Dell offers luxury desktop for gaming

Dell Inc. is aiming for the high end of the video game market with its new XPS 600 Renegade desktop, which it showed at January's International Consumer Electronics Show but began taking orders for on Wednesday.

With hand-painted designs on the PC chassis, Dell says this product is a "collector's item," not a competitor to dedicated gaming consoles like the Microsoft Xbox 360, Nintendo Revolution or Sony PlayStation3.

"We attract people who want to play massively multiplayer games online; not the casual console gamer; people who use a monitor instead of the TV for better picture quality; people who have LAN parties so they can play on a team," said Ketan Pandya, senior marketing manager for consumer desktop systems at Dell, Round Rock, Texas.

To reach that level of performance, the machine will use three dedicated processors: a general system processor, a graphics card and a physics processor.

The general system processor is a Pentium 965 dual core from Intel Corp., overclocked to run at 4.26 GHz instead of its rated base speed of 3.73 GHz. The graphics card uses Quad-SLI technology from NVIDIA Corp., in Santa Clara, California, with four GeForce 7900 graphics processing units. And the physics chip is the PhysX processor from AGEIA, Mountain View, California; what Dell calls "the industry's first dedicated physics accelerator."

"Games are no longer bound by the CPU; the best high-end games, with the most realistic effects, are bound by what the graphics card is doing," Pandya said.

Dell's boutique approach to marketing turns conventional strategy on its head, analysts say. Most hardcore gamers today choose a dedicated appliance instead of a PC.

But from a technological perspective, "there is not much difference in the inner workings of a PC and a current generation gaming box. It's all in the graphics and, of course, the user interface," said IdaRose Sylvester, an analyst with IDC's Consumer Semiconductor Program.

So Dell may find commercial success by targeting this niche market, she said. In fact, their timing is excellent.

"This is a particularly good time now, since we are at the start of a major uptick in the gaming cycle for consoles. There can be a halo effect with more games coming out for both platforms, creating more consumer knowledge and awareness," Sylvester said.

In fact, users may have to wait a little while for those new games; the first games designed to take advantage of the physics technology are expected to reach stores later this year, Dell says.

Gamers will notice the difference, said Pandya. In most games, a player's character can see or touch only a few crucial objects in the virtual world. So a character running through a forest may see sharply in one or two directions, but the rest of the picture looks cartoonish.

"We solved that with the AGEIA physics accelerator. Now, when you shoot a keg of dynamite and everything moves away from it in the explosion, you will see all those objects with crispness, clarity and definition. It is real time dynamic motion," Pandya said.

Also included in the US$9,930 price is a 30-inch flat panel display and a backlit keyboard for night viewing in a darkened room. The computer runs on Microsoft's Windows XP Professional operating system.