If you were looking to buy an overclocked, liquid-cooled, fire-breathing gaming system, whose name badge would you expect to see on it? Very few would opt for Dell, but that's exactly what Dell's flagship XPS 720 H2C Edition is: a monster of a system, built into a monster of a case, with a monster of a price tag (well, that's how we'd describe nearly three grand for just the system box).

Built in a menacing, black, full tower case, the XPS 720 H2C Edition certainly looks the part and, when you try to pick it up, you'll realise just how solidly the thing is built. Incidentally, if you like opening a system case to have a poke around, you'll have your work cut out with the XPS 720 H2C as it's almost impossible to see the motherboard, let alone get your hands on it.

The top half of the case holds the power supply (in this case a custom 1,000W unit) and the four side-mounted 3.5-inch drive bays. In two of the bays in our review system sat Seagate ST3750640AS, 750GB drives in a RAID array to give 1.36TB of storage; more than enough to be getting on with.

The 'H2C' part of the name comes from the two-stage cooling system keeping the overclocked processor cool, and it's the first thing you see when you open the case. The H2C is a hybrid solution that is permanently sealed, comprising a liquid radiator, thermoelectric cooling module and associated controls.

The overclocked CPU in question is one of Intel's QX6850 Core 2 Extreme quad cores running at 3.46GHz rather than the standard 3GHz clock speed. Backing this up is 4GB of PC2 6400, 800MHz, DDR2 memory overclocked to 1066MHz, which is enough to keep the pre-installed Windows Vista Ultimate happy. And, as you can imagine, it's a bit quick - 11,000 marks in PCMark05 is blisteringly fast.

But as impressive as the overall performance is, the graphics performance is something else. Powered by two Nvidia GeForce 8800GTX cards, each with 768MB of GDDR3, in an SLI setup, the XPS 720 H2C produced a 3DMark05 score of 24,500, and 17,800 in 3DMark06. Or, if you like your benchmarks to reflect the real world, how about an average frame rate score in F.E.A.R of 196fps at a 1024 by 768 resolution - that's with all the detail settings on maximum!

But that's not all. Under the graphics cards sits an Ageia PhysX accelerator card to add even more to your gaming experience with games that support PhysX.

A bugbear of getting systems delivered is that, on occasion, some of the cards work loose in transit. But the way the graphics cards are imprisoned, sorry, supported in the XPS 720 H2C means there's little chance of that ever happening.

As with all things XPS you get a load of LEDs lighting up all over the place, but with the latest range Dell has built them into what it calls the LightFX system. This means that not only can you have the LEDs changing colours, you can have the ones in the top half of the front bezel doing things independently of the ones in the bottom half. But if you get bored with that you can set them to flash in time to Windows Media Player.

If you have deep enough pockets, this is a system to not only keep up with the Joneses but leave them choking in your dust. Hugely impressive it might be, but that price tag will have you questioning your own sanity, although to be fair to Dell, it's par for the course for a bespoke top-end gaming system.