My good friend and long-time colleague Lionel is a bit bummed today. You see Lionel is “the tech guy” here – you know the type – the one folks go to when they have a technical question. The guy who can shift to a different language when talking about the technologies and features found on today’s high end PCs. Lionel actually walks the talk – he uses his XPS 720 as a media center – recording hi-def TV shows, streaming them to an Xbox 360 from the PC via Ethernet in their home office to the living room, and storing thousands of pictures of his seriously cute kids and wife on their family adventures so they can be viewed on the widescreen, high-definition TV.
He’s also a part-time gamer (having kids and being head blogger have put a serious dent in the amount of time he can spend on that particular hobby for now). So why is Lionel feeling a little blue today? Because I get to write the introductory post on our newest flagship gaming system - the XPS 730 and XPS 730 H2C. This system is packed full of so many new, high performance, totally cool (no pun intended) technologies that it’s hard to know where to begin.
First and foremost –the XPS 730 series is based on an industry-standard ATX motherboard, powered by the NVIDIA nForce 790i Ultra SLI chipset with all features intact. Rest easy that when the latest and greatest graphics cards come out in the future you can honestly wrestle with the decision whether to make that monthly car/house payment or your upgrade your system.
Next, I think we should examine the “fantastic four” theme this system has going for it. It was built to take on quad core processors (the Core 2 Duo Extreme QX9770 3.2GHz processor ships factory overclocked to 3.8GHz). It has more than enough power to take on a quad GPU graphic solution –like the ATI Radeon™ HD3870 X2 CrossFireX (stay tuned for other options). And you can get it configured with up to four hard drives factory installed, and pre-configured in a variety of RAID arrays (a quick customer poll indicated that a popular config will be two- drive RAID 0 for Operating System and two- drive RAID 1 for data.) Jesse Recinos product manager for the XPS 730 provides a bit more detail in the video.
Now – about overclocking – oops wait – have to work in a word from our sponsor: With any overclocked component, there’s a risk for system instability. Overclocking is always a balance between performance and stability – for more information see Lionel’s original post on this. Back to our post – in addition to shipped factory overclocked processors, we will ship DDR3 Corsair DOMINATOR memory factory overclocked up to 1600 MHz. Louis Bruno has additional details on overclocking in this video.
Now for one of the cooler features (pun intended) - all this need for speed can of course lead to possible unintentional consequences (aka impact system stability) so our thermal and cooling engineers took the opportunity to enhance our patent-pending H2C cooling solution. When we first introduced the H2C cooling solution, engineer Chuck Hood took the time to drill down into the details in one of our first VLOGs. It proved to be one of our most popular videos, so we asked Chuck to come back and go over the enhancements made in the new edition.
Finally, I’d like to share a little know fact about the XPS 730 chassis. For those of you who have seen the XPS 7-series desktop in person you know it’s a massive system (I speak from experience – during CES this year I got to schlep one from the LVCC to New York, New York for an NVIDIA press event, then to Caesars for another press event, and then I put it in a taxi with my husband to head back to our hotel, while I headed to yet another event.) The original forward-leaning design was inspired by a jet engine cowl, optimized for air flow. Unless you’ve actually had your hands on one of these bodies, you probably don’t realize the outer skin is 2.4mm aluminum. When the design was first introduced it was the largest milled aluminum piece in the industry. The finish, created at an aluminum mill, is preserved at great effort throughout the manufacturing process. (in fact the chassis mechanical design /assembly process is patent pending). Today’s XPS 730 has a choice of finishes: brushed aluminum in silver, or anodized aluminum in Stealth Blue or Victory Red. When asked for any other fun facts, design team’s response says it all: “It’s bad ass.” Nuff said.
Game On!
May 3rd, 2008 at 1:28 pm
Will there be an air-cooled version of the XPS 730? If so, when?
Greetings,
Peter
May 6th, 2008 at 9:30 am
Well, this XPS 730 sounds great, but have you ever used the XPS 720 ?
we did and we had lots of problems.
Here is what I posted about it as well
http://blogtronix.com/blogtronix.com/355
Vassil Mladjov
blogger and ceo
Blogtronix
May 6th, 2008 at 10:15 am
Hi Vassil-
I watched your video, and would be happy to have someone look into it. I’ll email you and get your information.