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Dell's XPS 730x Core I7 Gaming System Reviewed
MojoKid writes "Shortly after Intel released their new Core i7 processors about a month ago, Dell announced a new update to the XPS 730 with Core i7 tech under the hood.
The new Dell XPS 730x is first and foremost a technology update but the chassis has also been buffed up a bit. The Intel Core 2 processor and NVIDIA 790i Ultra SLI chipset powering the original XPS 730 line have been swapped with
the new Core i7 processor and an Intel X58 Express chipset based motherboard. The XPS 730x retains the original 730's ability to
support both Crossfire and SLI multi-GPU graphics. Like all XPS 700 series machines since the XPS 710, the XPS 730x is available with optional factory overclocking and a H2C edition featuring a two-stage liquid cooling system. And yes,
it rips through Crysis quite nicely and puts up rather impressive benchmark numbers."
some of us don't have a grudge against microsoft and don't care if it dies.
get that through your thick skull already.
signed, the other 99.5% of the world.
Yes, but only to use the extra RAM and processing time to "cache" all of the crap you never use, and to help index your hard drive since apparently us users can never seem to remember where we put anything despite the fact we get a UAC prompt if we choose to save anything outside of our home directory.
And lets see how well the SLI/Crossfire graphics cards run games while also being called by the desktop window manager and and explorer to redraw aero effects constantly. And by the way, you're paying an assload of money for all of this too, including another crappy chassis.
</rant>
I think it's funny that we're using Crysis as a benchmark, rather than an object-lesson in "what not to do in game development."
The only reason why Crysis is being chosen here is because it's notoriously difficult to get it running on any system maxed out. The article's graph notes that the test was run without adding in anti-aliasing, and it manages to barely squeak out a playable frame rate (on a 22" widescreen lcd resolution).
Crysis looks good, sure, but so do most games at this point. It can scale down to run OK on lower machines, but again, so do most games at this point.
Benchmarking aside, I think it's beyond ridiculous that anyone would buy a $4,500+ PC for home / game use. What could possibly justify that? I have a year old system (quad core, 8800GT) that can literally play every game on the market at max settings... at 1920x1600! Oh, I guess with the singular exception of Crysis, which I haven't bothered with.
I wouldn't dream of spending that much cash on a game system. Think about it this way: You can buy this PC, -or- a used Audi. Or... a well-equipped gaming PC, a Sony XBR TV, a PS3, 360, AND Wii, and still have money left over for games.
Video Game News, FAQs, etc
Yes, but only to use the extra RAM and processing time to "cache" all of the crap you never use
I'm confused, you'd rather Windows just didn't do anything with the extra memory and processing power? If you really don't want you hard drive indexed, you can turn off indexing. The memory used to cache frequently used programs is reallocated when necissary, don't let the little graph in the task manager fool you into thinking you don't have enough memory just because your memory is actually being used for a change.
And lets see how well the SLI/Crossfire graphics cards run games while also being called by the desktop window manager and and explorer to redraw aero effects constantly.
Aero is automatically disabled when running any full screen game. If you really hate it that badly, disable it.
Vista has a lot of problems. Having features that many people like, which can be disabled by those who don't, isn't one of them. The only valid complaint you make, in my opinion, is obnoxious UAC prompts.
The only valid complaint you make, in my opinion, is obnoxious UAC prompts.
..which can also be turned off.
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."
Not that I don't agree with you in principle, but how hard is to have a bunch of organized folders: docs, mp3s, porn, etc.? Same argument: do a little work first, save time later.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
The only valid complaint you make, in my opinion, is obnoxious UAC prompts.
Which is also pretty groundless, since generally speaking UAC prompts appear for the same reasons, and with similar frequency, as sudo prompts on Linux or Windows.
And you can even turn them off, if you want to expose yourself to more risk.
In principle it's not that hard. That being said, desktop searching is incredibly helpful. You organized your mp3s by genre, band, album... Now you don't feel like clicking through a bunch of folders to get to your music. Sure, the bands you listen to often, you might have down with muscle memory. But when you try to look for something you haven't listened to in a while, it gets frustrating to sit around reading through band name after band name. Desktop search and you're done.
Desktop search has its place. Organizing yourself is form of self restraint and discipline that is absolutely vital to getting stuff done. On the other hand, the reason we have all this technology is to make life easier.
It would be stupid if it was correct. However, that is why Vista also has a unique memory priority feature. It is exactly to ensure that a process with lower priority memory requirements (such as the cache, readyboost, disk defrag, defender etc) does *not* page out normal priority memory. What's stupid is how some people are all prepared to make all kind of assumptions about Vista and then use those - often false - assumptions to knock it.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
No speakers (FAIL)
Yeah. You're paying tons of cash for the best hardware out there, and then route the audio trough crappy active PC speakers? That's like those people who buy an expensive car, and then can't afford the fuel for it.
If you have an expensive display, or sound card, don't be cheap on the sound. Everybody I know, who has a decent system, has it connected to his hi-fi system. I have only one output on my system: Real-time encoded AC-3 trough a fiber glass cable... It's better to let your amplifier do the D/A-decoding, instead of the cheap decoders in your sound card.
At least I don't have to tell my fellow Slashdotters, that the keyboard is very important too. :)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
The thing is, I use media players like (dare I say it) iTunes, WMP, Media Center, or RhythmBox to manage my songs and/or videos for me (as well as play them), so I don't need to sit there and browse folders or take a performance hit for indexing.
.flas in a directory such as ~/Documents/Flash.
When the great grandparent post said they liked indexing because they have a huge hard drive, the only thing I can think of for having such a hard drive would be Music/Video libraries, games, or absolutely huge Flash documents. The music/video most certainly would have a manager like iTunes or Media Center, the games are just apps with start menu/desktop launchers, and as a Flash dev myself I just put all of my
And if you need a terabyte of hard drive space to store a bunch of word processing documents, then not only do I feel sorry for you but by all means enable indexing since you apparently do nothing other than edit word processing documents all day long.
And as far as UAC, Indexing, and Aero having the ability to be turned off, I personally turn off Indexing for better personal organization, and always use the "classic" theme under any Windows version, but I would never turn off UAC in Vista because it is just as vital to security as sudo/gksu/root/wheel in *nix, and one of the reasons Vista does not have nearly the amount of security problems other past Windows versions have had.
Vista has its share of problems other than what can be disabled (DirectX 10, WDM issues, memory management issues etc.), but many of these have been somewhat resolved in the Windows 7 betas I've tested, although driver issues persist (they were betas, after all). I am personally skipping Vista from my work-related virtual machine collection for these reasons, awaiting the production build of Windows 7 (actually Windows 6.1). Microsoft has been paying attention to our complaints with Vista, and 7 reflects this, e.g. a toned down UAC, better memory management, more streamlining, and graphics without quite as much performance hit.
That's not stupid as such, it's the standard human thought process for making decisions which is:
1. Make a decision based on what you feel or what other people tell you to decide.
2. Find evidence that supports your decision, ignore evidence that counters it.
3. If there isn't much evidence make some up so you don't look stupid for making the wrong decision.
Nothing to do with Vista, or Microsoft, just the usual method of thinking.
Because no games out right now use 6 Gb of RAM. However, plenty of games are still limited by CPU and GPU power.
Bullshit. There are two makers of capable GPUs, and both support Linux well with decent drivers downloadable from their web sites. Installing the drivers is straight-forward for anyone capable of reading simple instructions. Different from Windows, yes, but not in any way difficult. You forget that while Linux is different from Windows, the users aren't in general any less competent.
Also, the fact that you believe there is such a thing as hunting down drivers in the Linux world shows that you have no fucking clue what you're talking about. If that's how you tried solving your problems, then it's obvious why you couldn't get it to work: you're doing it wrong. Don't blame the OS for your own incompetence.
I'm more likely to believe you damaged your performance by tweaking registry values and paging options than anything vista did. I've seen Vista run fine on 2 GB of memory.
Turning off UAC on your own computer is one thing (I leave it on, turning it off is like running as root all day). Turning it off on a computer that isn't yours is horrible. You are opening them up to security issues by doing that. Instead you should keep it enabled and train the users what it means when you get a UAC dialog (hint: they shouldn't get any unless the install software). If they are really "clueless", train them to call you before clicking through one so you can make sure they aren't about to hose their machine.
UAC is a godsend for people who maintain their parents or families computer. My mom calls me all the time with questions like this...