Performance Summary
Because the budget system was tested exclusively using a monitor with a maximum supported resolution of 1600x1200, we had to eliminate the higher resolutions from this average game-performance comparison. The only alternatives would have been to average the system's frame rates without the missing settings, or to average it with "zeros" for the missing data, which would unfairly skew the results in the low-cost build's favor.
Our high-end overclocked machine was able to pull out a surprising gaming victory compared to Dell's doubly-expensive machine. Our budget system also looks very nice in its overclocked configuration, gaining up to 50% compared to its default settings.
Four cores yield brutal computational power in the XPS 720 H2C, with the system performing nearly 50% better in 3D Studio Max than our high-end dual-core configuration. If you can afford to wait longer for it to complete computing tasks, then the budget system's performance is fair for the price.
Sandra again touts the four-core advantage, while the remaining synthetics averages look a little more balanced. The overclocked budget system does well in SPECviewperf average performance.
