Dell XPS Desktop 8950 Review: Intel 12th Gen Tower Of Power

The new Dell XPS 8950 desktop starts at just under $1000 and scales on up to over $3000, depending on the options you select. The model we tested would run you $1797 on Dell.com. That’s a decent chunk of change, but for what you get, it’s a reasonably fair price. We priced out a comparable self-built system and came out to about $1200 before adding the cost of a graphics card; so we’re in the ballpark here.

Dell recently reached out and offered a review unit of their newest XPS 8950 desktop. We initially said, “but we’ve already reviewed that one,” to which Dell replied “no, that was the 8940 Special Edition. We’ve since dropped the ‘Special Edition’, and updated the hardware. It’s got a 12th-gen CPU now, and we made its chassis larger to accommodate more powerful graphics cards, better air flow and ease of access.” Fair enough, Dell, send it.

So, here it is, the freshly updated Dell XPS 8950 mainstream gaming desktop. Don’t be fooled by its understated looks, though. Despite its rather clinical exterior, this is a pretty powerful gaming-capable PC. In fact, it’s exactly the sort of thing that might appeal to folks who are hip enough to play PC games, yet conservative enough to be averse to crazy curved plastic, airflow-blocking glass, and over-the-top RGB LED bling.

We’ve put the XPS 8950 through a barrage of tests, and for the most part, it performs as expected. We’ll get to the test data after we have a look at this machine all-round, inside and out. However, before that, let’s go over its full specifications and what features they offer.

Perusing the system’s specifications, we see a typical upper-midrange gaming PC loadout. The Core i5-12600K is more than capable of chomping through difficult gaming workloads with ease, while the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti offers extremely solid 2560×1440 or 1080p high-framerate gaming performance.

The included 16GB of RAM should be plenty for most gamers, and we appreciate the inclusion of a secondary data drive so that owners don’t have to fill up their precious solid-state storage with movies, music, and other large media files. Likewise, the machine has plenty of ports to service just about any desktop need.

That’s not to say there are no issues with the system, but they’re more about what’s going on inside the machine, so we’ll save those for when we crack the case open. First, let’s have a look at the plethora of ports.

Despite the somewhat utilitarian appearance, this isn’t a machine that you will want to hide under a desk because it will make the extensive front-panel I/O rather hard to access. Keeping the machine near your workspace will give you easy access to a 3.5mm headset jack, three USB3 Type-A ports, and a USB Type-C port, while an SD card slot serves as a modern-day floppy drive. There’s also that DVD-RW drive, too.

Around the back, there’s just enough I/O to keep us from complaining: a pair each of USB3 and USB2.0 Type-A ports, another USB Type-C port, an Ethernet jack, a DisplayPort connection for the integrated graphics, and six 3.5mm analog audio plugs. You also get the four display connections on the GPU, of course. Notice the shape of the power supply; we’ll come back to that in a minute.

If we wanted to nitpick, we might complain about all of the bare space on the motherboard’s I/O cluster, but it’s difficult to imagine what else a buyer of this machine could possibly need. A PS/2 keyboard port would have been appreciated, but that’s hardly a mark against the machine. If anything, we should laud Dell’s decision to preserve at least a single DisplayPort connection on the motherboard; it can be quite useful for troubleshooting should the need arise.

Dell says that this machine is intended to be upgradeable, and that’s a reasonable claim. For starters, getting into the case of the XPS 8950 could not be easier. You unscrew a single screw in the center of the plastic bracket on the back, and then give that bracket a tug. The whole right side panel will pop right off, and you can simply lift it away. Best of all, the side panel doesn’t slide forward or backward; when replacing it, you just set it down onto the bottom rail and then snap it into place.

We wanted to take a moment to highlight this sticker on the inside of the side panel. Click the image above to see the sticker in detail. The images on the sticker are step-by-step guides explaining how to replace the graphics card, power supply, and optical drive. Having these instructions right there is helpful and convenient, so kudos to Dell for making and applying these labels.

Once inside the XPS 8950, there are a few surprises. A plastic bracket supports the graphics card, which isn’t important with our svelte GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, but this chassis will accept a GeForce RTX 3090, and that could could definitely use the support.

We were pleased to note the presence of a pair of empty DDR5 DIMM slots, as well as a spare M.2 socket. Up above, there’s bays for 2.5″ and 3.5″ disk drives, as well as the necessary power cables, though you’d need to provide your own data cable.

The choice of a 120-mm closed-loop liquid cooler for this machine is a contentious one. Dell’s 120-mm CLC here was definitely selected to prioritize silence over cooling efficiency, and we understand why the OEM made that choice, but it is not necessarily the choice we would have made.

The fact is, liquid coolers are less reliable than simple finstack-and-fan coolers. Intel’s Core i5-12600K has a maximum power rating of 150 W; we would probably rather have seen something like the Arctic Freezer 7 or similar high-performance air-cooler. We’ll talk more about noise and thermals on the next page.

Overall, the interior of the machine is very clean and open, with lots of room to work and to assist clear airflow. The 120-mm fan in the front is capable of moving up to 146 CFM, so even with only one intake and one exhaust fan, airflow isn’t an issue.

We do have to balk at the motherboard’s non-standard form factor, though. The front panel connections are not on a daughterboard connected with a cable, as is usually the case with custom-built machines. Instead, they are on an awkward peninsula extending from the edge of the motherboard. This configuration means that this motherboard absolutely will not fit in any other case, and if you were to replace the motherboard, you would lose all of your front panel connectivity. Bummer.

As we pointed out above, the system’s power supply is also non-standard, at least in physical size. It’s not ATX PS/3, SFX, TFX, or Flex ATX; it appears to be a proprietary shape, although it implements the ATX12VO standard. We’re not a fan of proprietary components around here, but we will at least credit Dell for choosing a potent product.

The Lite-On power supply in this machine is rated for 750W continuous output and certified 80 PLUS Platinum. Unusually, if you choose, Dell will actually sell you this power supply even if your machine has a puny discrete graphics card so as not to restrict your future upgrade path. It’s a very nice unit; we just wish it was standard-sized to facilitate easier replacement.

But that’s enough jibber-jabber about the physical box itself—how does it hold up under testing? Well, head to the next page and find out…

Dell XPS 8950 Desktop: Thermals, Power, And System Benchmarks

Dell sent us the XPS 8950 outfitted with a Core i5-12600K CPU and a Z690-chipset motherboard. In combination with the competent liquid-cooling solution, you could be forgiven for assuming that this machine would be a capable overclocker. In fact, there actually is an overclocking menu in the system UEFI setup utility, but the options there are limited, and not particularly useful for overclocking.

The overclocking menu is mostly empty.

In fact, the single option in that menu that could be particularly practical is greyed out. That option would be XMP Support — you, unfortunately, can’t enable XMP on this system with the current BIOS. It’s especially quizzical given that Dell sent us a pair of DDR5 memory sticks spec’d for 4800 MT/s—the very same transfer rate that Intel specifies as standard for the Core i5-12600K. However, due to the lack of XMP support, the memory runs at the “safe” speed of 4400 MT/s.

Is this a big deal? No, not really. The practical effect on performance is likely to be margin-of-error, at least in games. It’s still frustrating, though, because there’s really no reason to disable that XMP setting. We asked Dell, and were told that it was disabled for stability reasons. It seems odd for that to be the reason in the face of both the memory and memory controller being under-clocked, but that’s currently the case.

Total System Power Consumption Tests

Our power measurements are done as total system power using a Kill-A-Watt device between the mains power cable and the wall. This gives us an idea of the real power usage of the system, which is more useful than specialized component power measurements when looking at a complete system like this.

For idle power, we simply let the system rest at the Windows 11 desktop, idle. We saw a surprising range of figures, even after the system had been sitting for minutes; we can only blame this on Windows 11. The idle power figure in the chart below is not the absolute lowest value we recorded, but represents the lowest value that we saw consistently.

For peak power, we instead ran the most brutal torture test we could imagine: Prime95’s Small FFTs test along with Furmark running concurrently. This is not a realistic scenario that users are likely to encounter, as even a crypto-mining workload will not generate this kind of power usage, or heat. Still, it serves as an extreme top-end for the system’s power consumption.

Idle power usage on the Dell XPS 8950 was quite good at just 43 watts. As noted above, we rarely saw as low as 39 W, while “idle” draw sometimes went as high as 85 W. This is probably down to the system having a fresh install of Windows 11 that was still doing some work in the background, and not a cause for concern.

The absolute peak power draw from the system came down to 469 W. That’s quite the number for a system with what is nominally a 200-watt GPU and 150-watt CPU, but it’s a peak number; during our torture test, the power draw leveled off to around 410 W. Under a more realistic gaming workload, we saw power usage in the 300-330 watt range.

During our torture test as well as during gaming, we monitored temperatures and noise levels. We’re happy to report that there’s not really anything of note to report. In our worst-case stress test, the CPU peaked at 85°C, and our GPU topped out at just below 82°C. Both are acceptable figures, particularly for a worst-case stress test.

Unfortunately, the noise floor in my workspace is around 50 dBa, and the noise level of the machine, even while gaming, is almost always below that. As such, it is essentially silent. The fans are audible, but this system remains relatively quiet overall. Praise that liquid cooler, we suppose.

During the stress test, the front fan does kick up a bit. Our sound level meter recorded a result of 56 dBa when placed about a meter away from the intake fan. It’s audible when sitting next to it, but we wouldn’t describe it as “noisy” or bothersome as the character of the sound is quite soft, not shrill. Next up: performance.

As mentioned, our XPS 8950 came pre-configured, with Windows 11 set up with a local user account and all of the out-of-box experience accommodated for. That won’t be how actual customers’ computers arrive, but hopefully their systems ship with the same software setup as ours. We were happy to see a stark minimum of bloatware from Dell or otherwise; the OS install on the system was clean and bloat-free.

ATTO Disk Benchmarks

The boot drive in the XPS 8950 is a 512GB Micron 3400 NVMe SSD that hooks up to four lanes of PCIe 4.0 via an M.2 socket. As you can see from the ATTO results below, it’s pretty spicy. The only performance metric that Micron provides for the 3400 is a staggering read performance of 360,000 IOPS. Of course, Micron doesn’t specify what I/O size, queue depth, or which system it achieved that performance with.

We didn’t get close to that number, but we were only testing using ATTO’s default 4 queue depth. At that fairly realistic setting, the drive still achieved some 120,000 IOPS in 4K reads, which doesn’t quite blow our socks off—we’ve seen better—but it’s still fantastic performance. Sequential speeds from the Micron 3400 are even better. The drive seems to cap out at around 6 GB/second on reads, and a bit over half that on writes.

As developers move more fully toward the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, and thus finally abandon the last-gen consoles, fast I/O like this will become more and more critical to a quality gaming experience. Frankly, this drive is plenty fast, so kudos to Dell for picking a quality SSD for this gaming machine.

Cinebench Rendering Benchmarks

Some companies may not like it, but Cinebench isn’t a purely synthetic benchmark. It’s based on a real application, Maxon’s Cinema 4D modeling software, and measures rendering performance under that workload. Frankly, we would have liked to move to the latest R23 version of the application, but we don’t have enough comparison data on that version yet.

The results in Cinebench sort-of set up one of two patterns that you’ll be seeing consistently across the rest of this page and the next. The pattern here is “it’s an Alder Lake CPU, so it’s pretty much faster than anything else in its class.”

Sure, this six-plus-four-core CPU loses out in multi-threaded performance to a couple of many-core Ryzens, but only its bigger Core i9 sibling can compete in single-threaded performance. The fact that the XPS 8950 is riding so close to the twelve-core Ryzen 9 3900XT’s multi-core score speaks to the potency of Intel’s Alder Lake CPUs.

Speedometer 2.0 Web-App Benchmarks

Speedometer is a test of web application performance. You know all those apps that run in a browser tab, like Slack, Discord, Google Docs, and even YouTube? Speedometer gives you a decent gauge of how those apps will run on a given system in a given browser. Indeed, results vary tremendously between browsers, and even between different browser versions. We tested the XPS 8950 with the latest version of Chrome.

Bit of an odd result here; it’s no surprise to see the Core i5-12600K in this Dell XPS scoot out ahead of almost everything else in this test, as web apps are largely single-threaded and heavily-reliant on the performance of a single core. Alder Lake has the best single-core performance to date, so naturally, the XPS 8950 jumps near the top of the pack.

Except it actually almost jumps directly TO the top of the pack, even beating out a Core i9-12900K. We wouldn’t read too much into this result; while we tested the XPS 8950 on the latest version of Chrome, the other data was captured in earlier reviews and may not necessarily benefit from recent browser or driver optimizations. The point is, Alder Lake is damn fast for web apps.

PCMark 10 System Benchmarks

Even after all these years, we’ve found that PCMark still gives a decent idea of what kind of performance you can expect in non-gaming applications. As with the rest of our benchmarks, we ran PCMark 10 three times, and took the mean of the results.

PCMark makes use of GPU acceleration as well as multiple cores, particularly in the Digital Content Creation benchmark. The XPS 8950 turns in a very respectable result here. This machine really isn’t intended for this kind of work, necessarily, but it’s a well-balanced and versatile system that can really serve almost any computing purpose. You could absolutely use this system as a productivity workstation.

GeekBench Performance

Given its custom firmware and conservative memory settings, we were curious how Dell’s system stacked up against a custom-built Core i5-12600K machine. This is a little bit of an unfair comparison, because our test bench was running much faster memory as well as a cleaner install of Windows. Still, it serves to show the difference between an out-of-the-box pre-built system and a tightly-tuned custom rig.

All of the machines tested here besides the Dell XPS 8950 were custom-built HotHardware test rigs. Don’t be confused by the order of the graph; they’re ordered by their multi-core score. Our XPS 8950 takes a small hit to both single- and multi-threaded performance compared to the HotHardware Core i5-12600K test machine. Frankly, we’d suspect much of this is down to the memory speed; GeekBench can be very sensitive to memory latency and throughput.

Before you shake your head, though, note that this machine is still scoring higher than all of the AMD-based systems on our chart in single-threaded performance, and remember too that we’re talking about a CPU with just six high-performance cores. It may not match up to a lean and mean enthusiast rig, but this is by no means a slow system.

Let’s move on to graphics and gaming, shall we?

Dell XPS 8950 Desktop: Gaming And Graphics Benchmarks

3DMark is a synthetic game-like benchmark for assessing graphics (GPU) and physics (CPU) performance. This tool has a wide variety of tests and demos that target various types of performance to give a better picture of how a system will handle real games. We used the Time Spy benchmark, 3DMark’s DirectX 12 test, to push the XPS 8950. This test has multiple presets, but the standard Time Spy test is plenty taxing. Plus, we have a plethora of reference data, so that’s what we stuck with.

3DMark Time Spy DX12 Benchmarks

You may recall on the last page how we mentioned the two trends of this review. 3DMark establishes the other: the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is a lower-powered GPU than those founds in most of our comparison systems, so the XPS 8950 often ends up near the bottom of these charts. This isn’t because the XPS 8950 is slow, it’s because our review config simply came with a lower tier of GPU than the systems we’re comparing it against.

We wanted to make that as clear as possible because the XPS 8950’s included GeForce RTX 3060 Ti puts out exactly the kind of performance we expect from an RTX 3060 Ti. There’s nothing wrong with it; it’s not under-performing. It’s just a lower-end GPU option at play here than the other system configs.

With that said, if you know how a GeForce RTX 3060 Ti performs, you pretty much know how this system is going to perform in games. Indeed, in 3DMark, the Dell XPS 8950’s result was within 400 points of the average score for this combination of CPU and GPU.

These numbers aren’t on the charts, but it’s interesting to note that the CPU score in Time Spy was actually quite a bit higher than the Graphics score. As a result, the overall Time Spy score was higher than the individual graphics score, which is pretty unusual.

Middle Earth: Shadow Of War Benchmarks

Middle Earth: Shadow of War is getting a bit long in the tooth, but this fun and beautiful title, set in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings universe, still makes a great test of DirectX 11 performance. To test the XPS 8950 relative to other systems, we set the resolution to 2560×1440 and turned the visuals up to the High preset.

Unsurprisingly, the pattern repeats. There are no showstoppers here; the Dell XPS 8950’s GeForce RTX 3060 Ti turns in a very solid performance akin to the Geforce RTX 2080s. 97 FPS is a great experience in this game, but it also gives us considerable headroom. So, how does it fare in 4K?

Not bad, actually. While that 59 FPS average isn’t flawless—the game suffers a few hitches here and there—it’s a more-than-playable experience, especially with the visuals turned up as they are. Also interesting to note is the Radeon RX 6800 XT’s fall from grace. Reliant on Infinity Cache as it is, the Radeon GPU can’t keep up with its rivals from Team Green at fully eight megapixels.

Shadow Of The Tomb Raider Performance

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is currently the final entry in the Tomb Raider reboot trilogy, although another entry, this time running on Epic’s Unreal Engine 5, was just announced last week. Since we don’t have comparison data for that newer release, we’ll test this one again. 

Same story, different game. Dell’s XPS 8950 chugs along like a champ, churning out frames from its GeForce RTX 3060 Ti exactly as fast as expected. It just barely edges out the GeForce RTX 2080 in the Maingear Vybe from 2019, although the difference could be down to the three-generations-newer CPU, too.

Gears 5 Benchmarks

Gears of War was a graphical tour de force when it released on the Xbox 360 in 2006. As the showpiece title for Epic’s third full-number revision for Unreal Engine 3, it showcased stellar visual effects. Now, 16 years later, Gears 5 may not be similarly stunning, but it’s no slouch either and looks pretty great. We skipped the “High” preset testing this time around, and in the interest of brevity went for Ultra.

Gears 5 has always had some pretty strange performance characteristics. In 2560×1440, things more or less line up as expected, with the XPS 8950’s GeForce RTX 3060 Ti placing it in the lower portions of the chart. Surprisingly, the EKFG 270 Conquest actually places above the Dell XPS 8950 in our 4K testing, although 4K with Ultra settings in this game is sort of academic on both of these machines.

Metro Exodus Benchmarks

Metro Exodus is based on author Dmitry Glukhovsky’s series of Metro novels that started with Metro 2033 back in 2005. It’s become something of a tradition for the Metro games to receive updated re-releases just a few scant years after the original release, and that’s the case for Exodus, too.

We’re testing with the original release here, though, simply because that’s the data we have to compare against. If you were actually going to play Metro Exodus in 2022, we’d definitely recommend the Enhanced Edition, as long as you have the requisite DXR-capable hardware—it both runs and looks better than the original recipe.

** Note: the Alienware Aurora R10’s Radeon RX 6800 XT does not support DLSS.

Thanks to Ampere’s ray-tracing refinements, the RTX 3060 Ti in the Dell XPS 8950 manages to outpace not only a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, but also an NVIDIA TITAN RTX. Oddly, the Dell XPS 8950 also manages to outpace the previous-generation XPS Special Edition, despite that that machine came with a faster GeForce RTX 3070. We’re willing to credit that to driver updates, and possibly better thermals, since we ran those previous numbers.

A minimum framerate of 33.4 FPS may not sound that great, but it’ll increase quite a bit once you move over to the Enhanced Edition of Metro Exodus. That version of the game is downright smooth on these settings.

Dell XPS 8950 – But Will It Run It This Game? Yeah, probably.

We tested a lot more games than just those four on the Dell XPS 8950. Attempting to tease out any foibles in the system’s design, we ran it through the gantlet, trying every kind of title we could think of. So doing, we got a pretty good idea for how the system runs quite a few games.

Above, we’ve placed a list of tested and confirmed game settings for a raft of popular titles. Where not otherwise indicated, these settings target 60 FPS at the listed resolution, although some run quite a bit better than that.

While we tested these games at these settings, we can’t guarantee that every part of each game will run flawlessly with the listed settings. As such, performance may or may not fall below what you consider acceptable with the listed settings, and yes your mileage may vary. The above table is just to give prospective buyers an idea of what kind of performance you can expect out of Dell’s XPS 8950 across a myriad of game titles.

A Piece of Re-BAR

When poking around in the system setup trying to turn on XMP memory optimization, we noticed an option for Re-sizeable BAR. BAR in this case stands for “Base Address Register,” and without getting too far into the weeds, “Re-sizeable BAR” is a feature that allows the GPU to open up a bigger window into main memory. This can accelerate transfers to the GPU. AMD calls the tech “Smart Access Memory” for its platforms, but it’s identical to the base Windows functionality.

The Re-sizeable BAR option on the Dell XPS 8950 defaulted to “off,” which we found surprising as, to our knowledge, there are essentially no downsides to having it enabled in this configuration. Admittedly, the benefits of the feature are usually fairly small, but a little extra performance is a little extra performance, right? Here are a few benchmarks we ran with the feature on, and then with it off.

Note that Forza Horizon 5 is not whitelisted by NVIDIA.

We asked Dell why the feature was turned off and were essentially told that there wasn’t enough benefit to enabling it. That’s actually a reasonable statement, sort of—it’s true that it offers very little extra performance, as you can see above. However, once again, there’s also virtually no downside (that we’re aware of) to having it enabled. Some review testers have found performance regressions with it on, but NVIDIA requires games to be on a whitelist to take advantage of the feature at all.

Dell mentioned this when giving its rationale for not enabling Re-sizeable BAR by default, commenting that “NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience does a good job managing the titles which have Resizable BAR support.” The problem is, GeForce Experience can’t enable the feature unless it is first enabled in the system BIOS setup utility.

Ultimately, we don’t really fault Dell for leaving the feature disabled by default, but we would also recommend anyone who buys a Dell XPS 8950 to go into the system BIOS setup and turn it on.

Dell XPS 8950 Desktop: Final Thoughts And Our Review Verdict

We were reasonably impressed with Dell’s XPS Special Edition 8940 when we tested it back in February of last year. Even though that machine was configured a bit more capably than this year’s 8950, with an RTX 3070 and double the RAM, this year’s model is a marked upgrade in every way otherwise.

It’s larger, making it easier to work in and improving airflow, and Intel’s 12th-Gen Core CPUs are much faster than 10th-gen Comet Lake. The new chassis is even easier to access, and it’s more upgradeable, too. Thanks to the improved airflow, cooling is better, and the new 750W Platinum-rated power supply will support just about any graphics card you can throw at it, all the way up to Dell’s top-end Core i9-12900 config with a GeForce RTX 3090.

Make no mistake though, even saddled with slower memory as it is, the new Intel Core i5-12600K is still a beast. It will rip through gaming workloads with aplomb, and the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti on tap in our config is no slouch, either. It’s capable of full-resolution 4K gaming in a great many titles, and resolution scalers like DLSS can allow it to run the rest.

The XPS 8950 also comes in black, if you prefer your PCs without feet.

The new Dell XPS 8950 desktop starts at just under $1000 and scales on up to over $3000, depending on the options you select. The model we tested would run you $1797 on Dell.com. That’s a decent chunk of change, but for what you get, it’s a reasonably fair price. We priced out a comparable self-built system and came out to about $1200 before adding the cost of a graphics card; so we’re in the ballpark here.

GeForce RTX 3060 Ti cards are still pretty hard to come by, so when you factor in market prices for the GPU, as well as Dell’s warranty and build services, we’d say it comes out a wash. Besides, there’s still something to be said for swiping your card and unboxing a brand-new computer without having to spend an hour or more screwing parts together.

Of course, what you give up for the convenience of a plug-and-play PC are all of the things that come with a custom-built computer. Some folks may not care about significant portions of those benefits, like potentially slightly improved performance, or the option to bling out your system. That said, Dell’s design choice to employ proprietary power supply and motherboard form factors is more objectionable.

Not objectionable enough to keep us from recommending the XPS 8950, though. It’s a solidly-built desktop PC system with clean, understated styling, strong performance, and considerable versatility. Whether for a hardcore gamer, a content creator, a streamer, or a quadruple-display developer, the XPS 8950 should serve admirably, and it won’t require a second mortgage on your house to do it.