Dell XPS 730x Top gaming pc of 2009

Features

The Dell XPS 730x has a distinctive look that was clearly crafted with the gamer in mind. The tower itself is constructed out of sturdy aluminum and has a grate window on the side that provides a bit of visual access to the inner workings of the hardware. The aggressively industrial-themed face of the tower features 2 USB ports and audio jacks for convenient access.

Cracking open the body of the Dell XPS 730x yields a healthy bounty of performance oriented hardware that will leave even the most seasoned of veteran gamers feeling a bit flustered. The Intel Core i7-920 processor features four cores running full speed at 2.66 GHz each. With that kind of power, you can kill the ambient processes required to render convincing 3D environments.
Factor in the 6 GB of DDR3 RAM and Crysis, Company of Heroes, Left 4 Dead or Empire: Total War will get stellar frame rates even if you leave programs running in the background.
The Dell XPS 730x’s superior lineup of hardware is headed up by the 512 MB GeForce 9800GT video card. The 9800GT is perfectly suited to power contemporary DX10 games.
Should the $1899 configuration we selected prove underwhelming, the Dell XPS 730x, naturally, can be upgraded to include dual video cards, multi-terabyte hard drives and Blu-ray drives or burners. We opted for a more modest build that will appeal to the budget conscious gamer.

Summary of Reviews from Across the Inter

Don’t just play, dominate. Leave your opponents in pieces with the power, speed and performance of the XPS™ 730x gaming desktop.

Out-of-the-box performance with Intel’s CoreTM i7 processors Extreme Extreme overclocked1 speed to take on the toughest opponents War paint is standard; chose from 3 commanding colors

Standout Features

• 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7-920 quad-core processor

• 6 GB tri-channel RAM

• 512 MB GeForce 9800GT video card

• 500 GB hard drive (7200 rpm)

Price in Dollar

1599.00

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ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series – System Requirements

PCI Express - PCIE - Video Cards - ATI Radeon

ATI PCI Express Video Cards from Diamond Multimedia… Innovative, powerful and engineered with advanced stability, graphics solutions by ATI support creativity and productivity in business, education, entertainment and production. ATI Video Cards support CrossFire™ and Avivo™. CrossFire is the ultimate multi-GPU gaming platform and Avivo gives users High-Definition (HD) visual experiences on the PC.
ATI PCI Express (PCIE) Video Cards offer Gaming, Digital Home and Business solutions. The latest ATI PCI Express (PCIE) Video cards deliver the quality, features and high-end graphics performance you need to dominate your games. See how ATI Video Cards can change your digital world at home, work or play with Digital Home solutions. ATI PCI Express (PCIE) Video cards for business solutions are designed for commercial business and enterprise users to provide stability/reliability in their workstation needs.

ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 System Requirements

• PCI Express® based PC is required with one X16 lane graphics slot available on the motherboard
• 450 Watt or greater power supply with 75 Watt 6-pin PCI Express® power connector recommended (550 Watt and two 6-pin connectors for ATI CrossFireX™ technology in dual mode)
• 
• Certified power supplies are recommended for ATI CrossFireX™ technology support. Refer to http://ati.amd.com/certifiedPSU for a list of Certified products
• Minimum 1GB of system memory
• Installation software requires CD-ROM drive
• DVD playback requires DVD drive
• Blu-ray™ playback requires Blu-ray drive
• For a complete ATI CrossFireX™ system, a second ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 graphics card, an ATI CrossFireX Ready motherboard and one ATI CrossFireX Bridge Interconnect cable per graphics card (included) are required

ATI Radeon™ HD 4850 System Requirements

• PCI Express® based PC is required with one X16 lane graphics slot available on the motherboard
• 450 Watt or greater power supply with 75 Watt 6-pin PCI Express® power connector recommended (550 Watt and two 6-pin connectors for ATI CrossFireX™ technology in dual mode)
• Certified power supplies are recommended. Refer tohttp://ati.amd.com/certifiedPSU for a list of Certified products

• Minimum 1GB of system memory
• Installation software requires CD-ROM drive
• DVD playback requires DVD drive
• Blu-ray™ playback requires Blu-ray drive
• For a complete ATI CrossFireX™ system, a second ATI Radeon™ HD 4850 graphics card, an ATI CrossFireX Ready motherboard and one ATI CrossFireX Bridge Interconnect cable per graphics card (included) are required

ATI Radeon™ HD 4870 System Requirements

• PCI Express® based PC is required with one X16 lane graphics slot available on the motherboard
• 500 Watt or greater power supply with two 75W 6-pin PCI Express® power connectors recommended (600 Watt and four 6-pin connectors for ATI CrossFireX™ technology in dual mode)
• Certified power supplies are recommended. Refer tohttp://ati.amd.com/certifiedPSU for a list of Certified products
• Minimum 1GB of system memory
• Installation software requires CD-ROM drive
• DVD playback requires DVD drive
• Blu-ray™ playback requires Blu-ray drive
• For a complete ATI CrossFireX™ system, a second ATI Radeon™ HD 4870 graphics card, an ATI CrossFireX Ready motherboard and one ATI CrossFireX Bridge Interconnect cable per graphics card (included) are required

ATI Radeon™ HD 4870 X2 System Requirements

• PCI Express® based PC is required with one X16 lane graphics slot available on the motherboard
• 650 Watt or greater power supply with one 2x3-pin PCIe® power connector and one 2x4-pin PCIe® power connector is required (1K Watt with two 2x3-pin and two 2x4-pin connectors for ATI CrossFireX™ technology in dual mode)¹
• Certified power supplies are recommended. Refer tohttp://ati.amd.com/certifiedPSU for a list of Certified products
• Certified system cases with good airflow and cooling are recommended. Refer tohttp://ati.amd.com/certifiedcases for a list of Certified products
• Minimum 1GB of system memory
• Installation software requires CD-ROM drive
• DVD playback requires DVD drive
• Blu-ray™ playback requires Blu-ray drive and full 1080p display requires a 1080p-capable monitor
• For a complete ATI CrossFireX™ system, a second ATI Radeon™ HD 4870 X2 graphics card, an ATI CrossFireX Ready motherboard and one ATI CrossFireX Bridge Interconnect cable per graphics card (included) are required

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ATI Radeon™ HD 4870 - GPU Overview

• 956 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
• PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
• 256-bit GDDR3/4/5 memory interface
• Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
  • Shader Model 4.1
  • 32-bit floating point texture filtering
  • Indexed cube map arrays
  • Independent blend modes per render target
  • Pixel coverage sample masking
  • Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
  • Gather4 texture fetching
  
• Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
  • 800 stream processing units
    • Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
    • Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
    • Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
  • 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
  • Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
  • Shader instruction and constant caches
  • Up to 160 texture fetches per clock cycle
  • Up to 128 textures per pixel
  • Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
  • DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
  • High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
  • Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
  • Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
  • Re-Z, and Z Range optimization
  • Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
  • Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
  • Up to 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing
  • Accelerated physics processing
• Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
  • High performance vertex cache
  • Programmable tessellation unit
  • Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
  • Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
• Anti-aliasing features
  • Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)
  • Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
  • Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
  • Gamma correct
  • Super AA (ATI CrossFireX™ configurations only)
  • All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
• Texture filtering features
  • 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
  • 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
  • sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
  • Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
  • Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
  • Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
• OpenGL 2.1 support
• ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform⁶
  • Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2) for H.264/AVC, VC-1, and MPEG-2 video formats
    • High definition (HD) playback of Blu-ray and HD DVD video
    • Dual stream (HD+SD) playback support
    • DirectX Video Acceleration 1.0 & 2.0 support
    • Support for BD-Live certified applications
  • Hardware DivX and MPEG-1 video decode acceleration
  • Accelerated video transcoding & encoding for H.264 and MPEG-2 formats
  • ATI Avivo Video Post Processor⁶
    • Color space conversion
    • Chroma subsampling format conversion
    • Horizontal and vertical scaling
    • Gamma correction
    • Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
    • De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
    • Detail enhancement
    • Color vibrance and flesh tone correction
    • Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
    • Bad edit correction
    • Enhanced DVD upscaling (SD to HD)
    • Automatic dynamic contrast adjustment
  • Two independent display controllers
    • Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
    • Full 30-bit display processing
    • Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
    • Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
    • High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
    • Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
    • Fast, glitch-free mode switching
    • Hardware cursor
  • Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
    • Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)²
    • Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content³
  • Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
    • Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x1536²
  • DisplayPort output support
    • 24- and 30-bit displays at all resolutions up to 2560x1600²
  • HDMI output support
    • All display resolutions up to 1920x1080²
    • Integrated HD audio controller with support for stereo and multi-channel (up to 7.1) audio formats, including AC-3, AAC, DTS, DTS-HD & Dolby True-HD⁴, enabling a plug-and-play audio solution over HDMI
  • Integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
    • Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
    • Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
    • Underscan and overscan compensation
  • Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
  • VGA mode support on all display outputs
• ATI PowerPlay™ Technology⁵
  • Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings
  • Performance-on-Demand
    • Constantly monitors GPU activity, dynamically adjusting clocks and voltage based on user scenario
    • Clock and memory speed throttling
    • Voltage switching
    • Dynamic clock gating
    • Central thermal management – on-chip sensor monitors GPU temperature and triggers thermal actions as required
• ATI CrossFireX™ Multi-GPU Technology
  • Scale up rendering performance and image quality with two, three, or four GPUs
  • Integrated compositing engine
  • High performance dual channel bridge interconnect¹

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Enhancement with new Splendid Technology

Splendid Technology

Optimizes Colors for Perfect Multimedia Entertainment

Splendid™ Video Intelligence Technology is built upon a color engine that automatically analyzes and determines the nature of the user’s current task, thereafter adjusting the display’s parameters accordingly to ensure the best possible color and image fidelity.

Splendid™ features five video preset modes (Theater, Game, Scenery, Night View and Standard) and three skin tone presets (Natural, Reddish and Yellowish) to enable users to further fine-tune their ASUS monitors to achieve specific results.

Standard Mode allows you to view documents and browse websites comfortably with optimized colors and contrast.

Game mode adaptively brings up dark, hard-to-see areas while leaving the well-lit areas untouched—allowing you to see your enemies lurking in dark corners without washing out the colors as a whole.

Theater mode simulates a theater experience by enhancing the contrast and color saturation of the image—delivering livelier and vivider visuals for greater immersion.

Scenery mode increases the brightness range, introduces more contrast gradations and selectively tweaks the color saturation of key elements such as blue skies and green fields to make for more captivating land and seascapes—keeping your photos as fresh and vivid as when you were actually there.

Night View mode breathes the beauty back into night vistas by smartly raising the Y-Luminance signal to highlight poorly-lit details—capturing the scene’s beauty in crisp and vibrant fashion.

3 preset skin tone
Select between natural, reddish and yellowish skin tone presets for more natural-looking human subjects on screen.

Stylish and User-friendly Design for Modern Sophistication
A designated hotkey on the frame makes it easy to switch between the five preset modes.

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ASUS P5KPL-AM Motherboard

P5KPL-AM with Intel G31 chipset inside supports Intel® Core™2 Dual and Quad-core CPU and features 1600(OC)/1333/1066/800MHz FSB, PCI Express x 16, Serial ATA interface, high performance integrated graphics engine, dual-channel DDR2 1066(O.C.)/800/667 memory, and 8 Channel HD Audio CODEC. Users can experience faster graphics performance and higher video quality today. P5KPL-AM is the most affordable all-in-one solution platform for Intel® Core™2 Processor with Intel G31 chipset inside.

The Intel® G31 Express Chipset boosts your gaming and multimedia experience with the integrated graphics engine Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 3100. It supports 1333MHz FSB (front-side-bus), and delivers breakthrough advances in 3D and 2D graphics; and video capabilities. This integrated chipset is able to meet the changing display requirements of visually rich applications and features the Intel® Clear Video Technology - which trailblazes new standards in high-definition video, crisp imaging, and accurate color control.

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Asus P5KPL/1600 motherboard feature

P5KPL/1600 CrossFire X ready, featuring top game experience. LGA775 Intel® 45nm Processor Ready This motherboard supports the latest Intel 45nm CPU which introduces new micro-architecture features for greater performance at a given frequency, up to 50% larger L2 caches, and expanded power management capabilities for new levels of energy efficiency.

LGA775 Intel® Core™2 Processor This motherboard supports the latest Intel® Core™2 processors in LGA775 package. With new Intel® Core™ microarchitecture technology and 1600(O.C.)/1333/1066/800 MHz Intel® Core™2 processor is one of the most powerful and energy efficient CPU in the world.

Dual-Channel DDR2 1066(O.C.) DDR2 1066(O.C.) memory provides great performance for 3D graphics and other memory demanding applications on next generation memory technology.

PCI Express Architecture PCI Express is the latest I/O interconnect technology that will replace the existing PCI. With a bus bandwidth 4 times higher than that of AGP 8X interface, PCI Express x16 bus performs much better than AGP 8X in applications such as 3D gaming. PCI Express x1 and x4 also outperforms PCI interface with its exceptional high bandwidth. The high speed PCI Express interface creates new usages on desktop PCs.

ATI CrossFire X Technology AMD´s CrossFire boosts image quality along with rendering speed, eliminating the need to scale down screen resolutions to get the high image quality you want. CrossFire ignites with the higher antialiasing, anisotropic filtering, shading, and texture settings you desire. Adjust your display configurations, experiment with your advanced 3D settings, and check the effect with a real-time 3D-rendered preview within AMD´s Catalyst™ Control Center to rule your CrossFire system.

SATA 3Gb/s Serial ATA3.0Gb/s is the next generation ATA specification that provides scalable performance for today and tomorrow. With up to 300MB/s data transfer rate, Serial ATA II is faster than current Parallel ATA, while providing 100% software compatibility.

High Definition Audio Enjoy high-quality sound system on your PC! The onboard 8-channel HD audio (High Definition Audio, previously codenamed Azalia) CODEC enables high-quality audio output, jack-detect feature automatically.

S/PDIF-out on Back I/O Port This motherboard provides convenient connectivity to external home theater audio systems via an optical or coaxial S/PDIF-out (SONY-PHILIPS Digital Interface) jack. It allows to transfer digital audio without converting to analog format and keeps the best signal quality.

ASUS Express Gate Surf the Internet in 5-second-boot time without entering Windows With a fast bootup speed of only 5 seconds, the ASUS Express Gate offers an optional Linux OS bootup that allows you to enjoy instant access to commonly used functions like accessing the Internet, VoIP, and Web emailing without entering the OS. * The actual boot time is subject to hardware configurations and product models

ASUS AI NET2 Diagnose LAN connection before entering OS! Network problems are often caused by bad cable connection. AI NET2 remotely detects cable connection the second you turn on the system, and any faulty connections are reported back up to 100 meters at 1 meter accuracy.

Gigabit Lan With Intel CSA-based Gigabit LAN controller, network data can be transferred at a much higher rate with lower latency. This new interface performs networking tasks more efficiently, and achieves bi-directional gigabit speeds.

ASUS Q-Fan ASUS Q-Fan technology intelligently adjusts CPU fan speeds according to system loading to ensure quiet, cool and efficient operation.

C.P.R.(CPU Parameter Recall) When the system hangs due to overclocking failure, there is no need to open the case to clear CMOS data. Just simply restart the system, the BIOS would show the previous setting and then users can amend the CPU setting again.

EZ Flash2 Simply update BIOS from a USB flash disk before entering the OS EZ Flash is a user-friendly BIOS update utility. Simply press the pre-defined hotkey to launch this tool and update BIOS from a floppy disk before entering the OS.

CrashFree BIOS 3 Simply restore corrupted BIOS data from USB flash disk The ASUS CrashFree BIOS 3 allows users to restore corrupted BIOS data from a USB flash disk containing the BIOS file. This utility saves users the cost and hassle of buying a replacement BIOS chip.

MyLogo2 Personalize your system with customizable boot logo You can convert your favorite photo into a 256-color boot logo for a more colorful and vivid image on your screen.

Compliance with the RoHS Directive The motherboard and its packaging comply with the European Union´s Restriction on the use of Hazardous Substances (RoHS). This is in line with the ASUS vision of creating environment-friendly and recyclable products and packaging to safeguard consumers´ health while minimizing the impact on the environment.

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