The case is black and silver, a large and very heavy tower which runs close to silent.
It also came with a Dell bluetooth keyboard/mouse - this is very nice except that there is a delay of a few seconds in it coming to life from standby where the mouse and keyboard don't respond. The keyboard has a volume dial which i love. It takes 4 AA batteries in total which last for a few months. The Bluetooth dongle that comes with the keyboard/mouse set is a bit basic, it supports data sync with my phone but i was unable to get a bluetooth headset to work.
I have found that playing games isn't really for me. I don't know why but it feels too much like work and not much fun, maybe i'm playing the wrong games. The games performance in this configuration is good but you would probably want more powerful/dual graphics if you were seriously into gaming. I use the machine mainly for desktop work and as a media center. In those tasks it is a joy to use, very quick and responsive - no waiting for software to start and dialogs to open. It could still be faster, but not much. Startup still takes about a minute from off and about 10 seconds from S3 Power save.
I use Media center on Vista a lot, it is easy to use and rock solid. The menus layout is logical and quick, mostly, and the visual effects work well. For example the program guide is displayed as a semi transparency over live TV. I have a Haupage dual tuner and this works well with a sperate Microsoft remote control. The whole exprience of this is terrific - it's really slick and polished.
I'm not crazy about the rest of vista. It feels a bit flackey and i have had a few BSOD. Occasionally it stops recognizing some of the hardware and reinstalls the drivers. It's not serious but still annoying. Overall, other than the media center, there are no advantages to vista, and i suspect the machine would be even more responsive with XP, especially for games.
I installed Ubuntu on this machine to see what it was like. Most of the hardware was easy to get going though i didn't feel it was worth the effort to get it fully configured. Video playback quality of hidef MKV files was poor under Ubuntu and I couldn't see any real advantage other than the freedom aspect.
Excluding the monitor the machine cost about £1,400 which is not much more than a similare configured machine would cost to self-build. The price includes 3 years next day support which gives me a bit of peace of mind. I don't think i would have been able to put together a machine of this quality - mainly bacause of the bespoke dell case so overall i am very pleased with this machine.
