11/17/2008, 9:35am, EST
Monday, November 17thDell outs Studio XPS, XPS 730x with Core i7
Dell today quickly seized on Intel's Core i7 debut by launching two new systems, including one completely new line. The Studio XPS upgrades the regular Studio desktop with features friendly to gamers and high-end media with Core i7 processors and dedicated video as the baseline. They further exploit the new Intel hardware with three memory sticks that both up the minimum storage and also the available bandwidth.
A standard Studio XPS tower at $949 comes with a 2.66GHz Core i7, 3GB of DDR3 memory, and a Radeon HD 3450 for video acceleration; storage comes from a 500GB hard drive and a DVD burner. Higher-end systems come with 2.93GHz processors, 6GB of memory, and options such as a Radeon HD 4850, Blu-ray, and storage that can include up to 1.28TB in a RAID 0 stripe.
Higher-end users also have access to the XPS 730x, an upgraded version of the company's gaming-centric desktop. The systems come with faster processors and video cards as standard and get the option of factory-overclocked chips: two out of the three pre-built systems run Core i7 Extreme Edition chips boosted to 3.73GHz out of the box.
A base system at $2,599 sports a 2.93GHz processor, 3GB of memory, a 640GB hard drive, a Radeon HD 4850 for video and a Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi for audio. Besides options carried over from the Studio XPS, the XPS 730x also gets variants with liquid cooling, GeForce GTX 280 or Radeon HD 4870 X2 video, and more exotic storage that can include 2TB RAID 0+1 split across four drives or a 300GB Western Digital Velociraptor for raw performance.
Studio XPS systems are shipping first and should be available by late November, while many XPS 730x systems don't ship until early-to-mid December.
Studio XPS
XPS 730x
Filed under: computers
Other story tags: Intel, Dell, blu-ray, NVIDIA, AMD, GeForce, Radeon, Creative, XPS, Core i7
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WoW
Of course we know this must be an incredible machine. We know that sleek looking cases and bright UFO-like LEDs make a better machine. I'm impressed. Oh, wait, it's a DELL and it has XP in the name. Nevermind.
LED FAIL
I have the 630i and the lights seemed like a really cool feature. Sadly I've contacted Dell numerous times and they had no clue on how to disable the lights or change the colour of them. I installed the nVIDIA chipset drivers and after some digging figured it out. It is sad that you can't set the lights to glow/flash/change colour to notify you of a new e-mail or when a download completes. Most of the time installing the nVIDIA chipset drivers caused BSOD and I had to reinstall windows as the drivers don't support having PATA optical drives attached... and it comes with two.way to fail dell.