That title really wasn’t supposed to sound as phallic and egotistical as it appears to be.. it really is huge. No, really, it is. Okay, I’ll stop. Last week, I got my hands on a Dell XPS 730 H2C, and then spent the next day (i kid you not) reinstalling it, and making it function properly. I read many reviews online about it before picking it up, and I believe that some of them were… set up. In all cases, they claim that the machine comes with nothing on it, bar 3dmark06, and that the configuration it ships with is just fine for gameplaying. That really isn’t the case - or perhaps I just have really bad luck; that, or the UK market makes things worse. In any case, having spent a good several hours installing games and other software, I found that most were unplayable - black screens, crashes, slow FPS. Blowing it away was the best, and worst, thing I’ve done thus far. The biggest bone of contention was getting CrossfireX to function afterwards - it’s very new tech, and being ATI, there is zero output from the Catalyst Control Center with regards to crossfire (they decided it would be a good idea to remove the check box for it on HD3870X2 cards).

I discovered, somewhere on the internets that the way to get crossfire functioning correctly is to remove a card, install the driver, reboot, install the second card, reboot, connect the crossfire connector, reboot. It worked. I shit you not. 90FPS in crysis, biotches.

Unfortunately, and here’s where things go downhill entirely, the fan management on this thing is less than adequate. ATI wholeheartedly believe that GPUs don’t need their fans to run while under heavy load; that’s about what I can figure at least - the fans are completely manual, they do not engage automatically. I have to run rivatuner if I don’t want everything to crash horribly with massive graphics corruption.
Dell appear to have followed suit, giving zero control over what the fans are doing, except by way of the nVidia ESA Control Panel, which is pretty awful at controlling anything - except for the LEDs. To top that off, today, 5 minutes into playing Neverwinter Nights 2 -hardly the most intensive game- I leapt from my seat as a nuclear launch sequence kicked in, every fan in the thing went batshit insane, air-raid sirens sounded, the ground shook -okay, so it wasn’t quite like that.. it certainly seemed like that at the time- I bring up the system monitor (thanks nVidia), and find out that my CPUs are hitting 212F (100c for you metric folk), and discover to my horror that the “Front CPU Fan” (read: Radiator Fan - it’s watercooled) is not running, at all. It has been told to run at 100%, but it’s doing absolutely jack shit.

Dell give you a nice tool kit, and a nice pen with a torch/laser built into it; now I know why. I stripped the thing down to re-seat all the wiring for the overly complex cooling setup, and this took me about 45 minutes to do. The radiator itself requires the system to be drained if you want to lift it off the radiator fan to get to the wiring that comes out the back of it, and the control unit for all the cooling/extras sits neatly behind that, a huge air intake and the front drive bays. They also use self-tapping screws into plastic, which is evil if you actually want to be able to put what you take apart back together. The radiator fan is still dicking around, ignoring calls to increase speed by the system from what I can tell through the system monitor, however, it is at least running now, and efficient enough to keep the CPUs at 104F (40c) during normal load. I think perhaps I shall be giving Dell a call at some point to get this fixed properly. It’s a lovely system, looks mean, is mean, plays everything I throw at it at 1680×1050 and max performance settings without even blinking. I’m still unsure whether it’s worth almost $7k though.