Dell Studio XPS 8300 review

This PC only comes with a 21.5in monitor, though, so you’ll have to be reasonably close to watch. It looked a little dull in side-by-side comparisons with other displays, but it was evenly lit and colours looked natural. The supplied mouse is generic but comfortable, while the keyboard lends itself to swift and efficient typing.

With a score of 97 in our benchmarks, the Studio XPS 8300 fails to match the performance of other i5-2500K PCs we’ve tested. Although Dell has used an unlocked processor, it hasn’t been overclocked and there aren’t any overclocking options in the UEFI (BIOS) either, so you can’t do it yourself. With a graphics card that managed 24.2fps in Crysis when similarly priced PCs are getting scores of over 60fps, there’s nothing to impress us here. This is still a powerful PC that can run Call of Duty 4 with a snappy frame rate of 48.6fps, but you can do much better for your money.

Even though it’s a little cheaper than most of the i5-2500K PCs we’ve seen, we were distinctly unimpressed by the 8300’s cluttered interior and poor test scores, and we only got the price down to less than £1,000 by settling for a DVD drive, rather than Blu-ray. Even Dell’s one-year collect and return warranty is outshone by some of its rivals. We prefer the Wired2Fire Hellspawn XFire.

The PC we reviewed is based on Dell’s 123456-D00X8318 evalue code. To get our test specification, you’ll have to phone Dell to add a monitor and swap the Blu-ray re-writer for a DVD-RW drive.