BTX Case

The first aspect you’ll notice immediately about the XPS 710 is its unique chassis. Gone is the traditional beige box, instead in its place Dell uses an all-aluminum outer shell with a plastic fascia on the front and rear of the case. The fascia on our review system came decked out in Obsidian Red -- not our favorite color choice but certainly distinctive -- fortunately Dell offers two colors to choose from.

The case itself is one of the most impressive we’ve seen, as we mentioned it’s made entirely out of aluminum, but it has the heft of a system carved from a block of stainless steel! Officially the case weighs in just a pound shy 50 pounds, and after carrying the system up a flight of stairs, we certainly believe it.

Part of the reason why the XPS 710 is so heavy is because of the system’s sheer size: measuring in at 22.5” tall, 8.6” wide and 24.25” deep, the XPS 710 is by no means a small system. This makes it difficult to lug the XPS 710 to a LAN party, but one benefit of the system is there’s plenty of room for the plethora of optical and hard disk drives you can install inside its chassis, not to mention dual-slot graphics cards and the system’s beefy BTX cooling system.

This also makes working inside the system’s case a breeze in comparison to smaller system cases.

Another reason why the case is so heavy is because of the way it’s built – to cut manufacturing costs and save weight, often times case manufacturers will use thinner sheets of aluminum for the outer shell of the system chassis. This isn’t the case for Dell’s XPS 710 however, the outer aluminum clamshell used for the top and bottom, as well as the left and right sides of the chassis is several millimeters thick.

The aluminum case Dell uses isn’t prone to scratching either, as anyone with a Shuttle XPC or an aluminum case can tell you, many aluminum cases can be scratched rather easily. While the Dell chassis isn’t scratch proof, it is much less prone to nicks and scratches than many of the other aluminum cases we’ve come across.

The bottom line is that this case is built like a tank.


Moving around to the front of the system, you’ll find that Dell uses drive bay doors to cover all of the system’s 5.25” and 3.5” drive bays. Our system came equipped with a 16X DVD-ROM drive and a 16X DVD+/- RW drive, as well as a combo 13-in-1 media card reader, but looking at the front of the system, you could never tell thanks to the drive bay doors. The system itself sports 4 external 5.25” drive bays as well as 2 external 3.5” drive bays. Inside the system you’ll also find an additional 3.5” internal drive bay just beneath the power supply unit (PSU) where you can house up to four hard disk drives.


The hard disks are mounted on rails, so installation/removal is a snap, literally. Dell even includes extra SATA power and data cables so if you add additional drives, the cabling is already there and it’s even properly tied down for you! This is a really nice touch in our opinion.


Getting inside the system is a snap. No tools are required, all you have to do is pull back on the cover release latch and then pull off the case cover itself. Voila you’re inside the system!