Carcharoth, like you, I used to build my own PC's. (But not in DOS days -- my DOS era PCs were factory built, first an original IBM, then a couple of ASTs.) In the 90s I got tired of building and started buying ready made. Since then I've owned four Dells all together, or maybe five, including two that are on my desk now.
Last year I built a PC for myself for the first time in about a decade. The reason I started building again was that I compared what I could get from Newegg in the form of parts with what I could get from Dell, and the difference in quality at the price was so big, I decided to build. I'm not trying to talk you into doing something you don't want to do, but I should mention that building was much easier than I remembered from years ago. It took maybe two hours total or even less with zero problems.
But as for your Dell -- unlike a lot of folks here, I think Dells are pretty good. As I said I've owned a bunch of them and they all stll run, including an eight or nine-year-old one which ran almost continuously 24/7 until a few months ago when I unplugged it. That whole time the only thing I replaced in it was the CD drive. If you define "excellent engineering" as "delivering a machine that peforms as described and is unlikely to break," then Dell's engineering is excellent.
The problem is that a lot of people (including many people who have posted here in various threads) define excellent engineering in a different way. They define it as "I should be able to upgrade the machine later and make it do more than it was designed to do when it was built." If that's your definition of excellent engineering, then Dells can be disappointing. They are often hard to upgrade, either because they use non-standard parts or because some system components aren't beefy enough to handle additions.
In short, Dells are good if you don't plan to upgrade, but if you do plan to upgrade, you better look over the spec's really carefully before you buy.
I don't know anything about the XPS 720 you're considering but I just read its spec's on the "Dell XPS 720 Product Details" page. The thing that jumps out at me is that it uses a BTX motherboard. As you know, the main industry standard is ATX, not BTX. If you need to replace that motherboard you're not going to have a lot of choices. It's almost certainly a proprietary Dell design, and that may make it incompatible with something you want to add down the road.
On the good side, the power supply and cooling seem to be adequate for additions, which isn't always the case with Dells.
Whatever you decide, good luck and enjoy.
Reply With Quote
More trouble than it's worth lol
You should prolly expect both.
Connect With Us