So far, so not that interesting. Where the Dell gets really cool is when you open it up. To do so you need to move the handle upwards and move the side door. This is impressively heavy giving it the solid feel of an expensive car. It's not the neatest PC interior you'll ever see, but that's forgivable seeing how much there is going on here. It's seriously over-engineered, which is what you'd want if you'd shelled out this much for a PC.

Firstly, there's a huge green cowling with the initials XPS moulded into the case. Underneath this is a very large finned pipe drawing heat from the CPU to the outside. There's no fan on this heat sink, with two 92mm fans at the rear of the case drawing the heat away. There's also a fan drawing air from the front and directing it over the graphics sub-system. There's also a fan mounted at the side of the case that takes air from the front and directs into the path of the graphics cards.

Yes, that's cards. There are, of course, two in this machine - Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTXs operating in SLI configuration. As with the motherboard, Nvidia has custom-made the cards for Dell. Each is fitted with a large dual-slot heat pipe and fan cooler, similar to the ones it has used on its new 512MB 7800 GTX cards. The PCBs on the Dell cards are full length with a metal bracket running down the spine. The only reason I can see for this is so that the cards can be secured in the bracket that also houses the internal fan with the advantage that there's less chance of anything coming out of place.

Beneath the graphics cards is the Audigy 2 ZS fully wired up for the front-mounted audio connectors and underneath that is the modem. Fitting is screwless, with a plastic strip that holds the cards in place. Unlike some screwless solutions this actually can be flipped down and put back easily.

Another plastic cowling sits over the two hard disks. Each is a 250GB Western Digital but these have been set up a single striped array of 465.66GB capacity and logically partitioned into a C and and F drive, with the letters in between taken up by the card reader. The C drive is 445GB in size, with the F drive containing recovery image files.

Another unique feature of the Dell is that the power supply is integrated into a completely separate section in the base of the PC, with two small fans at the rear. This means that your power cable is attached at the bottom rather than the top, which does make things neater.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about this massive machine is that it's surprisingly quiet. Though there's a raft of fans, all of them are large and low speed, reducing noise, while the bulk of the chassis and the cowlings ensure that you won't be deafened while trying to play your favourite game. This is of real importance as whatever its spec, if your system is too noisy, you won't enjoy using it. The keyboard and mouse are also important for working on. The ones supplied with Dell don't look as if they're from a system that costs well over two grand. The mouse is a rather bog-standard optical job, but the keyboard was actually perfectly comfortable to type on with a pleasing amount of travel in the keys, and some nifty media controls, including a volume wheel.

Inevitably, the CPU is from Intel. While Dell's hand was forced into using a non-Intel motherboard chipset by its wish to move to SLI, it's still keeping safe with Intel CPUs. The processor used here is a Pentium D 840, a dual-core CPU running at 3.2GHz. There's a healthy 2GB of RAM, but this is split over four DIMMs so you can't increase it without replacing what's there. 2GB should be enough for a good while, though.