Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

When the clock strikes midnight on June 18th, Dell will discontinue its sales of XP systems. The move allows Dell to meet the imposed June 30th deadline which requires the industry to cease shipment of XP machines. That is, unless you’re in the market for a netbook and nettop in which case Microsoft is happy for vendors to continue shipping XP in order to stifle Linux’s penetration into consumer computing give consumers a consistent user experience. After June 18th, certain Dell products will still be offered with a factory installed, XP Professional “downgrade” at the cost to you or your business of an unused Windows Vista Business or Vista Ultimate license and presumably, a small fee as we heard earlier. However, according to TGDaily, the downgrade will only be offered on XPS 630 and XPS 720 H2C desktops or the M1730 laptop — not the 11 laptops and 10 desktops Dell currently ships with an XP option.

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Filed under: Desktops, Gaming

Hailed as a rig that “gamers won’t outgrow,” the XPS 630 that we originally peeked at CES is finally official. As expected, the tower is ATI CrossFire and NVIDIA SLI-ready and will support Intel’s Core 2 Quad and Core 2 Extreme processors on the nForce 650i SLI chipset. You can beef things up with 4GB of DDR2 RAM, 1TB of HDD space or an optional Blu-ray drive and AGEIA PhysX accelerator, and you’ll have plenty of room for all those peripherals thanks to six total USB 2.0 ports, an optional 19-in-1 media card reader, gigabit Ethernet, audio in / out, FireWire and even PS/2 mouse and keyboard connectors. Also of note, it’s the first pre-fab PC to support the Enthusiast System Architecture (ESA), and you can snag your own for as little as $1,249 right now. Click on through for more of the breakdown. Oh, and if you’re interested to see how this beast stacks up, you can check out reviews from PC Mag, Hot Hardware and Computer Shopper.

Continue reading Dell’s XPS 630 gaming desktop gets official, reviewed

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Filed under: Desktops, Gaming

Check that evil scowl will you. You’re looking into the menacing red grill of Dell’s newest gaming desktop the XPS 630. Dell’s site modestly teases, “Here comes a new challenger.” Challenger eh, not leader? Come on Dell, you’re not going to generate any gaming hype with such tepidity. Drop in some NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics and say it loud, boy. Just not too loud, you don’t want to step on the toes of your Alienware subsidiary.

Update: Mystery solved. Looks like Dell dropped the “i” from the XPS 630i which we had the chance to get up close to at CES. It’s just an mid-level gaming rig. Nothing to see here folks, move along now.

[Thanks, Thomas C.]

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