XPS 730 pops up on Dell's support site
By Nilay Patel 
posted Apr 24th 2008 7:04PM
posted Apr 24th 2008 7:04PM
[Thanks, Andrew and Thomas]
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nothing dull here, no sir, pretty damn cool I says
Dell kicks ass, I don't care how much "hardcore" users would love to think otherwise.
DELL. Yeah.
Absolutely! The first big company to give the consumer real OS choice!
I think I'm going to buy an Inspiron laptop pretty soon after they roll out 8.04 on their machines.
You forgot to mention that this thing also uses the nForce 790i SLI board and supports DDR3 RAM. It's going to be sweet. I can only hope that it is ATX designed like it's little brother the XPS 630. Yay for standards compliance, finally.
The specs are there, in the manual.. page 203..
3 X PCIe x16 (2 generation 2, 1 Generation1)
2 X PCIe x1
2 X PCI
1 IDE
6 SATA
USB 2 front, 6 back
1384 1 front, 1 back
chipset 790i
DDR3
Intel core 2 extreme
Processor type
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo (Performance dual core)
Intel® Core™ 2 Quad (Performance quad core)
Intel® Core™ 2 Extreme (Extreme performance quad core)
Cache
at least 4 MB
Memory
Type
800 MHz and faster DDR3 unbuffered SDRAM; SLI memory
Memory connectors
four
Memory capacities
512 MB, 1 GB, and 2 GB
Minimum memory
1 GB
Maximum memory
8 GB
NOTE: See Addressing Memory Configurations to verify the amount of memory available to the operating system.
Computer Information
Chipset
Northbridge
Southbridge
nForce 790i SLI
nForce 790i SLI SPP
nForce 790i SLI MCP
BIOS chip (NVRAM)
8 Mb
NIC
two integrated network interfaces capable of 10/100/1000 communication
Video
Type
dual PCIe x16 Generation 2
single PCIe x16 Generation 1
Audio
Type
HDA 7.1 channel, Realtek 888 codec
So much dead space. So much...
so much money. so much
Someone should ask PC Magazine . com why they pulled their announcement of the XPS 730 off their site this morning, less than an hour after I posted the link to a Dell Forum. Their announcement quoted prices starting at $4,999.00 and going over $6,300.00 and gave some of the details of the available builds. Guess Mr. D. didn't like that being made public!!!
So... with the meager benefit triple SLI gives us, perhaps an Ageia PhysX or Havok(?) card is slated for the 3rd slot?
Nvidia bought Ageia already and are about to allow any 8000+ series card to become basically a physx card. So, do two cards in sli for graphics, and a third for physics.
It's quite significant for Australia (where it launches next week).. it's the first time Dell's offered watercooling from the factory.
Well,
I got the XPS 720 late last year for my CTO, OMFG, was this a big mistake. From video driver problems to power supplies to replacing all the parts 3 times (YES, 3 TIMES). In the mean time, DELL broke the PC after the second time and it took me 2 months (YES, TWO MONTHS) to get them to fix what they broke.
I even have a UT video on this here :
http://www.blogtronix.com/blogtronix.com/355
I must have been on the phone with the nice Anke from Bangalore for days over this one. You can aslo just type http://www.dellhel.com or www.delhell.com :)