Dell Aims for Gamers with XPS M1710

Mr Tits writes "Dell moved to solidify its position in the lucrative gaming market yesterday by launching the XPS M1710, a dual-core processor system designed to let gamers simultaneously play three-dimensional games while encoding music or scanning for viruses. "

Comments

What?

[Duds]

"Play games while encoding music or scanning for viruses"

Even as a desktop replacement that's just not sensible. Unless you're playing games from 1998 you're still going to need every teeny little bit of power that thing has, and you'd still be alt-tabbing out of games to check the other tasks, which will do nothing for them.

And how exactly the hell does "Dual core" help you when you're thrashing the hard drive wildly trying to virus check?

Re:What?

[tokki]

While it doesn't help with disk I/O, dual cores really do make a system much more responsive. Alt-tabbing over to another app during a game is instantaneous and snappy, where on a single-core processor alt-tabbing brings the sounds of "chariots of fire" into your mind as it moves in slow-motion.

A dual-core really doesn't make games snapper, as I can't think of any that are designed as multi-threaded, but it means you can leave a lot of other stuff running (assuming you've got enough memory) without worrying about how it might drag the game down.

And in the somewhat frequent instances where one app might consume 100% of the CPU through either design of flaw, the system is still responsive because you've got another CPU handling your requests.

In short, I'm never going back to single-core.

Scanning for viruses?

[Tibor the Hun]

Is scanning for viruses a regularly scheduled activity for windows gamers nowdays?
WTF?
Heey everyone! Now you can use your computer AND scan for viruses at the same time! How awesome is that!

Is that really a selling point?

Dual CD drives?

[gEvil (beta)]

Since nearly every game out there requires you to have the CD in the drive to launch it (ignoring no-CD cracks for the moment), where are you supposed to put the CD to encode music while you're playing games? Or are they referring to the raw wave files of your band that you just finished recording before starting into a heavy gaming session?

Have they removed the Dell spyware and malware

[John the Kiwi]

There are two big problems I have with Dell computers:

First they have random unneeded software such as Musicmatch jukebox, Quickbooks Demo, various useless Dell phone home software packages etc. There have been several reviews of Dell gaming machines where some games won't even start because of incompatibilities some games have with Dell's TSR's.

Secondly, Dell's warranties aren't worth a crap. For example if a Dell computer has a bad hard drive it will take at least 3 hours of calls and diagnosis before you can get their helpdesk to send someone out to replace it. It's generally easier to go to (insert computer store here) and replace the drive yourself rather than wearing the cost of using Dell's helpdesk at all.

A lot of my customers use Dell computers. I support them a lot. If you do end up with one make sure to reinstal from scratch, try not to use the recovery CDs which will restore all the crappy Dell spyware with it.

That's my 2c.

Kiwi

Re:Duo Core

[Garabito]

Hope Dell seems the same results for this gaming machine

I doubt so, considering that Dell bundles its XPS PCs with a crap load of software that slows down your gaming exprience. Of course, it's possible to achieve good results by doing a fresh reinstall of Win XP on them.

Re:I don't get it.

[Garabito]

What's the point of XPS now that they've acquired Alienware? Now they can just focus the Dell brand on business and home users with Alienware going towards gamers.

Or maybe they will just let the Alienware brand die? It's not something that hasn't happened before.

Re:Marketing dual cores to windows users

[badasscat]

Most people run virus software all the time. They also have a few other programs running all the time. Touting your machines ability to run these programs while playing games is an obvious fit.

Unless you're a gamer. You know, the kind of people Dell is hoping will buy an XPS system.

It's all fine and dandy if "most people" want to have all these programs running all the time. Hardcore gamers, though, know to turn everything off if they want the best performance. Dell apparently still doesn't understand this - they first of all load all the same junk onto their XPS machines as they do on their mainstream machines, then rather than tout the raw gaming performance of the XPS line, they tout the fact that you can multitask. Gamers don't care about multitasking. They care about one task and one task only: playing games.

Again, if Dell wants to market the XPS line as sort of a high-end everyman computer, that's fine. But that's never been their stated goal. This was the line intended to garner them street cred, the "top-down" approach where the real hardcore users will spend that extra money and then tell all their friends how great Dell is.

This strategy is ass-backwards if that is their goal. They should be touting how lean their systems are, not how many things you can do at once. They should be touting how many frames per second you can get running the latest games, not how you can encode music while you're playing. These are things that appeal to mainstream users, not the high-end, hardcore users Dell is trying to attract.