Dell's new XPS 700 series of desktop computers for gamers is nicknamed "Heavy Ordnance" and these big, beautiful systems live up to the name. Their unique grills on the front of the chassis exude the power that lines the interior of these gaming PCs. And they're not as expensive as you might think.

The baseline XPS 700 start at a decent price for a dedicated gaming desktop that includes a great display, the 20-inch widescreen UltraSharp flat panel. This monitor delivers bright colors and sharp images for gaming or watching DVD movies, and it's large and brilliant enough that you'll never miss your big gaming CRT.

The display matches the chassis of these desktops well: The 2.5mm thick aluminum tower features customizable LEDs on the front and back, so you can add your own personality touches to the unique tower. There are six heat pipes and aluminum fans on the inside of the tower to keep your system running cool, and the 750-watt power supply gives you plenty of juice for what's inside.

That price gives you an excellent set of tower components, including a 1.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor E6300. This CPU features two processing units on a single chip, boosting your performance when you're running intensive tasks such as high-end games.

Dell pairs that processor with 1GB of 677MHz DDR2 memory, a good amount for a high-end gaming system. You can double the memory for $115. This steps you up to 2GB of speedy 667MHz DDR2 RAM, more than most games will even touch, so you've got plenty of room to grow.

The motherboard inside the XPS 700 supports NVIDIA's SLi (scalable link interface) video cards. Basically, it comes with two slots and lets you use twin video boards in tandem for greatly enhanced graphics performance. The default option is two NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GS video cards, each with 256MB of dedicated video memory. You can step up to twin 7900 GTX cards with 512MB for additional performance, but it's a $500 upgrade.

Storage space starts out a quarter of a terabyte with the 250GB 7,200rpm hard drive. This drive offers a great amount of space for game installs and multimedia file storage, but these systems also support larger and faster RAID options. For example, you can step up to 320GB of storage space on twin 160GB drives spinning at 10,000rpm for even faster performance. This configuration will unfortunately add close to $460 to the sticker price, however. If storage is more important than speed, for about the same price you can opt for a full terabyte of space on twin 500GB 7,200rpm drives and not have to worry about running out of room for a long, long time.

Dell includes a nice optical drive setup on these desktops as well. The primary drive is a 16X DVD writer with double layer capability. This drive can burn to CDs and DVDs as well as the newer double layer DVDs that let you store up to 8.5GB or four hours of high-end video on a single disk. The XPS 700 systems also come with a plain DVD-ROM drive, which makes disk-to-disk burns an easy task.

Audio is also top notch inside the XPS 700. The Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi XtremeMusic sound card delivers Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound, great for those high-end gaming headphones. These systems ship with a 10-watt speaker that clips onto the UltraSharp LCD--it's not thunderous, but it is quite aesthetic and provides decent sound for movie watching.

The XPS 700 can optionally ship with Windows XP Media Center edition, so you can add a TV tuner so and use your system as a digital video recorder to watch and record television. A dual TV tuner with remote control that allows you to record two shows at once adds $150 to the price of the system.

Dell includes a basic optical mouse and USB keyboard with these gaming desktop computers. They serve as standard input devices, but most gamers already have their preferred input device combo at the ready. There's a one-year limited warranty on these desktop computers for gamers, which is fairly standard for gaming PCs.

Dell's well-designed XPS 700 systems are priced very competitively for desktop computers for gamers so you can bring home the Heavy Ordnance without overbearing your gaming budget.

Pros: Great component list, nicely priced with 20-inch LCD
Cons: Upgrades fairly expensive

Warranty
1-year limited