In case anyone is thinking about buying one of these boxes... I just got mine and I must say, its fast!
Less then 10 minutes after I openned the box I already had a knife out ready to hack the PCI-E slot to accept my X700 Pro (look here for more information). Everything went well and I'm running XP on it right now without any problems (torture tested it with Prime95 for about 8 hours straight and have been playing Doom 3 on it). I'm evening using some old (3.3v compatible) PCI cards in the PCI-X slots and all seem to be fine, but since I don't have any faster cards (that can take advantage of the bandwidth PCI-X has to offer), I can't tell you what the bus speeds are like. I'd imagine the whole bus is slowed down though.
One thing I was concerned about with this box was the noise level. After I got it, I realised that it's really quite. Taking out the secondary CPU fan (you ARE going to select the FREE additional fan and shroud for that second CPU, aren't you?) and replacing it with a Panaflo or something helps, but it's honestly not even needed - ALL the fans are temperature controlled, including the PSU fans. Having used a G5 for a long time, I can say that I'm impressed with the noise levels of this Dell.
I paid $650 shipped and after tax for my machine with the 2.8ghz Xeon CPU (Nocona), 1gb DDR2 Registered ECC PC3200 RAM, and an 80gb SATA hard drive (WD WD800JD).
Less then 10 minutes after I openned the box I already had a knife out ready to hack the PCI-E slot to accept my X700 Pro (look here for more information). Everything went well and I'm running XP on it right now without any problems (torture tested it with Prime95 for about 8 hours straight and have been playing Doom 3 on it). I'm evening using some old (3.3v compatible) PCI cards in the PCI-X slots and all seem to be fine, but since I don't have any faster cards (that can take advantage of the bandwidth PCI-X has to offer), I can't tell you what the bus speeds are like. I'd imagine the whole bus is slowed down though.
One thing I was concerned about with this box was the noise level. After I got it, I realised that it's really quite. Taking out the secondary CPU fan (you ARE going to select the FREE additional fan and shroud for that second CPU, aren't you?) and replacing it with a Panaflo or something helps, but it's honestly not even needed - ALL the fans are temperature controlled, including the PSU fans. Having used a G5 for a long time, I can say that I'm impressed with the noise levels of this Dell.
I paid $650 shipped and after tax for my machine with the 2.8ghz Xeon CPU (Nocona), 1gb DDR2 Registered ECC PC3200 RAM, and an 80gb SATA hard drive (WD WD800JD).