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The hardcore PC gaming market is a tough one. With so many different companies out to offer buyers just the right rig for what will hopefully be just the right price, it's gotten hard for any one competitor to claim dominance over the rest, especially when the hardest of the hardcore gamers prefer to buy individual parts and assemble their dream rig themselves. With so many different options, the best each company can do is push technology to the limit to offer gamers the best options and prices possible.
Earlier this week, Dell announced the debut of their new XPS 720 H2C gaming rig, claiming the behemoth offers a marked improvement over other entries in the 700 line such as the 710. Not content to simply learn about nothing more than the new system, I arranged interviews with a few Dell executives to learn more about the XPS line itself, and what the company typically associated with general consumer needs plans to do in order to keep the interest of the hardcore PC gaming market. Glen Robson, General Manager of Dell's Gaming Line of Business, and Abizar Vakharia, Marketing Manager for the Gaming Line of Business, spoke to me about Dell's gaming history, while Ketan Pandya, Product Marketing Manager, took time to give me an overview of the new 720 H2C itself.
Shack: Tell us a bit about your job, Glen. Is work strictly business for you, or are you a gamer as well?
Glen Robson: Before this job [General Manager, Gaming Line of Business], I was actually in charge of some of Dell's desktop groups, so I was the guy behind the desktop products and I was the crazy guy, also, behind the [Dell XPS] Renegade gaming box. I'm now the head of the gaming division. Am I a gamer? Yes, I am a self-confessed absolute addict. RTS, FPS, simulations... Those [genres] are where all my spare time goes.
Shack: Dell is typically known for serving general purpose consumers. How did the idea for a gaming line of machines come about?
Glen Robson: If you go way back into Dell's history, you'll see we've always had an interest in the high performance parts gamers have a use for. If you go back maybe three, four, maybe five years ago, we had maybe five or ten XPS machines, which were actually pretty good gaming boxes. We then moved into graphics, and at that point it became apparent to everyone here working in XPS that one of the key groups of thought that was driving the performance and technology [divisions] were gamers. So we transitioned from designing workstations. The importance of gamers has become far, far greater in recent years. They kind of became the basis for what is the performance of the XPS line of systems.
Shack: So the XPS line wasn't always focused on gaming?
Abizar Vakharia: When the XPS line actually was first born--about ten or eleven years ago now--at that time, it was really focused on a very high-end enthusiast customer. Now, over time, Dell continued to grow and continued to focus on consumer needs, and we reached a point where we didn't feel our [XPS] boxes were the kind of machines we should be putting our brand on. So, we actually for a while did not have an XPS product in our consumer lineup. About 5 years ago, we re-introduced a product line called XPS, where we had the right performance, we were able to that high-end enthusiast base. From then [five years ago] to now, we've actually had a lot of success and have understood the enthusiast customer better and better over these last several years. We've realized that one of the biggest uses these enthusiasts have [for computers] is playing computer games.
Now, you know, the products have certain features in them that we believe are fundamental to all enthusiasts. You can over clock the processor, we have a rapid driver [update] program so [you'll always have] the latest NVIDIA or ATI graphics drivers. If you want to play, and you're experiencing problems, you can always get the latest [video card drivers from us] to play the games that you want to play. XPS is an evolution of that enthusiast line due to the gaming space.
Shack: How did Dell's acquisition of Alienware come to fruition?
Glen Robson: Alienware was just a natural choice. Being XPS, we wanted the key performance and the best enthusiasts in the industry, so we had to look for something that would be complimentary to the XPS line of business. Really, there was only Alienware. They were doing a lot of cool things, and we felt they'd be a great addition to the Dell family.
Shack: Late last year, Hewlett Packard acquired Voodoo PC, and before that, Dell purchased Alienware. Did Dell consider other gaming-oriented computer manufacturers such as Voodoo PC, or was Alienware always your choice?
Glen Robson: As part of our business, you naturally tend to look at what other people are doing and make sure that you're well aware of everything. Alienware seemed the only company established enough to be added to the XPS line. They have the kind of value we want.
Shack: Many gamers feel XPS machines are rather over-priced, even in terms of gaming rigs. Other competitors offer similar configurations for sometimes quite a bit less than an XPS computer. Why go with an XPS over the competition?
Abizar Vakharia: That's an interesting comment. I've actually been inundated over the last three to four months with tagline after tagline from the industry talking about our XPS 710 H2C product being one of the best deals in the marketplace for a performance-class system. Really, the value that XPS brings to the market is, we deliver performance-class systems to the industry with robust ability and quality. So, specifically when I say that, I'm talking about the fact that these products come over clocked from our factory--such as the H2C--and not just our desktops, but our notebooks as well. As we look at our customer data, we've had a lot of satisfaction to tweak their systems in ways that don't allow the system to crash, but to get the [best] performance. That's one of the cornerstones for us--we want to deliver the latest technology, and we'll deliver it in a way that is scalable and of high quality.
Shack: When running a PC game, it's important to have the bulk of a machine's resources dedicated to the game, not to lots of background applications. One common complaint* many PC gamers have had about Dell is the existence of bloatware, software that hogs necessary resources that could and would be better used to run games. Has Dell acknowledged these complaints, and has the company done anything to remove bloatware from its machines, specifically the XPS line of gaming rigs?
Abizar Vakharia: You know what? You're right. One of the beauties of the direct model is that we get to talk to our customers directly, and we heard about this issue, oh, I'd say right around eighteen months ago. It was something that, as we started penetrating the gaming space, not just the enthusiast space, we started getting those customers. We set up our IdeaStorm that is now up and running, things like that serve as conduits that tell us these things about our products. When we heard [about bloatware cramping game performance], right around thirty days after we started hearing these complaints, we launched the ability for our customer to buy an XPS gaming box with a completely clean install. So, they can elect to buy just the OS, or some productivity applications, or some security features, or any combination therein. So today, if you go to our website and look at our new [XPS] 720 H2C that we just launched, you can buy it with a clean [installed] OS. Same thing with our notebooks--we've got a clean install option there, too.
Shack: Casual gaming is a market that has always existed, but one that's gaining more and more ground. Casual gamers may not be interested in spending upward of $6000 to run Supreme Commander and Crysis at maximum settings. What does Dell do to cater to the casual gaming sector, or is that a concern for a line as powerful as XPS?
Glen Robson: That's a great question, David. I think one of the most exciting things that's happening to PC gaming today is, there are more and more people trying PC gaming for the first time. Games like World of WarCraft have brought a whole new set of gamers into PC gaming. And we realize that. The XPS extends beyond the $6000 system. True, there are much higher-priced gaming rigs that can play a lot of games, FPSs and RTSs. If you want that experience, we can give it to you. However, there's also XPS 410, not as trendy as an H2C system, but again, it's got the capability that would appeal to casual gamers. We've also got options in our Inspiron and Dimension lineups that many of our customers buy to play games.
Shack: What research goes into finding out what technology gamers want in their rigs?
Glen Robson: Really, it comes down to multiple paths of information. First and foremost, one of the biggest changes we've seen in the XPS line, is that we're not just in tune with getting the best boxes out there. We're now playing a much bigger role in the gaming ecosystem, in that we make sure upcoming games can take advantage of the technology that we have. We've got a huge set of gamers internally who we talk with, and we've also got very good relationships [with our buyers] through conduits such as IdeaStorm. We've actually created multiple routes we use to talk with gamers, and many of us are gamers ourselves, so it goes beyond the standard marketing techniques we're all familiar with. This is our life, twenty-four hours a day seven days a week, we're all pretty passionate about it.
Shack: Along those same lines, many gamers have often wondered what sort of tests are conducted on finished rigs to find out if they're fast enough, stable, won't overheat, and so on. Could you tell us a bit about those tests and other aspects of that process?
Abizar Vakharia: One of the things we kicked off about a year and a half ago was a program called the Gaming Partner program. What we do is we actually are working with pretty much all developers and publishers, and actually helping to do a lot of testing and validation in their Quality Assurance Labs with all of these really high-end heavy games as they go through alpha and beta. Electronic Arts, Crytek, and even Blizzard--we work with these guys and make sure they've got our newer systems, and also make sure they understand some of the key technologies so they can write games that are optimized for that [the XPS experience].
Shack: What does Dell see as the future of PC gaming, and how is the company preparing for that future?
Glen Robson: That's another great question, and I wish I had you here so we could walk you through the labs and get you hands-on answers to that question. The main thing for me, as a long-time PC gamer, is online gaming. World of WarCraft and various others are driving a whole new demographic for PC games. The online experience is pretty unique to the PC, it's probably the best in the world. We've got some incredibly high-end technology and interfaces we're thinking about. Between ourselves and Alienware, we'll continue to push technology boundaries. PC gamers just want in terms of everything, in terms of frame rate and graphics technology, in terms of physics, and you're just going to see more of that. The experience will continue to grow and become more life-like, and [be] centered more around communities.
Abizar Vakharia: I'd like to add that one of the beauties of the PC's architecture is that boundaries can be sort of unlimited. We had this idea of taking the lighting which is in existence on a lot of our systems and actually exposing the lighting controls to game developers so they can continue to take the gaming experience to the next level. Today, there's a Dell LightFX 1.0, actually 1.1, SDK that many game developers used to control the lighting on the [XPS] system. And that goes beyond gaming. The lights work with Windows Media Player, iTunes. You can actually take your desktop and use it to play music and play games, and the lighting becomes context-based. We have a LightFX 2.0 coming out in the future which will have even more features and more controls, it will have zones within the computer, to get even more lighting effects with games.
Turn the page to read about the new Dell XPS 720 H2C.
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Shack: Can you give us a breakdown of the technology gamers will find under the XPS 720 H2C's case?
Ketan Pandya: There are a lot of important parts that make up the 720 H2C. What's exclusive to Dell is what we call the H2C ceramic cooling system. Liquid cooling has generally been [cycling] water through a radiator. What we wanted to do is bring more science to the gaming industry. [H2C is] actually a two stage cooling system. The first stage is designed to take the liquid and run it through a radiator and use ambient temperature to cool it down somewhat before it moves on to the second stage. The second stage is where things get exotic. This stage takes the water that comes out of the radiator flow, and it's been partially cooled, then running it in between a set of ceramic plates. Are you familiar with the Peltier effect?
Shack: Well actually, I... no.
Ketan Pandya: [laughs] When you induce negative or opposite charges on ceramic plates, you create a zone in between those plates that acts like a refrigerator. Then, you run liquid through that, it comes out even cooler. The whole system is designed to constantly take the liquid that's going through the system and keep it cool. So now, you don't have to rely on fans running at really high speeds, because you've got H2C. It's step one to get closer and closer to the ultimate computing model.
Shack: Is the case optimized to assist your cooling system?
Ketan Pandya: Absolutely. On the case is a grill, and in front of that is actually one large blower [that helps with] the first stage radiator. Underneath it, you'll see some plastic casing, that's a second blower. This whole thing is ventilation from the front grill, which goes all the way through the computer. Everything that gets hot, such as multiple GPUs, multiple CPUs. The system has been designed to isolate components that produce the most heat into an area where we can get the largest convection airflow as well as, coupling that, with the ceramic cooling, which will bring the noise level down.
Moving on, the case is all aluminum side and top chassis, which is really impressive, and it's a piano-black finish. Very important when I bring friends over to show off my machine. It's very artistic looking. One thing that I like to brag about is, it's probably the heaviest computer you're going to find. It has so much in it that when you take it out of the box and put it down, you're kind of awestruck, you know, like, "This thing is really heavy!" We kind of look at it as something to be proud of, something to show off.
Shack: A lot of PC gamers like to lug their rigs around to LAN parties. Is there concern about those situations?
Ketan Pandya: We've asked a lot of our buyers, specifically our gaming buyers, "Are you concerned about system weight, especially when going to gaming events?" They said "Yeah, you know, it's heavy, and it's a little tough to bring in, set up," things like that. But they said it's worth it, because when they put it down and everyone says, "Oh, it has lighting," and they see the case and know it's an XPS H2C. We'd like it to be lighter, but we'd definitely like to be able to show it off.
You'll also notice the lights on the case. We've had customized lighting for some time, but what's new to the 720 is the customized lighting will feature something called Dell LightFX. The lights can be programmed by software developers to interact with the game or flicker to music. There are three zones of lighting on the 720. There are two on the front, the first is designed to highlight the optical drives, and the second is designed to sort of match the shroud affect and break affect of lighting at the bottom. The third [zone] is really cool because it's on the back of the system. A lot of people will be adding components or removing components, and you have the computer on the floor and are fiddling around in the back, it's often difficult to [see what you're doing].
A big thing that's changed [since the 710 H2C] is the chipset. For the first time, we're introducing the 680i SLI from NVIDIA. What that gives us is the ability to add some higher end GPUs--we fully support the [GeForce] 8800 Ultra. We also support the Ageia PhysX card. We had that in the 710 line, and we'll still have it in the 720. We have support for X-Fi, Xtreme Fidelity. Something that's really new that we're pretty excited about is, we're going to be supporting Corsair memory. They actually have very exotic memory solutions, and we're going to factory over clock their memory [from 800MHz] to 1066MHz.
Now for the last couple of things. On the RAID controller, we're introducing 0+1 and 5 functionality, which is an enhancement that adds additional support beyond the 0 and 1 standalone. Of course a Blu-Ray disc, which Dell is a prominent supporter of. There's been more and more adoption of the Blu-Ray disc in the format wars. Lastly, Windows Vista and the Intel Quad Core CPUs. That's the Core 2 Extreme we'll be supporting. We're going to allow customers to over clock that. You're going to have some pretty phenomenal performance.
Speaking of performance, are you pretty familiar with 3D Marks scores?
Shack: Yes.
Ketan Pandya: We've got a score of 20,135. That's within the top 20 scores of all time. What's interesting is, among those top 20, this is the only [machine] that you can actually purchase. So, in a lot of ways, if you're a really hardcore enthusiast, you'll find lots of ways to keep squeaking out performance.
Shack: What sort of market research goes into finding out what gamers really want in terms of hardware in their gaming rigs?
Ketan Pandya: That's a great question. We do a couple of things. We send systems out and work with our partners to get the best games running on our computers. We ask questions like, "Hey, we notice you're using such-and-such computer. What do you like about it?" Or, "We see you have the Dell XPS 7-series [such as the 710 H2C]. How can we make it better?" We like to be present at major events to see what's going on.
In addition to that, we do a more formal way where we have people run their 3D Marks scores against ours, and we'll find someone who really knows what they're talking about from an architecture standpoint. We'll bring that person in and we'll work with them and ask, "What do you see as the major trends in the industry? What do you thing about how such-and-such would go over?" At those events, we try to get as much feedback as possible.
We also have ongoing tracking of our customers. Because we're direct and we know what systems you bought in terms of the fact that gamers will tell us what they do and do not like, we're able to interact with them. We've actually brought in enthusiasts into our lab and have shown them our computer systems; they've been very helpful. Also, we've created a lot of new [idea] vehicles, and one we're particularly proud of is called Dell IdeaStorm. IdeaStorm's been a great way for customers to tell us ideas they have. They can be anything from, "Have you thought about putting Linux on your computers?" to "We really like this certain casing, can you put that on more of your systems?" We use that [IdeaStorm] as a constant monitoring to keep track of what's important to our customers, especially those that are real enthusiasts. A lot of people aren't going to tell you what they want different until they see it, but the enthusiast community will be very responsive and will go out of their way to interact [with us].
Shack: Let's say the machine does crash. What sort of quick support options do XPS users have?
Ketan Pandya: Sure, and there's a couple things I want to caveat. We do have safety switches built into these [systems], which won't allow for catastrophic failures. You're not going to have a CPU over clock so much that it actually results in some sort of mechanic breakdown. You'll just have to reboot. Everything we allow you to do has some volatility involved, but at the end of the day, should something happen, you can just revert.
Now, specifically, our options are available for a lot of our customers, but XPS takes them to the next level. The Support Center is designed to do anything from coming online to chat with us, downloading your drivers. At the Support Center they'll have quick access to a ton of different drivers, because gamers don't like to wait for that kind of stuff. A lot of people don't know basic stuff, like running Disk Cleanup or Defragmenter, and other basic maintenance stuff. Dell PC TuneUp takes care of all that stuff for our customers. The Network Assistant is designed to not only check out devices to help the user figure out how to set up their home router, help set up wireless, stuff like that. The whole point of all these things is to try to get stuff more and more automated so that customers don't have to click through a lot of steps, and try to be a complete consult so you don't have to worry about clicking eight different icons in nine different places. Since we're direct and we built your computer, we should be able to isolate any required assistance to your specific model.
Shack: With all of these top-of-the-line components, can you give us any approximation as to how much the XPS 720 H2C will cost?
Ketan Pandya: Absolutely. We generally like to, when we have a new product coming out, it takes the place of the current product, so if you go to our Dell site, you'll notice that the product is running around $5500, $5600 starting. This is our flagship, the one that's designed to have everything in it that's fully loaded. Of course you can still add things like other monitors, bigger hard drives, stuff like that. You can go as high as around $8000 I think. Because we're built to order, it's really up to the customer.
Shack: Thanks for your time.
The Dell XPS 720 H2C became available on Tuesday, May 22.
