As I probably mentioned in the past, I have been muddling along with a six-year-old Sony COTS computer for... well... the past six years or so. For the first year of its life, that was not so bad, but for the past three years or so, I have not been able to purchase anything even approximating a new game, simply because the machine would laugh its little digital guts out if I tried to install any of them on it. However, with the impending arrival of Starcraft II (assuming Blizzard does not pull a Ghost on us), that simply would not do. I had been willing to wait a while to upgrade my hardware (and, by "upgrade" I mean "completely and utterly replace" - the Sony had already been upgraded as far as it physically could go, and that was still pretty much pathetic), but Tennessee ran one of their nifty sales-tax-free weekends recently, and Better Half and I decided to take advantage of it.

Well, the new toy is here, a little over a week after ordering it, and I thought I would put up a few pictures - hey, this is the first time in a while I have had a drool-worthy computer. Click to enlarge all but the last.

So the box is something of a giveaway, I will grant:

... and its internal quality is honestly a little surprising:

Just the basics - recovery and installation CDs, and a mark 1 mod 0 keyboard and mouse combination (after all, Dell's prices for peripherals are a bit... inflated):

Now we are getting to the good stuff:

There is what I was looking for:

Gotta love that fire engine red trim:

Gratuitous butt shot:

And my computer takes off its... side. I have to admit, getting into it is quite easy - push a slider on the top, and the side pops off. Inside you can probably make out the twin, SLI'd nVidia GeForce 9800 GT cards (cumulative 1024MB of processing RAM), the massive heatsink sitting on top of my quad-core, 2.5Ghz processor, the 4GB of RAM (any word on a fix for 32-bit Vista, by the by?), and all the other goodies tucked away:

Unfortunately, my current set-up is the biggest travesty of them all... Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that is a brand-spanking-new Dell XPS... plugged into a 19-inch CRT of unknown age. Hey, at least it is a Dell monitor! By way of excuse, my LCD monitor is in some storage bin somewhere, waiting for us to tell the moving company we are ready to accept our shipment. Also, thank God the XPS came with a DVI-VGA dumbing-down-dongle:

And for those who are curious about such things, here is the computer's score, as per PerformanceTest by Passmark. I guess that is good?