While Dell has tried for some time to be all things to all people, it’s never quite succeeded with its desktop XPS range. They’ve always been reasonably good, with all the right bits inside, but have never quite hit the giddy stratospheres of excessiveness that the top end of gaming demands. The real fruits of Dell’s merger with enthusiast PC flogger Alienware make themselves known with this latest release, though. Other than last year’s strictly limited-edition 600 Renegade, this is the first time Dell has sold a factory overclocked machine. It’s a testament both to how far overclocking has come, and to the oft-mooted headroom in Intel’s Core 2 chip.

At the XPS’s heart is a Core 2 Extreme Quad-Core QX6700, its multiplier overclocked in the BIOS to take the clock speed up from 2.66GHz to a mighty 3.2GHz. Already one of the best chips on the market, the results of this nearly 600Mhz boost are impressive. Calculating Pi to 16 million places was more than a minute faster at 3.2GHz compared to 2.66GHz. But more important than the overclock itself, in a way, is what has made it possible: a titanic custom cooler (the ‘H2C’ of the name) bolted onto the chip and overshadowing most of the motherboard. It’s an experimental chimera of air, liquid and Peltier cooling, sealed into a self- contained unit Dell reckons can go several years with zero maintenance.

This, and the various other brackets and spikes of plastic and metal designed to make everything internal as secure and neat as possible, does mean that upgrading anything in the XPS yourself is a colossal headache. But then, this is a system aimed squarely at people who, for whatever reason, really aren’t into system-building. Dell takes full, even cynical, advantage of that mindset, to the point that even the power cable is a custom job – still a standard kettle lead in essence, but with the three pins each rotated 90 degrees. If it breaks, you won’t be picking up another for 50p from a car boot sale: you’ll be ringing Dell and forking out a small fortune for a replacement.

Back to the cooler though. It’s something whose results can’t be argued with. With the chip overclocked to 3.2GHz and left running at 100 per cent load, the temperature barely topped 50°C. That’s comparable to what the default-clocked chip runs at under a standard heatsink and fan array. The chip remained entirely stable throughout our tests, too – it might well be screaming inside, but it certainly didn’t show it.

Noisy system

A bit of a letdown is that this is a fairly noisy system. Water cooling is normally associated with the sound of relative silence, but the combination of the custom cooler’s fans and those on the XPS’s pair of GeForce 8800 GTX cards makes for a fair old din. Given the vast price tag on this system, it’s a shame there aren’t a couple more heat blocks run off the cooler to cater for the graphics cards too. It would cut some of the noise and make them as overclockable as the unruffled CPU.

As a system though, the XPS offers unparalleled gaming performance. It casually chucks out over 14,000 3DMarks, and an incredible 185fps in Company of Heroes. Most impressive is how little the drop-off is from a resolution of 1,280x1,024 to a massive 2,560x1,600: 12,000 3D Marks and 101 fps in CoH, which would be impressive from a more average rig at an average resolution. Most of the credit for this can be laid at the door of the twin 8800s, 2,560x1,600 being about the only place that the second card really comes into play. Still, everything the rig’s capable of can be achieved for a lot less from a self-built system (though you’ll probably need to dabble in the dark pools of watercooling to pull off the overclock with such stability). Yes, the XPS is for an audience that can’t or won’t do that, but a lot of the price would appear to come from the custom case, an excessively masculine affair that screams mid-life crisis. There’s no doubt it stands out from the crowd, but for some people it’ll be a bit too much. Even for those who are in love with the look, it’s undermined sharply by a cheap, fragile-feeling plastic plate over the front of the drive bays.

The XPS remains a gamer’s dream - though a monster that can outperform any other spec on the market right now. It’s a crazy price – the spec and associated cost is configurable; our review unit totals around £3,500 without a monitor – but it has a reasonable degree of future-proofing, not always the case with a hardcore gaming rig. Its Ageia PhysX card feels like completism for completism’s sake, though.