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To either side of the front panel are two ventilation openings for the intake fan that sits behind. There's no particular merit in having this gaping hole in the side but it does give the 420 series a unique style and I wouldn't say it's a disagreeable look. Furthermore, if you happen to have a bowling alley in your living room you can use the gap as a convenient hand dryer.

Round the back things are very sparse with much of the standard motherboard output panel blanked out by a plastic insert. That's not to say the 420's lacking in connections though. You still get six USB 2.0 ports, a 10/100/1000Mbps (yes, that's Gigabit) Ethernet port, eSATA and Firewire 400 ports, five analogue audio outputs and an optical digital audio output. The nVidia GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card also provides you with two dual link DVI outputs for connecting up to two monitors. And, courtesy the optional Xcelerator/TV card, there's also inputs for a TV aerial, S-Video and composite video. All in all, unless you have some particularly old peripherals that require serial, parallel, or PS/2 ports, or if you particularly require wireless networking, the Dell XPS 420 has all the connectivity you should need.

There are a number of keyboard and mouse options available on the Dell website with the Logitech EX110 keyboard and MX Revolution mouse being about the best of the bunch. However, we received just the basic wired keyboard and mouse as well as a Windows Media Center Remote.

The keyboard is the usual cut-down design that Dell has been using for a while but this time with an array of multimedia buttons added to the top right. Being used to slim style keyboards in this day and age, I find the high keys a bit difficult to work with and the action is rather spongy - making it difficult to tell if you've pressed a key or not - but I've certainly used worse.

Likewise, the mouse is better than some cheap bundled affairs but is far surpassed by more enthusiast devices. Using the included mouse mat it tracks well and is OK for desktop use but if you plan on doing a bit of gaming I'd look elsewhere. Also, the shape of the mouse feels very odd with its cutaway sides and symmetric shape leaving very little to actually get hold of.

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