Dell Studio XPS 435 goes up for sale

Dell's newest performance desktop is now available for purchase online. Geared toward the "power user," the XPS 435 has six DIMM slots, and three drive bays for a maximum potential of 24 GB of DDR3 1066 MHz Tri-Channel memory, and 4.5 TB of storage.

The XPS 435 is powered by Intel Core i7 processors -- for the base configuration priced at $1,099, a 2.66 GHz i7-920. For an additional $470, that can be upgraded to the i7-940 that runs at 2.93GHz. The top speed i7 processor available in the XPS 435 is the 965 which hums at 3.2 GHz but tacks on an additional $1,170 to the overall cost.

The standard configuration includes an ATI Radeon HD3650 256 MB graphics card, a 16x DVD burner, a single 500 GB 7200rpm SATA drive, and an integrated 7.1 channel audio processor. In terms of design innovations, the tower includes a recessed tray with three USB ports suitable designed with the personal media player apparently first in mind, and a forward-facing 15-in-1 card reader which is a hallmark of image processing workstation hardware.

If ordered today, the "preliminary ship date" for an XPS 435 is March 19. With Dell products, this date will sometimes be impacted by user-selected options. If you are building a computer with a part that is not immediately available, for example, the preliminary ship date will take this into consideration. For the 435, however, it appears that all options are readily available from Dell, and even the most outlandish $10,000 configuration will take the same 15 days that the $1,099 model takes.