Chad Sapieha

Laptops may be all the rage these days, but serious gamers pooh-pooh portable PCs in favour of meatier machines that live near desks and often weigh more than your average six-year-old. Like Dell’s new 22-kilo, XPS 730 H2C, which starts at $5,999 and, according to a Dell press release, “can play Crysis at full 1920-by-1200 resolution and 30-plus frames per second.”

That’d be a first. And something any hardcore PC gamer would want to see. Which is why we asked if we could check out one of these monster rigs for ourselves.

The tower we were sent had dual 768MB NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra graphics cards working together in scalable link interface (SLI), which alone was quite enough to pique our geeky curiosity. But it also boasted a quad-core processor in the form of Intel’s 3.0GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9650 with 12 MB cache, along with 4GB of overclocked Corsair Dominator DDR3 SDRAM running at 1333 MHz and two terabytes (!) of hard disk storage spinning a 7,200 RPM.

To top it all off, it has Dell’s H2C liquid cooling system, which accounts for at least $1,000 of the machine’s hefty price tag and is supposed to let the box run whisper-silent. However, an enormous fan made our unit sound rather like a freight train. When we quizzed a Dell rep on the noise and asked whether we could switch off the fan we were informed that we had a pre-production model.

“Our production units should be significantly quieter,” read the email we received. “Please do not turn off the fan.”

Fair enough. However, if this monster (and monstrously loud) fan is the one that ships with non-H2C units, those pricey, liquid-chilled cooling pipes suddenly seem less like a luxury and more like a mandatory investment for anyone who wants to actually hear the games they play.

But enough about noise. The big question, obviously, is this: How well does the XPS 730 H2C play Crysis, the most notorious, hardware-humiliating PC game on the planet?

Pretty well. We weren’t able to coax out a very playable game at full 1920-by-1200 resolution running on the highest graphics settings, but bumping the game’s optional eye candy down a notch enabled stutter-free, high-resolution play. Conversely, taking the resolution down a tad and cranking up all the visual settings to very high made for a similarly gorgeous gaming experience.

Put plainly, Dell’s new rig plays games good. Now your job is to figure out if you can justify the extra cash required for the privilege of being able to slide your games’ video settings all the way to the right.