Dell has just the solution for the economic woes of the United States, it comes in the form of a hardcore gaming PC with a price tag that amounts to a few months of mortgage payments. The XPS 730 HTC is big, powerful and very, very expensive.

Dell has not skimped when it comes to the hardware. The XPS 730 HTC has a lot of shiny bells and whistles including: dual ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 graphics cards, 4GB of 1333 MHz DDR3 Corsair Dominator memory, an Intel QX9770 overclocked to 3.8 GHz, a 1TB storage drive and a Creative X-Fi sound card.

I am all for overblown PCs, I really am, but I limit myself for the simple reason that, no matter how good a machine is, it is going to be mediocre in about six to eight months and about eighteen months down the track it is probably going to suck and not be able to play any of the latest games. This is the primary reason why I have steered away from Crossfire and SLi systems up until this point and it is the reason that will keep me from traveling that road any time in the future.

If the price tag of $6500 is a little steep, then you can always stick with the slightly slower QX9650 and downgrade to 2GB of RAM. That will knock $1,000 off the price, but if you are going to pay $5,500, you might as well go the whole nine yards and get the off the shelf gaming system to end all off the shelf gaming systems. Or, you could just build the same thing yourself for like half the money. Either way, you probably aren’t going to be able to play Crysis 2. [Dell via PC Magazine]