Dell Studio XPS 8300 review

Not everyone wants their PC to look like a looming black obelisk. Although Dell’s Studio XPS 8300 won’t be to everyone’s taste, it’s compact, unassuming and reasonably quiet. It’s only when we opened it up that we realised how much has been sacrificed to keep the PC small. The plain metal interior looks cheap, everything is cramped and cable routing is haphazard.

There are spare drive bays for one 5 1/4in drive and two 3 1/2in disks, but there are only two spare SATA connectors. The other two are occupied by a DVD drive and 1TB hard disk, and none supports the faster SATA III standard. The motherboard’s backplate provides just four USB ports, an eSATA port, six 3.5mm stereo sockets for analogue surround sound and an optical S/PDIF output. Another four USB ports and a memory card reader are built into the top and front panels. Dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi is integrated onto the motherboard.

The PC has 8GB of RAM in two 4GB sticks, which leaves space for another two modules. There are also two PCI-E x1 slots and one PCI-E x16 slot, but all of them are occupied. The x16 slot is taken up by the graphics card, a 1GB ATI Radeon 5770, while the two PCI-E x1 slots are occupied by a USB3 card that provides a solitary port on the back panel and a Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1200 TV tuner for viewing and recording digital TV. A media centre remote control is also supplied.

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.