Dell’s XPS Desktop gets a new look and liquid cooling

Enlarge / Not to scale: Old Dell XPS Desktop (left) with new XPS Desktop (right). (credit: Dell)

Dell's XPS Desktop is ditching the cheese-grater look in favor of something sweeter. The tower PCs announced today are 42 percent larger and have a new thermal design that flattens the previous version's bumpy, weave-like ventilation grille into a square-filled design reminiscent of waffles. The beefier chassis-which measures 27 L, compared to its predecessor's 19 L-makes way for Intel's latest 12th-Gen Alder Lake CPUs and Nvidia's and AMD's most powerful graphics cards.

The top-line CPU option is the powerful Intel Core i9-12900K-and when we say powerful, we mean it. The chip is a 125 W, overclockable, 16-core, 24-thread CPU with 30MB of cache and a 3.2 GHz clock speed that can boost to 5.2 GHz. The prior XPS Desktop came with up to an i9-11900K, which is also 125 W but with fewer cores (although performance may vary due to the 12th Gen chip's mix of performance and efficiency cores, threads, and cache and higher clock speeds (3.5 / 5.3 GHz).

Options for graphics go up to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 or an AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT. You can add up to an incredible 128GB of DDR5-3600 RAM (across four 32GB sticks), twice the memory offered by the last-gen XPS Desktop. The PC packs up to 4TB of storage, courtesy of a 2TB SSD and 2TB HDD. Fuel for all that computing horsepower comes from a 750 W power supply.

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