Dell vs. DIY

Posted at: Monday 30th July 2007

You've got a grand for a new PC - do you buy it new? Or do you spend £1,000 on hardware and build it yourself?

The Dell's PSU is much more modest, with a maximum combined output of 375W. During testing, the Dell was remarkably efficient, drawing 155W from the mains when looping 3DMark06, a good deal less than the 204W the 1K Wonder required. Clearly, the graphics card inside the CPC machine is a thirsty beast, since the Dell has more components to run. Although the Dell's PSU could cope with a GeForce 8800 GTX, its low 375W output is a concern for future components and, with only one spare Molex plug and one PCI-E plug, it isn't an ideal companion for many upgrades.

Winner: The 1K Wonder

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10 Performance

With a faster default-clocked CPU, the Dell was the victor in the CPC benchmarks. The Dell gave the 1K Wonder a bit of a pasting, scoring 1.68 overall, compared to 1.51 for the CPC machine. The 12 per cent difference in the two scores tallies almost exactly with the difference in CPU speed between the two PCs. Seeing the results in black and white was still a bit of a shock though - the 1K Wonder was a long way behind.

Turning to games improved matters, as the power of the 1K Wonder's 320MB GeForce 8800 GTS hit home like a mighty right hook. It's a much more powerful card the Dell's GeForce 8600 GTS, with 96 stream processors compared to the latter's 32. By opting for a 20.1in screen, Dell set the battle level at 1,680 x 1,050, a league well above the GeForce 8600 GTS's striking range, which made the power difference especially pronounced. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. on the Dell was slow and turgid, as if it were set in a treacle-blighted land rather than a radiation-afflicted country. The 1K Wonder all but doubled the Dell's average frame rate, and posted a playable minimum of 25fps as well. The outcome was similar in the other games we tested. At 1,680 x 1,050, the Dell couldn't manage playable frame rates in any of the titles with which we tested it. You wouldn't need to perform much tweaking to get F.E.A.R. flowing on the Dell, but Need For Speed: Carbon and Company of Heroes both required the dreaded step down to medium details.

While our machine lost some time to the Dell in video encoding and photo editing, for most CPC readers, this is easily outweighed by the Dell's poor gaming performance. Frankly, in this round, the 1K Wonder pounded the Dell to pieces.

Winner: The 1K Wonder

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11 Overclocking

Despite our choice of graphics card handing the 1K Wonder a clear victory over the Dell in terms of gaming performance, I was keen to erase the loss in 2D. Having seen the IP35 Pro pushing an Intel Core 2 chip to 4GHz in Taiwan (with the help of liquid nitrogen), I was confident about its overclocking abilities, and it didn't disappoint. I was able to push the FSB up to 375MHz without needing to touch most of the BIOS settings - only the RAM and CPU needed overvolting - which provided a CPU speed of 3GHz. At these settings, the temperature of the CPU never troubled even 40˚C, so I continued pushing. The highest settings with which the system was stable was an FSB of 415MHz and the CPU overclocked to 3.32GHz, 35 per cent faster than the speed at which it was sold. The chip reached but didn't exceed 42˚C at these settings. The 1K Wonder's Media Benchmarks scores leapt to a phenomenal 2.22, well ahead of the Dell.