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?

Officially, Dell only supports overclocking in its pricier XPS machines, having decided that people who don't want to splash out won't want to tweak their PC. This seems like flawed reasoning to us - after all, if you're on a budget, surely you want your money to go further? Fortunately, while the Dell's BIOS lacks any overclocking options, the Windows-based ClockGen (www.cpuid.com/clockgen.php) utility managed to work some magic. You need to find the board's PLL through trial and error (it's the SLG505YC56D), and then alter the FSB using a slider. You can't tweak any voltages, though, which limits how far you can push the board and the CPU: beyond a 300MHz FSB, we found that the machine became unstable. At a 300MHz FSB, which increased the CPU speed to 2.7GHz, everything was fine, and the Dell's Media Benchmarks score rose to 1.85 overall.

We used the same method to overclock the graphics cards in both PCs, downloading Nvidia's nTune utility to unlock the clock speed adjustment panel in the drivers. The 1K Wonder's 8800 GTS was happy with a GPU speed of 580MHz, 80MHz faster than its reference speed. The Dell's 8600 GTS was only marginally less obliging; we stepped it up 75MHz to 750MHz. In games, the 1K Wonder's combination of overclocks yielded good if not quite stellar results. The pesky low minimum frame rate in Company of Heroes didn't improve, but the average frame rates rose in all four titles. F.E.A.R., as ever, was the most responsive of the games, with its average rising by more than 10fps.

The overclock we applied to the Dell wasn't as successful in terms of results, with F.E.A.R. gaining only 2fps, and the results in the rest of the games being similarly unprepossessing. This round was a clear victory for the Wonder.

Winner: The 1K Wonder

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12 Warranties & support

While every component we bought for the 1K Wonder has a warranty, sourcing from a variety of retailers creates headaches when things go wrong. Having a single point of contact, as with the Dell, makes life simpler, especially if you have a problem that's hard to attribute to one particular component. As well as a standard one-year warranty, Dell has introduced a more general-purpose tech support service called 'Presto', with operators who will attempt to answer all manner of PC-related questions, not just those regarding hardware faults. You can buy a year's membership, or pay on a per-query basis, with 'small issues' costing £19 and 'complex technical problems' £39 to resolve. A year is included with the machine Dell sent us. While some people will no doubt regard this as unnecessary and expensive, we can see the appeal of having one number to call for advice,

24 hours a day. The alternative for DIYers is the Web - usually forums. Abit's website has excellent forums, and our own CPC forums are a great example of the many friendly, informed communities where you can find help for PC problems. On balance, however, it's a slower and more fragmented way to sort out problems.