Dell XPS 710

The spacious case has room to hold four hard drives (our review system came with two 320GB hard drives in a striped RAID array for a total of 640GB of storage) and four externally accessible drive bays. To make adding hard drives easier, Dell ships the system with the necessary SATA and power cables to add a third and a fourth hard drive. The unit has plenty of room for additional expansion cards, too, with four unoccupied PCI slots: one PCI Express x16, one PCI Express x1, and two regular PCI.

You don't need a screwdriver to install drives or expansion cards: Latches that you can open by hand hold all cards and drives firmly in place. Unfortunately, the memory card reader slots are situated low, in such a way that the cover that slides over the slots impedes access to the slots. Also, we had to use a significant amount of force to get the 2.5mm-thick aluminum side panel loose.

The bundled 20-inch Dell 2007WFP wide-screen display produced attractive, bright, and sharp images, and smooth motion when playing back a movie DVD, though it did need some tweaking to produce optimum image quality. But if you're spending over $4000 on the system anyway, you may want to invest $380 more to get the 24-inch 2407FPW.

Richard Baguley