Studio XPS 8000 and Windows 7 – The First Few Days
After more than five years, I’ve finally purchased a new main system. My previous system was based around a P4 3Ghz processor in a custom system that I built myself. Over the years I’ve always assembled my own desktop systems since that has allowed me to make the trade offs necessary to ensure upgradeability. Despite my old system being over five years old, between regular upgrades and my rabid fascination with system optimization, it still ran decently. Sure, it was getting a little slow but it still met most of my needs. The need for a new system was triggered by two things. One, I needed a platform capable of supporting 64-bit processing. The 2010 version of SharePoint is 64-bit only and I wanted to be ready to play when the public beta drops later in November. Two, my kids are both old enough to want to spend time on the computer and having only two computers (I have an older laptop as well) meant they were constantly fighting over who’s turn it was. So, even though my old computer is being replaced for me, it’s getting handed down to one of the kids while the other will now share the laptop with my wife (who so rarely uses the computer, it’s not really sharing).
I began by pricing out what I wanted with a look to assembling it myself again. However, with the release of the new i7-8xx processor family, the prices on pre-built systems were awesome. After pricing out what it would cost to build exactly what I wanted vs buying from Dell, I discovered that I couldn’t build one myself for even close to the price that Dell systems were going for. We’re talking a 30 – 40% difference. With the money I saved, I’m halfway to buying a decent laptop for myself as well.
Dell Studio XPS 8000
I settled on the Studio XPS 8000 line because I wanted an i7-860 processor. Although the i7-9xx line is positioned as being higher performance, the main advantage there is the triple channel memory instead of the dual channel memory on the i7-8×0 line. Conversely, the i7-8×0 line has more aggressive turbo mode technology and even though the i7-860 and the i7-920 have the same price point, the i7-860 outperforms the i7-920 in nearly all benchmarks (the exception being raw memory access). Based on my years of system tweaking, memory has seldom been the bottleneck so I really wasn’t worried about that. For a complete comparison, check one of the many reviews online. I read most of them and they all generally came to the same conclusion.
The last time I put together a system, I used Dell as my baseline for determining whether it was cheaper to buy or build. Last time around, because of the extras you get automatically with the Dell system such as keyboard, mouse, OS, etc. it was cheaper by around 20% for me to build. This time around, I had selected the stuff I wanted and was pricing both locally and through TigerDirect. Locally was consistently 10% more expensive no matter what trade offs I made so that was out. I had a decent system specced and priced and then went to Dell to compare. Well, they didn’t have any i7 systems when I first checked but by customizing the i5 package, I could get what I wanted. I was shocked to see how cheap it was. Anyway, as I normally do, I slept on it and went back the next day to check again and noticed that Dell had added some i7 configurations including one that was exactly what I had customized to. Even better, they dropped the price on that package. So, I ordered it. They’ve since changed the packages around but the one I ordered is still there and still cheap.
Well, my hardware finally arrived and the first thing I noticed was that it was white with a black front. For some reason, I was expecting it to be all black even though the pictures of it are white. Anyway, that aside, it seems to be well built. There’s no bad surprises and I appreciate the “gadget tray” on top with a couple extra USB ports. Setup was easy enough, no problems with plugging everything in. I fired up with the pre-installed OS just to confirm that the hardware was working and all was good.
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
Even though I’ve had a retail copy of Vista Ultimate that I won at some Microsoft thing sitting around for quite some time, I had held off on installing it as I didn’t see any benefit to putting it on my old system. Luckily for me, I waited long enough that I was able to leapfrog straight to Windows 7. Now, having never really worked with Vista, I wasn’t sure what to expect with Win7. Installation turned out to be alot quicker that I am used to with XP and Win2K3 server.
The first thing that bit me was partitioning the drive. Normally I like to partition into two drives: C for OS and program files and D for data. I tend to keep a pretty flat folder structure on my drives and it’s much easier to find things if you’re not dealing with all the OS stuff. Anyway, it turns out that if you create two partitions, Win7 will install to the second one and it didn’t give me an option to pick. So, after the first installation, I had the OS on the wrong partition and had to reinstall. Luckily, it really is a painless process so no big deal. Otherwise, no real surprises. Using the driver disk included with the computer provided support for everything (of course) except my monitors (which I reused from my old system). I had a bit of trouble finding support for my secondary monitor which is an old Samsung 213T which I like to use in portrait mode. On XP, I used a utility program called Pivot that came with the monitor but it doesn’t work on Win7. Luckily, portrait support is built into the nVidia driver software so, once I figured out where to look, all was good.
I’m still getting everything setup but I’m pretty excited about some of the features that Win7 provides. Probably the biggest thing is native recognition of VHD files. I do all my development work under virtual images and being able to mount drives natively and even boot natively into an image is just plain awesome. I haven’t setup my dev image yet but when I do I’ll likely write about it. I plan to follow Scott Hanselman’s excellent advice so if you’re looking to do that, go check it out.
Overall Impressions
Moving from a relatively slow machine to a new, shiny machine has been interesting. Possibly the biggest thing I noticed is that although its faster, it’s not as different an experience as I expected. There’s no real wow factor, everything just works. Programs respond reasonably and consistently. Everything looks nice but nothing stands out as a game changer. For typical computer use, there’s just not much difference. I’m sure as I get into the nooks and crannies I’ll find things that make me appreciate the advances but either way I’m satisfied.
For reference, here’s the details:
- Dell Studio XPS 8000
- x7-860 processor (8MB cache, 2.80GHz)
- Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
- 8GB Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1066MHz
- 1TB – 7200RPM drive, SATA 3.0Gb/s, 16MB cache
- nVidia GeForce GTX260 video with 1792MB GDDR3
- Samsung 275T 27″ widescreen at 1920 x 1200
- Samsung 213T 21″ in portrait mode at 1200 x 1600
- 5.1 surround sound speakers
- Logitech keyboard of some sort
- Logitech G5 gaming mouse
- assorted desk junk
And here’s some pics (had to take three since I can’t get back far enough to get everything in one pic):
- Dave