I had mentioned after CES that we would be blogging in more detail about some of the new products we unveiled there. In case you missed it, John Blain blogged about two new Alienware machines. I wanted to take a few minutes to talk a bite more about our latest desktop meant for home users looking for a powerful machine that doesn’t take up a lot of space. If that describes you, the XPS 8300 is definitely worth a look.
Many of you who read my posts on a regular basis know that I’m a desktop guy at heart. Sure, I’ll use a laptop when I’m on the road or cranking away at work, but at home, I use a desktop to get things done. The reason is that price/ performance is tough to beat . A powerful desktop can be used for all kinds of tasks these days… and that beings me to our new XPS 8300 desktop.
Right off the bat, the XPS 8300 gets some Sandy Bridge second-generation Intel Core goodness running on the new H-67 chipset. If you want to do a deep dive into what kind of performance these new processors bring to the table, feel free to spend some time reading in-depth Sandy Bridge articles from Anandtech and Tom’s Hardware.
What it means is that if you use a desktop for all kind of multimedia tasks, this performance will make you happy. Whether you’re recording HD television content via a TV tuner and streaming it to the living room, editing multi-layered high-resolution digital photos, watching 1080p video content via Hulu or YouTube, or you create, edit and share high definition video of your own, you’ll appreciate the performance it provides. If you use your machine to encode or transcode video, folks are saying that Intel’s Quick Synch Video functionality that’s part of these new processors is worth an excuse to upgrade.
Starting at $749 with a Core 15-2300 2.8GHz processor and an ATI HD 5450 graphics card with 1GB RAM, the XPS 8300 is a pretty compelling option. It has a 460-watt power supply, and that means it can support up to ATI’s HD 5870 graphics card, the same one I’m rockin’ in my Studio XPS 7100 at home (love it). It also supports up to 4TB hard drive capacity and up to 16GB DDR3 1333MHz RAM.
Besides great performance on heavy-duty kinds of tasks, the other cool thing worth mentioning in my opinion is that Stage software is included. Chances are good if you’re buying this kind of machine, you have all kinds of digital files like MP3s, photos and movies in a number of different places. Like I mentioned in my CES 2011 post, Stage helps keep these kinds of files organized across several devices. More to come on that front, but in my quick experiences with Stage, it’s pretty useful.
Feel free to add any comments or questions below.
