An open-world arcade racing experiment in Detroit debris

Don’t tell Newton: Ramming your hot rod full-speed into a concrete block, idling minivan, or in-game ad billboard in Burnout Paradise doesn’t really slow you down. The game is a steady, fuel-injected dose of momentum from spark plug to finish line. Pushing over Paradise City’s 20 square miles of pavement for just an hour means accumulating new cars, completing events, knocking over barriers to find shortcuts or spontaneous jumps, earning license upgrades, setting street-specific high scores, or just streaking a newfound scenic route with rubber.

The game combines the feel of impulsive, mission-based sandbox titles like Grand Theft Auto and Tony Hawk with loose, forgiving, driving mechanics—making for disposable, whimsical racing with a persistent career and surprisingly good online mode. Every major intersection in the city is a gateway to a racing event. Spin your wheels at a stoplight and you’ll activate a point-to-point race or one of four other variations on the standard sprint: Road-rage events have you side-swiping a set number of opponents within a time limit, stunt runs are all about racking up points with long drifts and high jumps, and in our favorite, “marked man,” you’ll try to escape a set of ominous black sedans before they can smear you into the median. There are vehicle-specific challenges, too, and as you spend more time in Paradise City, you can earn the keys to rival cars roaming the streets by pushing them off the road.

Some cars earn a boost from stunts, others from banging against other vehicles and objects in the environment, and still another type gains it by just maintaining a high speed.

When you understeer a turn (Burnout’s sluggish map-guidance interface is one of its only shortcomings), you’re treated to a slo-mo sequence of your coupe compressing into a steel accordion. You’ll never see a pre-rendered animation—plow into a passenger van, pole, or unlucky bus near top speed, and the game catches each frame of your chassis’s crunch from a cinematic angle. These scenic crashes don’t affect your car’s performance, and they’re an anchor for the game’s forgiving, unfrustrating design.

Seamless presentation is one of Burnout Paradise’s best qualities. Criterion keeps the experience accessible: Loading screens are a rarity, the player’s stats and best times are all recorded alongside an excellent in-menu city map, and hopping online is a matter of two keystrokes, where you can roll through events or “freeburn” with up to seven other players. The PC release bundles all the updates the console version has seen in the last year: a night-day cycle and dynamic weather, new online game modes, and a handful of motorcycles to hop on when you get tired of four wheels.

Bikes! No, you can't whip chains at passers-by like in Road Rash, but the choppers are a good wheelie-popping diversion when four-wheeling gets old.

Burnout Paradise is a memorable arcade racing experience. What holds it back an rpm or two are the relatively predictable events—after you’ve won 20 or so challenges, the lack of more dynamic content (police, racing factions, tournaments, or multi-race events) makes the single-player seem tedious. Once you’ve explored the city enough to get a feel for it, Paradise loses some of its charm—busting over a dirt ramp and power-sliding through oncoming traffic as you round a blind corner into a telephone pole is spontaneous only the first few dozen times.

A grand strategy-RPG hybrid as beautiful as it is bloody

Fans of Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War might feel burned by the barely recognizable sequel to their old favorite, but going in without expecting it to be yet another typical real-time strategy game is extremely rewarding. That’s because DoW II is actually two excellent games in one. Both have outstanding graphics and animation, a complete lack of traditional RTS base-building, and strong tactical gameplay, but the single-player/co-op campaign mode and multiplayer experiences are very different.

In single-player, you command a group of four marine squads (or two each in two-player co-op) in a campaign to defend sub-sector Aurelia from invasion by Orks, Eldar, and Tyranid forces. Without the typical emphasis on base-building, the game feels more like an action RPG. For example, squad leaders level up and never die (they can be revived after their life is depleted). The squads can also be equipped with Wargear to make them more powerful.

In the single-player campaign, the focus is on using your Space Marines' special abilities to maximum lethal effect.

There are tons of opportunities to customize your team, from which three of the five available squads you choose to take on a mission, to how you spend their earned skill points when they level up, to what Wargear you choose to equip them with. Each play-through changes based on your choices.

Those choices lead to some impressive action, like slamming jump-jet assault marines into a group of Orks and sending them flying, or using your scouts to snipe a large Tyranid from a safe distance, severing the psychic link to the smaller beasts and turning them against each other.

The missions tend to become tedious, and the laborious Space Marine dialogue makes you reach for the Escape key, but continue forward and you unlock new abilities and earn new equipment.

Playing in co-op (which works smoothly over Games for Windows Live) lets you focus your attention on just two squads, allowing you to manage their abilities even more efficiently and in coordination with your teammate over built-in voice chat.

Multiplayer changes the rules dramatically and comes without any training wheels attached, so learning to play—especially as the Eldar, Orks, and particularly the unintuitive Tyranids—is not for the casual player. It is, however, worth learning for its tactical, location-capturing gameplay. The action is centered on taking and holding Victory Points on the map (similar to Relic’s Company of Heroes multiplayer), which causes intense fighting for control of neutral ground rather than the typical base assault. Placing your units behind cover for increased defense makes using the terrain to your advantage (and destroying it to deprive your enemy) a key part of gameplay, something not typically seen in RTSes.

DoW II changes the rules of the typical RTS enough to make both modes a refreshing experience without becoming completely alien to strategy players. Even those with zero interest in the rather goofy Warhammer fiction will appreciate this new approach.

It's big, mean, loud, and it doesn't play well with others, but it gets the job done

At five inches high, 6.14 inches square at the top, and weighing a few ounces shy of two pounds, the Thermaltake BigTyp 14 Pro is among the biggest and heaviest coolers we’ve tested—although it’s not as big as Cooler Master’s V10, reviewed last month.

The BigTyp 14 Pro contains six heat pipes routed through aluminum fins mounted perpendicular to the motherboard and is topped with a plastic shroud and 14cm variable-speed fan, which blows hot air straight down instead of through the back of the case, like with most performance coolers. Two retention clips screw into the base and are fastened with nuts on the underside of the motherboard, just like with the Cooler Master V10. Installing the BigTyp 14 Pro is easier than the V10—it’s smaller and lighter, it won’t bump up against crucial components like RAM, and the nuts can be screwed in with a Phillips screwdriver as opposed to a hex wrench. But there’s no room for a 12cm rear fan with the BigTyp installed.

The Thermaltake BigTyp 14 Pro is big enough to cause problems with some cases.

The support brace that reinforces our Cooler Master ATCS 840’s removable motherboard tray and backplate got in the way of the BigTyp’s plastic shroud. We’re not sure who to blame for this: Cooler Master for putting a brace so close to the top left of the motherboard, or Thermaltake for creating such an enormous cooler? Regardless, the cooler should install fine in most other chassis. (We ended up Dremeling out a corner of the cooler’s shroud to make it fit.)

At low fan speeds, the BigTyp 14 Pro outperforms our stock cooler, and at top howling speeds it’s a match for our favorite, the Zalman CNPS 9900. But even at $20 cheaper than the Zalman, the BigTyp won’t be taking the top slot. It’s too big and it messes up internal airflow by requiring removal of the 12cm back fan and routing its hot air straight down onto the mobo instead of onto the back of the case.

Hands-on with the first two-terabyte consumer hard drive

Two things get people excited about hard drives: speed and capacity. Western Digital already holds the performance crown with its much smaller Velociraptor, but now the company owns capacity, too, with its new Caviar Green 2TB WD20EADS.

The Caviar packs a full 500GB more onto its four platters than our previous capacity champion, Seagate’s 1.5TB 7200.11 Barracuda. But while the Barracuda married capacity with performance, the Caviar instead opts for low acoustics and low power consumption. How low? The Caviar is rated at 2.8 watts at idle, while the Barracuda idles at 8.3 watts. For a single computer, the power reduction is minimal, especially when it’s sitting in a machine with a CPU that eats 130 watts and that has two 300-watt GPUs cranking away. But for the low-power-consumption crowd, we can’t see it getting better than this. The Caviar’s power savings come by varying the rotation speed on its 400Gb/square-inch platters between 5,400rpm and 7,200rpm.

 The 2TB Caviar Green makes up in capacity what it lacks in speed.

But how much performance are you willing to give up for that Green badge? With the Caviar, the trade-off is significant. Even with a 32MB cache, this isn’t the drive for speed freaks. The Caviar’s read speeds, for example, are about 25 percent slower than those of the Barracuda in h2wbench, and PCMark Vantage puts the Caviar about 15 percent behind the Seagate drive.

Random-access read times for both drives are around 12ms, while the Caviar’s random write latency is around 6.7ms, 1.4ms slower than the Barracuda’s.

The Caviar can’t match the read or write speeds of this generation’s terabyte drives, much less the 1.5TB Barracuda or the Velociraptor, but the drive’s big selling points are capacity and power savings. In those two categories, it is unbeatable. And the memory of the 1.5TB Barracuda’s firmware issues might scare off folks considering that drive. Though we weren’t among the small percentage of people affected by the 7200.11 generation’s firmware issues, the Barracuda will probably be tarred with that brush for a while. That essentially makes the Caviar twice the size of its nearest competitors. That’s something to be lauded even if you don’t tool around in a Prius or keep to a strict carbon-footprint diet.

The spring update to the GTX 280 delivers a touch more speed

Last month, we reviewed Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 295, a dual-GPU GT200-based board that benefited from a die-shrink from 65 nanometers to 55 nanometers. This month, we’re testing the GTX 285, which uses the same silicon as the GTX 295, in a clocked-up single-GPU design. Unfortunately, the paltry clock-speed improvements that the die shrink allowed don’t deliver enough of a performance boost to make this board worth recommending, especially for folks who already own a GTX 280 board.

When you compare the GTX 285 to the GTX 280, you can see what the problem is. The GTX 285’s GT200 core is clocked at 648MHz, up from 602MHz for a stock GTX 280. The 1GB of GDDR3 memory runs at just 621MHz on a 512-bit bus—the GTX 280’s memory runs at 550MHz. The upshot is that this new card delivers less than a 10 percent performance increase over the GTX 280 parts in most benchmarks. The only big gains over the 280 are at lower resolutions with very high antialiasing and anisotropic filtering levels. The big gain is in power consumption. The 285 features a TDP of about 183W, while the 280 drew a massive 236W. That means that the 285 will actually run in a system that’s equipped with just a pair of 6-pin PCI-E video connectors—you don’t need the 6-pin and 8-pin combo that’s been de rigueur for the last few months.

Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 285 is the fastest single-GPU board we've tested, but it's roundly smacked by ATI's dual-GPU 4870 X2.

Looking at the benchmarks, it’s clear that this isn’t a good upgrade for anyone with a GTX 280, Radeon 4870 X2, or even a GTX 260 Core 216. Who is this card for? In short, anyone who’s still running a last-gen card. That means G92-series for Nvidia, or a 4850 or slower board from ATI. However, it’s not a particularly good deal, even though it’s the fastest single-GPU board we’ve tested. When you compare its performance to ATI’s 4870 X2 boards, it gets spanked. With a street price of about $380 at press time, it’s significantly outperformed by ATI’s dual-GPU 4870 X2 boards, which cost just $30 to $80 more, depending on vendor and bundle.

Other than the die-shrink and clock-speed increases, the GTX 285 offers exactly the same feature set as the GTX 280. It supports HDMI, including audio pass-through, accelerated video decode, support for accelerating CUDA and PhysX apps, and a host of features designed to make rendered video look fantastic. When the price of these boards come down some, they’ll be worthy upgrades. Until then, you’re better off saving a few more pennies and buying a much-faster dual-GPU board.

I’m having a blue-screen problem on a T42p ThinkPad with 2GB of RAM running Windows XP Pro SP2. This is a corporate laptop issued to me as a mobile employee, so I have admin rights to it.

I’m to the point of reinstalling the OS, but I don’t have access to the corporate image without driving 90 miles, and at this point, I’m leery of just installing a different OS copy, with a different serial number.

SUBMIT YOUR QUESTION Are flames shooting out of the back of your rig? First, grab a fire extinguisher and douse the flames. Once the pyrotechnic display has fizzled, email the doctor at doctor@maximumpc.com for advice on how to solve your technological woes.

Good for gaming, but is it worth the price?

At $2,300, CyberPower’s Extreme M1 17-inch gaming notebook is the antithesis of the budget Gateway P-7811 FX we’ve been raving about for months. The most obvious extravagance you get for the higher price is dual-GPU graphics in the form of two ATI Radeon HD 3870 cards in CrossFireX. The Extreme M1’s 2.53GHz T9400 Core 2 Duo CPU is also 270MHz faster and features twice the cache as the Gateway’s proc, its 320GB hard drive is more than 50 percent bigger, and its optical drive supports Blu-ray playback.

With eSATA, 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, HDMI, a webcam, a fingerprint reader, an Express Card slot, and a media reader, the Extreme M1 has you covered for features.

The question is, how do these extras translate in performance? Compared with our zero-point notebook, the Extreme M1 excelled in all the benchmarks to varying degrees—not surprising, given the zero-point’s age. Against the Gateway P-7811 FX, there was a little more give and take. For example, in the ProShow Producer and MainConcept benchmarks, CyberPower’s rig had gains hovering around 10 percent, which is proportionate to the M1’s clock-speed advantage over the Gateway’s 2.26GHz CPU. But in our Photoshop benchmark, the Extreme M1 was actually around 7 percent slower than Gateway’s P-7811 FX.

Gaming was an even more interesting story. We didn’t expect the dual-GPUs in the Extreme M1 to really flex their muscle in our standard notebook benchmarks, as FEAR and Quake 4 aren’t that graphically intensive, particularly at the mild settings we use in our mobile tests. But we certainly weren’t expecting the Extreme M1 to turn out just 28fps in FEAR—that’s 74 percent slower than Gateway’s budget machine. Without any clear explanation for the performance lag, we forged on. In Quake 4, the Extreme M1 was a more expected 7 percent faster than Gateway’s P-7811 FX.

We went a step further and tested the Extreme M1 with our desktop gaming benchmarks as well. After all, the CrossFireX graphics should be up to the task of more graphically challenging titles. And sure enough, we were able to run Crysis at the M1’s 1920x1200 native resolution and set to Very High Quality, albeit at just 15fps. With Unreal Tournament 3, the Extreme M1 surpassed even some gaming desktops with 114fps. Gateway’s P-7811 FX, with its single GeForce 9800N GTS, achieved half the frame rate in those two games: 8fps and 74fps for Crysis and UT3, respectively. Indeed, the overall gaming prowess of the Extreme M1 convinced us that the FEAR score is likely the result of a driver issue and not any hardware shortcoming.

Yet despite its competence as a gaming rig, we have some reservations about the Extreme M1. It’s heavier than most gaming notebooks, weighing close to 13 pounds with its power brick; its 12-cell battery can’t supply juice for a full two hours—we got one hour and 50 minutes through a standard-def DVD in power-saving mode; and its speakers are weak and tinny. Even more troubling, the Extreme M1 doesn’t feel all that sturdy to us: There was a slight buckling to the strip of touch-sensitive controls above the machine’s keyboard, and the lid of the notebook showed scratches after just a few days of indoor use—it’s little consolation that the scratches were camouflaged by all the smudges and fingerprints that quickly covered the machine’s shiny black veneer. For the price of this notebook, we’d expect better quality.

How peer-to-peer file-sharing networks work

BitTorrent is a tremendously popular peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol designed to simplify and speed up the process of transferring large files over the Internet while drastically limiting the bandwidth consumption of any one server.

In a conventional file-transfer process, a file is stored on a server on a network such as the Internet. Other computers on the network send messages to the server, informing it that they would like to copy that file. When the two sides establish a connection, the other computers become clients to the server. As the number of clients increases, so do the demands on the server. And while each client might consume only a little bandwidth, the server can consume tremendous amounts. To reduce costs and prevent the server from crashing, the server’s owner will typically constrain the speed at which each client is allowed to download data or even limit the number of clients that can be served at one time.

In the original BitTorrent, one computer acted as a tracker to coordinate the peer-to-peer file-transfer process. The tracker maintained a list of which computers on the Internet were in the process of uploading or downloading pieces of the seed file. A trackerless BitTorrent system eliminates this central computer by distributing the tracker data amongst the swarm participants.

Napster and Gnutella

Peer-to-peer file sharing eliminates the need for a central server to host files. The original Napster, however, still relied on a central server to keep track of connected computers and the files available on them. That’s how the service ran afoul of copyright laws and was eventually forced to shut down: Napster’s servers didn’t store copyrighted material, but the courts decided that Napster’s service violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act because the company knowingly facilitated copyright infringement.

While the Napster lawsuit was underway, another peer-to-peer network named Gnutella sprang up and completely eliminated the centralized server. When you launch a Gnutella client, it immediately searches the Internet for other computers running Gnutella clients. Each of these peers is called a node. When you initiate a file search, the Gnutella client queries each node to determine if it’s hosting the file you’re looking for. If these nodes don’t have the file you’re searching for, they’ll send queries to the nodes they’re connected to. The node that does have the file will send a response message back to the node that initiated the search, and the user can then decide whether or not to download it.

Gnutella has two significant shortcomings: First, it relies on file transfers between just two peers. Since the most common means of consumer Internet access—cable and DSL—use asynchronous connections in which download speeds are much higher than upload speeds, the peer downloading the file is limited to whatever speed the peer uploading the file is capable of. Second, it depends on users to reciprocate, but it can’t force anyone who downloads files from other people’s computers to allow others to download files from their machines. Netiquette frowns on this practice, which is known as leeching, but Gnutella can’t prevent it.

BitTorrent

BitTorrent cleverly avoids the legal and practical problems associated with peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like Gnutella and the original Napster. It allows one peer to rely on several others for file transfers, rendering the process both faster and cheaper for all the peers involved, and it has a reward system that encourages user reciprocation.

Rather than establish a relationship between just two peers, the BitTorrent protocol simultaneously gathers pieces of a file from several peers that already have the file or that are in the process of obtaining it. It then downloads these pieces to your computer and reassembles them on your hard drive when all the pieces have been acquired.

The BitTorrent protocol depends on at least one peer making the entire file available to the network; this is known as the “initial seed.” As other peers begin downloading this seed file, they simultaneously upload pieces of the file to other peers that are looking for it. Each peer is encouraged to continue making the file available after they’ve downloaded it in its entirety, in effect creating additional seeds. A BitTorrent client can facilitate this with a tit-for-tat scheme that rewards reciprocation by giving preference to peers that send data back.

To share a file, the user first creates a smaller file, called a “torrent,” that contains metadata about the file and the “tracker” computer that will coordinate the file distribution. The metadata inside the torrent file varies according to the BitTorrent client that created it, but the file will have an “announce” section that specifies the tracker computer’s URL, and an “info” section containing file names, file sizes, and a hash code for each piece of the file (more on this later).

Any peer that wants to download the file must first download the torrent file associated with it. The torrent will connect the peer to the appropriate tracker, which will in turn tell the peer which other peers are currently downloading the file. All the peers actively engaged in sharing a particular file are referred to as a “swarm.” The more peers in the swarm, the faster each peer will be able to download the file. In a conventional client-server relationship, a file in high demand can be slow to download because it presents a hardship for the servers hosting the file. With BitTorrent, a file’s popularity actually increases the speed at which it can be downloaded.

Each peer distributing a file breaks it into chunks ranging from 64KB to 4MB in size and creates a checksum for each chunk using a hashing algorithm. When another peer receives these chunks, it matches its checksum to the checksum recorded in the torrent file to verify its integrity.
 
A “trackerless” BitTorrent system has no central computer coordinating the file sharing; instead, every peer acts as a tracker. In this case, the BitTorrent client employs a distributed hash table to keep track of the location of the initial seeds, checksums, and peers actively engaged in the swarm.

 A lunch-box computer that eats the lunches of bigger PCs

You know when a little person shows up in a Ben Stiller movie he’s gonna whoop some ass. Sometimes that’s not just a comedy film cliché. Take, for example, Falcon Northwest’s size-challenged Fragbox II.

You’d think this Halfling PC would have a hard time competing with full-tilt, big-ass gaming rigs, but Falcon brings its A-game to the table by managing to stuff an overclocked Core i7 into the wee chassis.

This is the third Fragbox II we’ve seen in recent years and it’s also clearly the fastest. With its overclocked 2.93GHz Core i7-940, 6GB of DDR3/1066, Lite On Blu-ray burner, Seagate 1.5TB Barracuda, and a pair of GeForce GTX 285 cards in SLI, this PC is hardly wanting.

Think of the Fragbox II as Hervé Villechaize mixed with Samuel L. Jackson.

The Fragbox II didn’t set any Lab records in benchmarks. The majority are still held by Velocity Micro’s Raptor Z90, which we reviewed in our Holiday 2008 issue. With its larger and cooler-running desktop case, the Raptor Z9 packed a 3.2GHz Core i7-965 overclocked to 3.66GHz. That’s enough to keep the Falcon’s slightly overclocked 3.06GHz Core i7-940 at bay.

Falcon does keep things competitive, however, by enabling Turbo Mode, which takes the proc to 3.3GHz in some applications. That’s enough to embarrass some far more extravagant rigs. The most glaring example is the $10,000 Hardcore Reactor PC we reviewed in February. The tiny Fragbox II manages to pull even with that monster in our Premiere Pro CS3 benchmark and speeds past the Hardcore in MainConcept Reference encoding and ProShow Producer. Interestingly, the two GeForce GTX 285 cards in the Fragbox II leap ahead of the tri-SLI based Hardcore in Unreal Tournament 3. Why? The Core i7 in the Fragbox II is faster than the Core 2 Extreme in the Hardcore and we run our test at a “low resolution” of 1920x1200. Tri-SLI needs ultrahigh resolutions to overcome its inefficiencies in less GPU-intensive games.

The Fragbox II doesn’t just ace outdated Core 2 Extreme PCs, either; it also manages to put a dent in Gateway’s FX6800, which we reviewed in April. The Fragbox II turns in better scores in Premiere Pro, ProShow, MainConcept, and both gaming tests since it, surprisingly, has higher specs than the larger Gateway. There’s one area where the Fragbox II falls short, though: storage. The Fragbox II’s single 1.5TB drive can’t keep pace with the SSD and RAID 0 Velociraptors elsewhere, and it gets spanked in our drive-intensive Photoshop benchmark. Falcon does sell an uber SSD version of the Fragbox II, but didn’t sample it to us. Pity.

Obviously, you can’t cram the same ton of parts in an SFF box that you can with a full-size desktop machine. But it’s not something that should take anyone by surprise, so we can’t ding the Fragbox II for that. Noise is a different matter. To keep all this hardware cool requires fans. Given the Fragbox II’s size, that means smaller, shriller fans. The Fragbox II isn’t unacceptably loud, but you won’t keep it running in your bedroom at night. You might even notice it if it’s in the room next door. Still, the biggest negative is the price. At $4,632, this rig is hardly budget.

It is, however, smaller and faster than a lot of the gaming machines we’ve seen recently. Heck, it’s even cheaper than some of them too.

This all-in-one dares to take on our zero-point rig

All-in-one PCs like Dell’s XPS One 24 aren’t the most powerful computers on the market and they know it. Like thin-and-light notebooks, they trade brute power for a thin, stylish profile and quiet operation—and we’re absolutely fine with that. We’d never give up our benchmark-crushing uber rigs for an all-in-one, but a good one can be a terrific second PC for the kitchen, living room, or bedroom.

Don’t take that to mean the XPS One 24 is wimpy, though. It’s far more powerful than the HP TouchSmart we reviewed in the Holiday 2008 issue (you’ll find our review at http://tinyurl.com/dxcxkf), thanks to a foundation based on Intel’s 2.33GHz Core 2 Quad Q8200 CPU, a respectable mobile GPU (Nvidia’s GeForce 9600M GT with a 512MB frame buffer), and a desktop 750GB hard drive. The trade-off for that power is heat and noise: The components in Dell’s machine produce more heat than the parts HP chose, and Dell compounded its thermal issues by sticking the power supply inside the chassis (HP uses an external brick). So, while the TouchSmart is all but silent, the cooling fan in the XPS One 24 emits a slightly annoying whine.

We dig that we can tilt the Dell's XPS One 24, but it would be even better if it could swivel, too.

Noise aside, when we sat the Dell and the HP side by side, we were surprised at how much more screen real estate the Dell has to offer—we hadn’t realized what a difference two inches could make. It’s not a touch screen, but it does boast volume and media-playback controls hidden in its bezel that light up when your finger comes near (a proximity sensor is responsible for this parlor trick). The screen has a native resolution of 1920x1200, but you have to move up to the “Product Red” model ($2,200) to get a Blu-ray drive.
 
The XPS One 24’s footprint isn’t as large as you might think, but it probably won’t fit in your armoire-style desk: The machine emerges from a glass base that measures just 13 inches wide and eight inches deep, but the JBL speakers permanently mounted to the left and right of the display render the computer about four inches wider than the typical 24-inch monitor. The base cannot be removed, so there’s no way to hang this computer on the wall. The JBLs, meanwhile, are better than what you’d typically find incorporated into a display, but that’s not saying much. They’re much too bright and lack enough bottom end to deliver an enjoyable performance with movies and music.
 
We’ve been reluctant to benchmark this class of PC because the zero-point rig we use as our basis of comparison is by design the polar opposite of an all-in-one. It wouldn’t be fair to belittle an all-in-one for being a slow gamer because it’s not designed for that—so we don’t. But the CPU in the XPS One 24 is only slightly slower than our zero-point and the machine has twice as much memory, so we decided to see what this baby could do with our productivity benchmarks. As you can see from the benchmark chart, it delivered respectable performance, edging past our zero-point in three of the four tests. Not bad.