XPS 630: Gaming Power for the Masses

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.

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