Dell Dell XPS 720

The forward-sloping case design permits easy access to the cables at the back when the system is under a desk. Three LED lights illuminate the USB 2.0 ports at the rear while eight lights shine on the drive bays on the front of the system; Dell's QuickSet software lets you adjust the effects and lighting colors (blue, red, green, pink, and more).

The spacious case has room to hold four hard drives; our review system came with two 160GB, 10,000-rpm hard drives in a striped RAID array for a total of 320GB storage. To make adding hard drives easier, Dell prewires the PC with the necessary internal SATA and power cables for a third and a fourth hard drive. Of the four externally accessible drive bays in our test machine, only one was used (for the 2X Blu-ray drive). The system has plenty of space for additional expansion cards, too, with three unoccupied PCI slots: one PCI Express x16, one PCI Express x1, and one regular PCI.

You don't need a screwdriver to install drives or expansion cards, as an easy-release mechanism that you can open by hand holds all the cards and drives firmly in place. Unfortunately, the memory card reader slots are situated too low, and a cover that slides over the slots impedes access to them. We had to use a significant amount of force to get the 2.5mm-thick aluminum side panel loose, too.

The bundled 24-inch Dell UltraSharp 2407WFP wide-screen LCD monitor produced attractive, bright, and sharp images; though it also displayed smooth motion when playing back a movie DVD, it needed some tweaking to produce optimum image quality.

If money is no object, you may find more appeal in Dell's XPS 720 H2C (in which liquid cooling and a QX6800 CPU overclocked to 3.46 GHz are standard), but the red XPS 720 is an enviable gaming beast in its own right.

Richard Baguley and Danny Allen