Here in Marbella, Spain, Dell has been showing off its top-end gaming desktop, now on sale in Europe. The company has also finalised the specification for the UK release and a price - a whopping £3,400 for the sample configuration below.
You do get a lot for your money, chiefly Intel's two-die quad core solution, the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 . Each core is factory overclocked to 3.2GHz.
The new XPS also includes a new patent-pending cooling technology, which was outlined during the system's European launch at Dell 's Innovation Event in Marbella.
As we reported after Michael Dell's CES keynote , the new cooling technology uses a two-stage process. Firstly, a liquid-to-air heat exchanger takes most of the heat away from the processor - this works like a car radiator. Then, a fluid chiller removes more heat with ceramic-based thermoelectric cooling (TEC) modules.
Dell representatives say this is a similar technology to that used in space shuttles to transfer heat from the side heated by the sun to the colder side of the shuttle. It's possible for the cooling to take the processor below room temperature, but it bottoms out at ambient temperature to prevent condensation.
Intel experts were also on hand to demonstrate the ease of overclocking the unit via a Nvidia-powered Control Panel applet.
The specification includes two 768MB Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX cards in SLI configuration, as well as a Ageia PhysX physics accelerator card.
The more essential components include two fast 10,000 rpm 160GB hard drives and 2GB of 667MHz DDR2 memory.
Here's the specification in full:
- Intel Core2 Extreme quad-core processor factory overclocked to 3.2 GHz
- 2 x 768MB Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards
- 2GB 667MHz DDR2 memory
- 2 x 160GB 10,000 RPM SATA Raid 0 Hard Drives
- 16X DVD /- RW and 16X DVD ROM Drive
- Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Music PCI Soundcard
- 128MB Ageia PhysX physics accelerator PCI card
- Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
- Dell USB Multimedia Keyboard and Premium Optical Mouse
- Two-year limited warranty with designated XPS sales service
