Not a direct recommendation, but I did get my Dell deal by monitoring the websites that he suggested for coupons. And my shiny new XPS 630 arrived yesterday… hooray!
It’s been a long time since I’ve bought a pre-built system (aside from notebooks), but I have to say, I’m pretty impressed with this one. It’s slick, with a very nice case–fairly minimalist, black and brushed aluminum, quiet, lots of ventilation, and lots of space for expansion inside. Inside, everything is as tidy as I would have made it–rounded cabling, and all nicely routed to maximize airflow. It comes with a nice leather binder for all the manuals and system discs (they even tossed in some XPS branded velcro cable ties in a little pocket in the binder), and the box it came in was shiny black on the inside, with all black packaging. Silly stuff, I know, but between the quality of the build and the attention to detail, it reminds me more of a Falcon NW product than a Dell computer.
The case also has what is perhaps the only practical application of case lighting that I have ever seen: there are lights in the back illuminating the rear connections (which is handy at night, or if you have your case under a desk), and lights on the front that rake down the front of the case and illuminate your desktop. Aside from aesthetics, it also makes a pretty good desk lamp, if you don’t have one (which I don’t), providing enough illumination to see stuff on your desk without having to turn on the room lights. You can also adjust the color; I made mine red, and now when I game late at night, it’s feels like I am on a submarine.
It came pretty clean, too, which was a nice surprise. I was prepared to do an OS reinstall out of the box, but after firing it up and examining what they had put on there (the only extraneous startup items were Google desktop and Dell ECenter, both of which are easily removed), I decided not to bother.
I haven’t had time to do a lot of gaming yet, but I did a little messing around, and damn, it’s fast. Core 2 Duo E8400, 3 GB RAM, GeForce 8800GT 512 MB, 750 GB hard drive, Creative XtremeGamer soundcard. My old computer is over four years old at this point, so this was quite a step up.