Power, Heat, And Efficiency
The 27" XPS One's display is amazingly efficient, with a 16 W delta between it turned off completely and running at maximum brightness. That helps this platform achieve a similarly-amazing 53 W idle power consumption result, which includes a desktop CPU, a mobile GPU, and the monitor. Incidentally, this also forced us to add monitor power to the consumption results of our System Builder Marathon setups.
The Clevo notebook uses far less power, but also has a less-potent CPU and a far smaller screen.
The 27" XPS One runs really hot due to its fan profile that favors pleasant acoustics over comfortable thermals. We could have forced the fan to ramp up a little sooner at higher ambient temperatures, though. Doing so would have taken those temperature results down at the expense of more fan noise.
Unfortunately, low-end graphics performance hurts the XPS One's efficiency rating compared to the gaming notebook, which wields better gaming performance at lower power use. If we factor out the graphics portion of our overall performance evaluation, minimizing the emphasis on gaming, we can point to a larger display and a more powerful CPU for the -17% delta that remains.
Who ever invented the desktop touch monitor should be shot.
There's probably some use for a touchscreen-desktop monitor productivity-wise.
But as a Windows 8 saviour? Hell no!
Its important to get a informal, subjective review from a general user. Numbers are very important, but they dont tell the complete picture.
+1 for more "Average Joe" impressions in gadget reviews.
Touchscreens on laptops might suck less as a concept, but laptop screens suck by design because they're so small.
Touchscreen has no place on a desktop, unless you have Felix Unger with plastic gloves touching it. It's messy, and it's hard not to feel like a retard while using it.
This is a solution in search of a problem. I haven't heard too many complaints on the keyboard/mouse interface. I have heard plenty of complaints about Windows 8.
Case in point: I set my girlfriend up with what I thought was a really nice setup. A touch screen AIO in her spare room. It had (read: HAD) Windows 7 on it. She was constantly complaining about how she hated it when it either did not register her touches or the limited gestures that I so painfully set up. She went months without even turning the damn thing on. She complained that she couldn't do anything with it because it was just too hard to get a simple task done.
Windows 8 comes out last October and I figure I'd give it a shot and if she still didn't like it, I'd have an extra computer in my man cave for something. I can't keep her off the thing. She absolutely loves it. She loves the live tiles, how it recognizes her gestures, how easy it is to navigate. I could go on...
What I wish people would realize is that Windows 8, while it will probably not be as widely accepted as our beloved Windows 7, it is still a pretty solid step forward. If you are a power user (myself included) you will probably never install W8 on your desktop or even your laptop. But it is a fantastic piece of software that can change how people use computers.