Refine search for PCs

Dell XPS 420

Author	Edward Chester
Published	11th Jan 2008
Manufacturer	Dell
Price	£815.81 (Exc VAT)
as reviewed	£958.58 (Inc VAT)
Latest Price	Click here

Design & Features
Performance
Value
Overall

Discuss this article

Email this to a friend

TrustedReviews Newsletters

Another innovation that's new to the 420, and to us, and which we think is rather more useful is the rubberised recess in the top panel. It doesn't do anything particularly clever, indeed it doesn't do anything at all. It's there simply to securely store USB hard drives, MP3 players, and all the other detritus that collects on top of your PC. Considering the amount of times I've nearly destroyed my various gadgets by knocking them off the top of my PC, I can certainly appreciate this subtle little addition.

Moving back round to the front we find the standard combination of two USB 2.0 ports, a Firewire 400 port, and two 3.5mm jack sockets for your headphones and a microphone. These are accompanied by a multi-format card reader, the Xcelerator panel, and two flip down drive bay covers behind which sit, at least in our case, a DVD-/+RW drive and a DVD-ROM CD-/+RW combo drive. The whole lot is nicely incorporated into the front panel so as to maintain the sleek black lines as much as possible and, though it doesn't come close to the likes of Apple's iMac or Mac Pro when it comes to making normally ugly connections and drives bays look good, it certainly looks pretty decent.

This Xcelerator front panel is actually part of a combined upgrade that includes a hybrid digital/analogue TV tuner expansion card that's situated round the back. As well as giving you the ability to watch TV on your PC, the S-Video and composite video inputs also enable you to record video from analogue sources like your VCR or old camcorder. As well as this, though, the Xcelerator incorporates a video transcoder chip that purportedly speeds up the re-encoding of certain video formats so you can quickly convert your video ready for playing back on your PSP or iPod, for instance. Unfortunately, the way this is implemented leaves a lot to be desired.

Rather than having a dedicated mini app that enables you to quickly and easily convert your video, Dell has chosen to bundle in Roxio Media Creator to perform this task. The upshot of which is you need to rummage through the thoroughly unintuitive software to perform a simple file conversion. And even then, I couldn't actually find the file formats I wanted. Moreover the usefulness of the analogue video input seems to be very limited as nearly all video sources are now stored digitally. In other words, unless you're planning on converting your old home video or VHS collections then don't bother with the Xcelerator.