the faster mainstream pcs out there but overall it's kind of hard to recommend so if you're familiar with Dells desktop lineup this system should look familiar they haven't really tweaked the chassis in a couple years it's got a nice clean look to it we like the white and the black here in the front looks pretty clean as well Dell is actually illuminated a door on the front of this system so now the USB ports are just exposed on the front making them easier to get to if not maybe messing the aesthetic up a little bit we can live with that behind this door here you'll find a blu-ray drive and up here you have your standard array of media card slots so around at the back of the system you see a nice assortment of ports there's nothing too innovative here but there's pretty much every connection you'd need for modern hardware so from the top you've got some USB to jacks here there's a USB 3 that's becoming more common now there is an SPDIF digital audio output as well as standard 7.1 analog out down here in the graphics card you've got all kinds of outputs there's DVI to display ports as well as standard HDMI out so inside the system it looks like kind of a typical mess that we're used to from mainstream PCs you can see the core i7 CPU here here you've got an AMD Radeon 7870 graphics card it's pretty high-end there's 16 gigs of ram that's becoming more common in high-end systems also and here Dells included a three terabyte hard drive giving you all kinds of storage now one of the more interesting features of this system you actually can't really see in here there's an Intel SRT solid state hard drive buried underneath the graphics card SRT also provides faster access to commonly used files so for games or other applications that you use often it'll be able to load them up and run them generally a lot faster than they would otherwise despite all those great features a problem with this system is its bang for the buck as usual the boutique vendors out there are really pushing hard on performance the system from origin for example we tested cost about $1200 and I'll perform this $19.99 Dell on pretty much every benchmark that makes it hard to recommend this system even though it's relatively capable so overall this is a well built PC with some interesting features but I can't really recommend it because it doesn't offer enough value for its price Farmer Brown this is the Dell XPS 8500