I purchased an Xi about 6 months ago. I've been very happy with the computer. Also happy with their service and follow up. I had a problem with one of the fans making a squealing sound... they shipped out a new fan right way. They shipped when they said the system would. I discussed with the sales guy what I wanted to do with the system and he helped to configure it with the budget I had to deal with. I know Theosopheus (sp?) also has one and I'm sure he can echo my positive comments.
I would say Jeff is the one to answer this post, seeing as he is the one who sold me on them. I have a 4.2GHz dual core with 4Gb of ram, a Quadro FX 3450, and a 10K RPM drive partitioned for dual boot. I got a bunch of other stuff with it. I would do it again. The service and and delivery was good, and it was under two weeks. I went and bought a refurb 24" dell monitor to go with the system. My dream system came in at under 5K. I have a dell precision at the office and there are many days where I wish I was at home on the Xi system. We could get into the athlon vs intel discussion but there is plenty of literature out there on the web.
Yeah, I'm on my second system from Xi and am very satisfied. I checked the reviews at Catalyst for my first sense of bearings on this. (I actually had one ordered for one of my clients first--so that makes three systems, total.)
Delivery time is good. If you catch them at busy times (like first or end of the year), you'll have a longer lead-time, but that's what you'd expect from any computer supplier at those times.
Build quality is also very good. However, components do eventually fail and need to be replaced, but that's not stuff manufactured by Xi (in fact, I don't know that they manufacture anything--they just put together great systems for CAD work for the best price). I've had a motherboard fan go out and recieved a replacement from Xi the next day. Other things like hard drives, as well. Very quick service.
That's the other thing. If you do have any problems, you'll talk with a human quickly and they'll do what they can to get it resolved ASAP. I've even called on the weekend (when they're closed), and was able to get a tech paged and to call me back to walk through a solution. Very good customer/tech support--far better than anything else I've seen in the industry.
My system specs for the latest machine (from end of this January) were posted somewhere in this forum a while back--perhaps search "Xi" and "AMD" and you'll find all sorts of posts going back a while. AMD was king for quite a while (bang/buck ratio), but Intel seems to be offering some good things lately, too. Not sure if it's a better value, however.
Check out the reviews at cadalyst.com when you can and see wht sorts of systems are available (if you haven't already). Meanwhile, I continue to recommend Xi very highly.
