Dell XPS Desktop (X8700-1259BLK)

Dell XPS Desktop (X8700-1259BLK)..

Special Price Dell XPS Desktop (X8700-1259BLK) By Dell

Most helpful customer reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
Great computer
By Douglas
I bought my wife an i5 version of this computer and liked it so much I bought this one for myself. I haven't gotten it completely configured yet, but so far I am very impressed. Based upon what I have seen so far this is what I have found.

Pro
Very fast
Minimal trial software
Space and power connections for 3 more hard drives
Video card more than adequate for all but high end games
Comes with Windows 8.1 rather than 8
Open slots for two more sticks of ram
Built in wifi (No problems with connectivity)

Con
Keyboard is very basic and wired
Mouse is wired
Power supply probably not enough for video card upgrade
No additional pci slots for second video card
At this price point a small ssd for the OS would have been nice

Overall, unless you are wanted to load up on high-end graphics, this computer will more than fulfill your needs. I added a Samsung 250gb ssd as a boot drive, as well as an additional 2tb mechanical drive, and everything runs perfectly. It required a total of 25 minutes to clone the original boot drive to the ssd, so that is a very easy upgrade. I highly recommend this computer.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Smooth, Fast, Nice Upgrade
By Chris J Wagner
Upgraded from a dual core to this i7. Also a move from 32 bit to 64 provides increased RAM availability.

I did customize my experience with this machine out of personal preference. I loaded a 256GB Samsung SSD (also bought on Amazon with an Icy Dock) in place of the included 1TB drive. I'll be using that drive for extra storage. There are many SATA ports, so adding an extra drive is no big deal. (I had an extra SATA cable laying around, too. Bonus me.)

In my customized experience, I also loaded Windows 7 professional. As of this post, there are 64 bit drivers for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 on Dell's website. I had to change from UEFI to legacy in bios for Win7 to boot normally. I believe UEFI should have worked, but it didn't. No biggie.

I'll be curious how some of my older games and QuickBooks will work on this machine in 64 bit, but that has no bearing on the box itself.

One thing I will say... working extensively with Dell's OptiPlex line, you miss the quick release to get inside the tower and also the removable drive bays. With only few exceptions, those things are completely tool-less. No big deal at all, just an observation.

I'm on Windows update 70 of 104... haha... but so far the machine is very responsive and a noticeable difference over the previous dual core machine.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Boot failures until a BIOS setting is changed
By W. Warren
It's not a good sign when a brand new computer fails to boot the first time it's turned on. The first image from this computer was an error message "Media Test Failure, check cable". After a couple of hours of troubleshooting, opening the case and checking cables, and finally calling Dell Support, a technician identified the problem. The computer was set to boot in "Legacy" mode instead of "UEFI" mode as required for Windows 8. If you follow instructions at Dell online and reset the BIOS to factory defaults, it will go back to Legacy and fail to boot again. Once I made the proper change in the BIOS to boot via UEFI, it booted fine and seems to be running OK. If this happened to mine, I bet there are at least 19 others (that's how many were available when I ordered) are also affected.
[Edit: I was going to add a picture of the screen, but it seems I can't. The full error message also had "Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key."]

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