Dell Studio XPS

While the system's 512MB ATI Radeon HD 4850 isn't the fastest graphics card on the market, especially when compared with some of the dual-GPU offerings of other PCs in this category, it still performs well on our Doom 3 and Far Cry benchmarks: The Studio XPS achieved 202 and 236 frames per second, respectively, in those tests. Its WorldBench 6 score of 136 nestles it solidly within the top percentile of power desktops we've tested, coming just 5 points shy of the category leader at the time of writing: Polywell's $4000 Poly X4800-Extreme (equipped with a 3.2-GHz Core 2 Extreme X9770 and 4GB of speedy DDR3-1625 RAM). We'd take the Studio XPS for $2000 less, any day--at least, on paper.

What the paper doesn't show is the Studio XPS's weak internal design: It's disappointing enough to pull the system into the middle of our top-ten list instead of catapulting it toward the top of it. The only noteworthy expansion you're going to get inside of this chassis is room for a single hard drive. That's all, and even then, you have to screw into the side of the chassis in an unorthodox fashion. The system uses its two 5.25-inch bays for a Blu-Ray combo drive and a DVD reader/writer. The sole PCI Express x16 slot is already taken up by the video card, and an included TV tuner steals one of the three available PCI Express x8 slots. This chassis truly is an upgrader's nightmare.