I first saw the Dell XPS One in a Dell shop in Akihabara, Tokyo 2 years ago. At the time I was looking to purchase a new computer and would have loved to have bought it then as the exchange rate of the pound against the yen was pretty good so it made the XPS One a few hundred pounds cheaper than buying it in the UK.
Obviously it isn’t practical to buy something of that size in a foreign country. A laptop is fine because you can just throw away the box and carry the laptop in your bag but you can’t do this with a 24″ monitor. I think customs would want to have a quiet word with you if you walked through arrivals with a massive TV under your jacket!
The XPS is a beautifull machine. Really slick and the monitor is of a very high quality. There’s currently 3 versions of the XPS in the UK. The XPS One has a 20″ screen and costs £1,099. Recently Dell added the XPS One 24, a 24″ version of the XPS One. There are two versions of the XPS One 24. The lower model costs £1,349 whilst the more expensive model starts from £1,799. As is usual with Dell, these prices are for the standard versions of the computer though you have the option to pay more and upgrade most aspects of it.
Dell XPS One – The 20″ Model
Bundled with Windows Vista Home, the cheapest XPS One has a 2.2GHz E4500 Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, 320 GB hard drive, DVD ReWriter,Bluetooth, Draft N Wireless Lan, 6 USB Slots (4 at the front, 2 at the back), 8 in 1 card reader, webcam, keyboard, mouse, TV tuner and remote control.
Unfortunately the basic model at £1,099 doesn’t even have a dedicated graphics card, just the integrated graphics from intel. This won’t be an issue for those who don’t play video games a lot but in my opinion, a pc which costs over a grand not having at least a 256MB dedicated graphics card is a joke.
As I said, I found the XPS to be very impressive when I saw it and was considering buying it about a 20 months ago but the basic model seems very underpowered for eleven hundred pounds.
Dell XPS One 24
For me, the XPS One 24 offers better value. An extra £250 will not only get you a much larger screen but a little more power and features.
The £1,349.00 has an improved Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 (2.66GHz, 1066FSB, 3MB cache) processor and a 512MB NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT dedicated graphics card yet it still only comes with 2GB of RAM. The design of the XPS One 24 is slightly different that the entry model. For example, the design is slightly different and the keyboard and mouse are now wireless and the USB slots are in different places.
Other than that, there is not too much difference between the 24″ and the 20″ models but for me the extra £250 is worth it for the extra screen size and graphics card.
The £1,799.00 model is by far the most powerful computer with the Core 2 Duo processor being replaced by an Intel Core 2 Quad-Core Processor Q8200 (2.33GHz,1333MHz, 4MB cache). The hard drive is slightly larger at 500GB and there is a Blu Ray DVD Rom as well but apart from that the machine has the same specs. Which baffled me as you would expect much more than 2GB of RAM for a quad processor powered machine.
Overview
The XPS is a beautiful machine to look at. The screen, keyboard and mouse look classy and feel really sturdy. All XPS Ones also have a 2 megapixel webcam compared to the 1.3MP webcams most other All In Ones have.
Compared to the other pcs I have looked at the last few days, the XPS One is very expensive. The basic model is £200 more expensive that the HP Touchsmart IQ522 and that has a bigger screen, bigger hard drive, twice as much RAM and touchscreen capabilities. Which is why the XPS is not a machine I will be considering for purchase.
What do you think of the XPS One?
