Gaming

• A Beast of a Card for a Beast of a Laptop

  Tue. Jun. 17, 2008
  by John Blain, Consumer & Gaming Liaison

  You may remember my last post on Direct2Dell, where I had announced the imminent arrival of the GeForce Dual 8800M GTX upgrade kit for existing XPS M1730 customers. In fact, we’ve been talking about this for quite some time. Back in January, Lionel blogged that Dell was offering the 8800M GTX to new customers. Last month, he said we’d be offering this upgrade to existing customers. For customers in the United States, that day has finally arrived!

  The card can now be purchased from our Dell.com, either as a stand-alone part for the slightly more adventurous, or with an installation service for folks that don’t want to do it themselves. I would recommend seeing what is involved in changing your video card before deciding which option is best for you. The service manual for the XPS M1730 can be found here, and we’ll soon post a vlog with Louis Bruno that walks you through the installation process.

  Update: Below is the vlog for customers who will install the 8800M GTX card themselves. If you would like to see a larger version, click on the links to download or view the Windows Media Video file or this version for QuickTime/ iPods and the iPhone.

  For those of you who opt to buy the installation service, here is what you should expect. After you place your order, a work order will be sent to a service provider in your area, who should contact you within 48 hours after you place the order to set up a service appointment for the installation. When the day of the service appointment arrives, your service technician should once again contact you to make sure you’ve received the parts from Dell, after which the technician will arrive at the appointed time to do the installation. After the work is complete, the technician will leave you to enjoy your new video card.

  Also of note, M1730 customers with version 3.3 of MediaDirect will have to install version 3.5 for MediaDirect to work with this new card. The catch? The MediaDirect partition has to be enlarged for the new installation to work, requiring that users repartition their hard drives, and then reformat their Operating System partition and reinstall Windows, drivers, software, and Dell QuickSet. MediaDirect 3.5 will be included with the upgrade kit for this purpose. If you opt for the installation service, the MediaDirect reinstallation will not be done by the service technician. If you want MediaDirect functionality, you’ll have to do the MediaDirect 3.5 installation yourself.

  Despite the complications in bringing this to you, this beast of a video card boosts performance over the older Dual 8700M GT cards by up to an astonishing 49%, and is capable of up to a 13,496 3DMark ‘06 score. Since I’m not a benchmark junky myself, I have to ask, what does this mean for real performance?

  The answer is astounding. Dell Labs noted an average of 43 frames per second in Crysis as opposed to 30 frames per second on an identically configured XPS M1730 with a Dual 8700M GT, and 21 frames per second on an XPS M1730 with the single 8700M GT. The answer, simply put, is that the difference this card should make is DRASTIC.

  So, all of you hardcore gamers out there that jumped on the M1730 when it launched, now you can upgrade your video card and make your machine truly worthy of the nickname “Beast”.
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• Dell XPS 630 and LightFX

  Fri. Jun. 13, 2008
  by Russell Thompson, Dell Gaming Team

  The Dell Gaming team includes a large contingent of gamers and nothing delights us more than being able to bring systems like the XPS 630 to thousands of our closest friends. We always hear a lot from our gamer customers… they tend to be some of the most active community participants at the Forum, on Direct2Dell and IdeaStorm. A lot of the feedback on our XPS 630 has been positive, but not all of it has.

  There are lots of questions and some confusion around LightFX support. To clear the air, I want to have an honest discussion about what exactly LightFX technology is, what features of LightFX technology the XPS 630 and XPS 730 systems support today and what our plans are to improve the LightFX graphics user interface (GUI) going forward.

  For context, let’s start with a brief history of LightFX:

  • LightFX was introduced on our early gaming notebooks – about three generations ago. At its introduction, LightFX was limited to choosing the color of the LED zones via a BIOS interface. Our customers thought the feature was a cool way to customize their system, but the interface was cumbersome.
  • The natural evolution of LightFX was to give the user a GUI to change their LED colors in a run-time environment. The most elegant solution at the time was to add this functionality to the existing Dell’s Quickset application; a utility application used to fine tune and customize our notebooks.
  • About the same time we were plugging LightFX into Quickset, some smart developers here at Dell were also defining a slick programming interface that allowed software developers (especially game and multimedia developers) the ability to fade, flash and control the LEDs zones of our XPS notebooks. Internally this was known as LightFX 1.0.

  To help demonstrate how the LED zone control could be used, plug-ins were developed for popular media playback tools like iTunes and Windows Media Player. Using these plug-ins, the LEDs on the system could be made to ‘dance’ in time with music and videos. Take a look at the end of Patrick’s vlog for an idea what I’m talking about. Again, we were pretty happy with the results and as we released new notebooks and desktops we even created a special desktop version of Quickset for the XPS 720.

  • Fast forward to 2007: Developing a new round of gaming desktops, the XPS 630 and 730, offered us the opportunity to, once again, improve LightFX technology. This time the design of these next-gen systems provided us with a dedicated microcontroller that improved LED related performance (off loading the overhead of changing states etc. from the system CPU). To take advantage of this we also updated our gaming API; bumping the revision to LightFX 2.0.

  Along with these improvements, however, we had to make a change. The new hardware architecture and implementation meant that we couldn’t continue to use the Quickset application as our GUI control. As a result, this functionality was moved to NVidia Control Panel, under the Chassis section of the Performance tab. The good news is that the user can still customize the LED zones and colors. The bad news is the final look and feel of this GUI was not quite on par with what we have delivered in the past and we could no longer support the media player plug-ins.

  This brings us to today. The XPS 630 and 730 platforms both support some elements of LightFX technology. Users still have the ability to individually control and set the color of their LED zones. We still support the LightFX gaming API. What we don’t have today is the user-friendly GUI.

  To solve this case of the missing GUI we’ve turned to our team members at Alienware. As the trendsetters of the gaming industry, Alienware offers AlienFX which is a customizable lighting effects program allowing the user to set visual colors and unique effects. It made perfect sense to leverage something so well done for our XPS systems.

  So in the coming months XPS 630 and 730 users will be able to download a new, customized version of the AlienFX application that is compatible with LightFX technology. This unique version , called AlienFX: Lite, will provide Basic Mode support for setting LED zone colors, meaning that, for each of the LED zones (four for the XPS 630, and five for the XPS 730), users will be able to choose from the 16 preset colors made popular on the XPS 7xx series and XPS M17xx series platforms. Unfortunately, due to technical reasons, AlienFX Advanced Mode features like defining and saving Themes and Events will not be supported by the XPS compatible version.

  Keep your eye on the download section of support.dell.com because, in the same time frame, we’ll also be posting the updated LightFX gaming API for our customers to download as well; and you can be sure that soon after their release we’ll be installing the AlienFX and API elements on our XPS 630 and 730 systems as they’re built in the factory. This will ensure that our customers are able to enjoy them right out of the box.
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• Folding@Home: Team XPS Keeps Rolling Along

  Thu. Jun. 12, 2008
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  Back in January, Jeff Dickinson became the first Dell Community member to blog on Direct2Dell. His blog post focused on the Folding@Home project, and on Team XPS. The team has been in existence since July of 2007, and they've accomplished quite a bit. I wanted to take a few minutes go over some of those milestones:

  • Team XPS has more than doubled in size since January 2008: Back then, Team XPS had 76 members; now they have 153 and can always use more
  • Team XPS has broken into the Top 100 teams worldwide: back in January, they had just cracked the top 150. Today, they currently rank #67 out of more than 120,000 teams)

  Team XPS members use all kinds of machines. As a whole  the XPS 700-class machines are the most common, but there's all kinds of machines. Leahchimaz even set up a bank of Vostro desktops that he dedicates to running Folding@Home. And folks like Rafael Polit have used their machines to join the cause. That said, you don't have to have an XPS or even a Dell to join the team. All you need is a desktop, notebook or even a Playstation 3 to be part of it. MoneyGuyBK's post over at Your Blog has additional information

  Thanks to all of the members of Team XPS. It's awesome to see the community you've built and what the team has accomplished up to this point—especially since it's for such a good cause. The team is always looking for more members. If you have some questions, submit a comment here or at MoneyGuyBK's post. You can also head to the Team XPS forum page to get answers.

  
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• Revamped Awards & Reviews Site on Dell.com

  Wed. Jun. 04, 2008
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  It's clear from any number of studies out there that customers trust what they hear from friends, family members, or someone they consider and expert more than what they hear from a company. It's also clear that most folks use the Internet to research products quite a bit when they are ready to purchase something like a computer that will be used daily for quite some time.

  Product reviews tend to be a source of information for customers when they are deciding between . Anne B. Camden just published a post to discuss two recent awards for the XPS 420 and XPS 730 desktops. Speaking of awards, yesterday we launched a new Awards & Reviews site on Dell.com. Of course, it features the latest third-party reviews of Dell products, but lots of folks worked to make it more than just a static page with links and logos. Hopefully, one thing you'll notice is that we tried to make it an intuitive visual experience. You can click on specific products if you have already narrowed your search or can see whole categories of systems.

  Beyond that, we wanted to make it more interactive by doing a couple of things: integrating product reviews from customers who own the product and videos from Dell employees who share their opinions of products. Regular readers of Direct2Dell have heard me blog about user ratings and reviews. They are significant because in my mind it represents a small first step in integrating community elements into Dell.com. I've been a big believer in Jeremiah's concept of the Irrelevant Corporate Website. To me, it makes sense that companies that do the best job of blending  customer and community feedback with the traditional e-commerce functionality  that we've all grown accustomed to will have a significant edge over competitors. Though we're still in the early stages of things  and have much work to do, we'll keep working toward that goal.

  

  I hope this site gives you a reason to spend some research time the next time you're looking to buy a system. You can check it out by clicking on the image above or by going to www.dell.com/awards. 
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• What's Happening to XPS?

  Tue. May. 13, 2008
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  I saw that Gizmodo and Engadget reacted to the Wall Street Journal story about plans for our XPS brand and Alienware. Several other blogs like Tech Digest and CyberNet News and others reported details as well. IdeaStorm user dabrace1984 posted an idea called Keep the XPS Product Line.

  Bottom line, we aren't phasing out any gaming machines early and we are not dropping the XPS line. For more details on what's going on, take a look at Anne Camden's post on Your Blog.
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• Latest on the Graphics Card Upgrade for XPS M1730 Customers

  Tue. May. 13, 2008
  by John Blain, Consumer & Gaming Liaison

  A few months ago, Lionel blogged that Dell had added the NVIDIA Dual 8800M GTX to the XPS M1730. This raised a lot of questions from existing M1730 owners, as you can see from the comments to the post, mostly regarding the possibility of an upgrade program. Given how absolutely amazing this card is, I’m surprised it didn’t generate more churn than it did.

  As the gaming/consumer liaison for the Dell community, I was able to take some of these questions to those in the know and get a few answers.

  First thing’s first: an upgrade solution is in the works, and will hopefully be released later this month. From what I’ve seen, there will be two options, one with an installation package, and one do-it-yourself kit for those die-hard techies. Considering the number of screws holding this beast together, most people will probably want the installation, but the do-it-yourself kit will be appealing to people like me that like playing with computer innards. The price of these upgrades is yet to be determined.

  So what’s taking so long? The core issue is that MediaDirect 3.3 is not compatible with the driver for the NVIDIA card. This incompatibility means that the Media Direct software needs to be upgraded. Unfortunately, the upgrade will require a reformat and reinstallation. Beyond that, it will also require you to repartition the hard disk to make room for the new version of MediaDirect, which is a bit larger. Data loss has been a major concern for the engineers working on a solution. At this point, it would appear that there’s really no way around wiping the drive to make the upgrade work with every feature.

  Since this card is obviously “the r0x0r”, I would think people’s inner gamer would be perfectly fine with a reinstallation in order to make this card work. This card is just that cool.

  I know this upgrade has been long in coming, and I know it's caused some frustration. We're sorry this is taking so long, and are working to get this card into your hands as quickly as possible.
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• Dell's XPS 730 Gaming Desktop Details Over at Your Blog

  Thu. May. 01, 2008
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  Update: This time on the Direct2Dell homepage.

   If you're interested in the latest information on the XPS 730, see Anne's post on at Your Blog. If you are a gamer, there's probably some stuff you'll want to see.

  It's got three videos: one that gives an overview of the system, a second all about overclocking and a third that highlights the new H2C cooling system.

  Enough babbling from me... if gaming's your thing, hop on over.
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• Is the Video Game Industry Composting?

  Mon. Mar. 10, 2008
  by Laura P. Thomas, Global eCommerce

  If you've followed many of my past posts on Direct2Dell, you know that I have a passion for virtual worlds and the opportunities I think they present for online interactions. So, it only make sense that I attended Corey Bridges panel yesterday on The Future of Virtual World & Game Development. Corey has quite a background from Netscape to Netflix and now Multiverse. He's also co-founder of the Metaverse Roadmap project.

  Too often when people speak at conferences you feel like you are listening to a commercial for their company or service, but luckily that was not the case with this panel. Instead, he took a high-level view at how the gaming industry is facing the same impact from independent producers that mainstream media is seeing. New technologies are putting production and distribution in the people's hands. In his words, game developers are dead, they just don't know it yet.

  From the compost of that dead video game industry, however, he predicts the rise of a beautiful garden (his metaphor). There will be new genres of games for different consumers - not just hardcore gamers. There will be smarter games for smaller market segments - those who aren't hardcore, but want more than "mainstream dreck".

  He also see more blurring between games, virtual worlds and social networking. As the new medium of virtual worlds is discovered by more people, and gameplay becomes "de-stigmatized" through the use of game systems for business purposes (training, collaboration), Corey predicts flourishing growth of indie development studios and a consolidation of the bigger publishers. Some say play is already how we principally learn and principally create, so fully emergent games is where we want to go.

  The benefit of it all for the rest of us? Corey says it's better design, fewer publishers, more millionaires. Hmm...I guess by the rest of us he meant those who are building games and virtual worlds...
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• The Changing Face of Gaming

  Mon. Mar. 03, 2008
  by Kerry Bridge, EMEA Digital Media Communications

  On Wednesday last week in London, UK, we held a gaming event to discuss and celebrate the enormous changes we are seeing in the gaming industry. At the event we launched the new XPS 630 and announced our sponsorship of team Dignitas. We also held a heavyweight gaming industry panel discussion, which included Dell, Intel, Alienware, NVidia, Ascaron, Gamerbase, Ubisoft, Dignitas.

   

  My favourite bit of news from the day was the announcement that Dell is sponsoring team Dignitas, who I managed to catch in the afternoon along with Dell’s Adam Griffin. Team Dignitas is a leading professional gaming team based in the UK with gamers from more than 20 countries across the globe. This announcement as well as meeting Su-Joy Roy and Dominic Mulroy from Gamerbase, brought it home to me that Dell's interest in gaming goes well beyond delivering some of the best hardware (both XPS and Alienware) in the industry.

   

  Format: flv Duration: 5:13

  Downloads WMV  MP4  OGG

   

  In the morning we asked Dell gaming experts Abizar Vakaria, Chris Shelton and Brian Joyce about the future of gaming. My apologies that you’ll hear a few clashes in the background as the crew are moving furniture setting-up for the event.

   

     FLV, WMV, MP4, OGG 

  A phrase from Susan Bookbinder, our moderator, resonated with me. It was along the lines of, “Like a fine wine the gaming and gamers are maturing into an evermore discerning breed.”  Gaming is now a fashionable social activity that you can enjoy with your friends and make new friends doing so.

  For me the discussion panel highlighted how Dell is working with a broad range of industry leaders to partner on and develop the best gaming experience available worldwide.    

   FLV, WMV, MP4, OGG

  Note: panel members from left to right: Dominic Mulroy, Gamerbase; Ulrich Norf, Intel; Heiko tom Felde, Ascaron; Michel O’Dell, Dignitas; Susan Bookbinder; Abizar Vakaria, Dell; Su-Joy Roy, Gamerbase; Brian Joyce, Dell Alienware and Phil Wright, NVidia.

   

  We have also added a few photos from the event on our Flickr site. And last, but not least, if you are interested in gaming and want join a growing community of gaming enthusiasts check out our Dell gaming forum. 
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• XPS 630: Gaming Power for the Masses

  Wed. Feb. 27, 2008
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  I warned you. Today, customers in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe and Japan can order the XPS 630. It's a gaming desktop meant to pack a lot of power into a smaller chassis. Granted, smaller is a relative term—it's smaller compared to the XPS 720: the XPS 630 has a starting weight of about 39 pounds compared to almost 48 pounds for its larger cousin.

  Note: Clicking on either of these photos below will show a larger version. You can see more photos at the main Dell Flickr site here.

   The goal behind the XPS 630 was to provide great performance and expandability at a reasonable price point. We call it a mainstream gaming system. It supports many of the same high-end options that the XPS 720 does, with a starting price of $1,249. That's where the mainstream part comes from. 

  The Dell folks I talked to were pretty excited about the XPS 630, and based on early awards from CNET, PC Magazine and HotHardware, I'm glad to see they're not alone.

  But enough about that, let's jump into the more technical details. By popular demand, the XPS 630 utilizes a motherboard based on the popular ATX form factor. It's based on a Dell implementation of NVIDIA's 650i chipset, is the first OEM system to support NVIDIA's new Enthusiast System Architecture (ESA) and all units will come with a 750W power supply.

  It also supports Intel processors (initially we'll support the quad-core Q6600 processor and the and Core 2 Extreme QX 6850, with more coming soon) and several graphics card options from both ATI and NVIDIA. We'll offer certain dual graphics card options in Crossfire mode or SLI mode, depending on whether you prefer ATI or NVIDIA.

  In terms of memory, we also support Corsair DDR2 Dominator 800MHz Enhanced Performance Profile (EPP) modules that can be overclocked to1066MHz.

  For folks that want to take performance a step further, you will have the opportunity to overclock the parts of the system through the system BIOS and software like NVIDIA's nTune application, much like the XPS 720 today. Unlike the XPS 720, however, we will not ship the XPS 630 overclocked from the factory. Because there's a lot more to discuss on that front, we'll blog about overclocking soon. And look for an overclocking vlog in the not-too-distant future.

   

  In this vlog, I interview Lee Kinder from the XPS Desktop Team about the system overall. He also discusses design elements, talks specs, hardware and OS options, overclocking and more.

  Format: flv Duration: 6:08

  Downloads WMV  MP4  OGG
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