Dell Starts Selling $9,900 Gaming PC

Mike Howes 22 Mar, 2006 at 2:04pm ET Article published in Tech

Dell will begin taking orders for its “limited edition” XPS 600 Renegade desktop gaming rig. The kit will set you back a whopping $9,930, though that includes Dell’s 30in LCD monitor.
The rig comes in a custom-painted case which houses four GeForce 7900 GPUs each with 512MB of video memory, ready to run games at 2,560 x 1,600.

Dell’s also put a SoundBlaster X-Fi Fatal1ty sound card in the box, which also houses a Western Digital 160GB, 10,000rpm Raptor hard drive and – in case you run out of room – a second WD HDD, a 400GB, 7,200rpm job. There’s 2GB of dual-channel 667MHz DDR 2 connected to the CPU via an Nvidia nForce 4 SLI chipset.

Source: The Register

Comments

22 Mar 2006 ~ 2:14pm Leonardo It's really hard to not be completely critical, so I'll start with positives:

Dell is actually taking steps to try and break out of the "Dull" stereotype.
Dell wants to give Alienware and the other expensive high-performance box makers competition. Great!
Custom painted case - oustanding (if you like boy wonder graphics).

The negatives:

Dell is looking for people with no hardware skills and lots of disposable income. Are there really a lot of people who will pay $9K+ for a desktop computer?

The pictured case looks like a painted version of the cramped Octiplex cases. If so, what a ripoff! That case is OK for mass corporate sales, where the user never opens the case, but NOT acceptable for custom, high performance gaming machine. pathetic! Good luck on future upgrades. Those cases are not easy to work in. Perhaps it is a different, larger case that just looks like the Octopus case?

Maybe they should put AOL and Type R stickers on the case, raise the price $1000 more, get it on the Today show or ZDNet, and sell even more of them!

If nothing else, I'll give Dell credit for trying something new - high performance.
22 Mar 2006 ~ 2:39pm RADA

Leonardo wrote:

It's really hard to not be completely critical, so I'll start with positives:

Dell is actually taking steps to try and break out of the "Dull" stereotype.
Dell wants to give Alienware and the other expensive high-performance box makers competition. Great!
Custom painted case - oustanding (if you like boy wonder graphics).

The negatives:

Dell is looking for people with no hardware skills and lots of disposable income. Are there really a lot of people who will pay $9K+ for a desktop computer?

The pictured case looks like a painted version of the cramped Octiplex cases. If so, what a ripoff! That case is OK for mass corporate sales, where the user never opens the case, but NOT acceptable for custom, high performance gaming machine. pathetic! Good luck on future upgrades. Those cases are not easy to work in. Perhaps it is a different, larger case that just looks like the Octopus case?

Maybe they should put AOL and Type R stickers on the case, raise the price $1000 more, get it on the Today show or ZDNet, and sell even more of them!

If nothing else, I'll give Dell credit for trying something new - high performance.

The case looks just like the dual Xeon Precision 670 cases we got for the engineers at Honeywell... minus the paint of course...
22 Mar 2006 ~ 2:43pm Jengo that sounds like one hell of'a PC, albeit making your own would be cheaper.
22 Mar 2006 ~ 2:47pm Garg It's not an Optiplex case, but it looks like the one next to me and it's a Precision 670, so I'll call it a Precision case. It's not much better than the Optiplex cases though, I'll tell you that. Less flimsy, though. Front USB in a usuable spot is nice too.

That's a hell of a rig, but no way I'd spend that much for it, even if I won the lottery. I'd build it for half that and give the other half to charity or something.
22 Mar 2006 ~ 3:00pm GHoosdum I wonder if they still use their standard craptacular 250W PSU in it... I wonder because I'm too lazy to click the link and check.
22 Mar 2006 ~ 3:05pm lemonlime Wow, I paid less than that for my car! I'd sure as hell not pay that kind of money for an Intel 'Xpensive Edition' based PC either.. I would DEMAND an FX60 at the very least..

I'd also echo Leo's comments.. it is good to see Dell do things a little differently.
22 Mar 2006 ~ 4:19pm BuddyJ I got a Mercedes at half the price. Granted, it doesn't have a flame paint job, but I think that's for the better.
22 Mar 2006 ~ 4:27pm csimon I wonder what it would cost to configure the same system from online vendors like newegg & monarch?
22 Mar 2006 ~ 4:30pm lemonlime

csimon wrote:

I wonder what it would cost to configure the same system from online vendors like newegg & monarch?

I think those are special SLI cards that you can't get through normal channels. IIRC they are double stacked 'single' cards in SLI.

That 30" LCD definitely needs those cards for that naitive resolution
22 Mar 2006 ~ 4:40pm RWB So who was it that wanted us to price him out a $10,000 computer?

There is just no smilie for this moment....
22 Mar 2006 ~ 4:42pm GHoosdum

RWB wrote:

There is just no smilie for this moment....

Sure there is:
22 Mar 2006 ~ 4:54pm jradmin

lemonlime wrote:

I think those are special SLI cards that you can't get through normal channels. IIRC they are double stacked 'single' cards in SLI.

That 30" LCD definitely needs those cards for that naitive resolution

According to Nvidia's site, they are releasing quad-SLI to manufacturers first. In my opinion thats total BS as it segregates the part of their customer base that has made them into the company they are today.
22 Mar 2006 ~ 4:57pm Leonardo

I got a Mercedes at half the price. Granted, it doesn't have a flame paint job

But just think how dashing your car would look with a flame paint job, a Type R sticker, a big DELL emblem, AND and Intel EE sticker! You could sell it on eBay to an AOL user for a fortune, especially in one of the rediculous overpirced "Buy Now" store fronts!
22 Mar 2006 ~ 4:58pm GHoosdum "Buy It Now: $9,900 plus elevenbilliontysix dollars shipping & handling"
22 Mar 2006 ~ 5:05pm Leonardo "The FASTESTEST computer known to man, made by the BESTEST most RELIABLEST computar company, DULL!" RARE, very few of these will be made (or sold).

Ebay seller:

bestescomputechSellarEvar: 325678 reviews, 98.325 Positive

+++++++++++++++++++++++++BESTEST EVER SELLER, ITEM ARRIVED JUST AS DESCRIBED. I AM SOHAPPY TO own a Delll!
22 Mar 2006 ~ 6:28pm csimon The more you spend the faster it will become 06501ee7! With the rapidity of graphic releases ...even buying 2 cards right now seems like a waste.
23 Mar 2006 ~ 9:44am csimon LOL ...it just dawned on me that this bios will probably be crippled like every other dell ...BULLTITS!!!!!!!!
23 Mar 2006 ~ 1:05pm Winga mmmm this raises some questions...

Why is Dell selling expensive over the top PC's if they have just bought out Alienware? http://www.short-media.com/forum/showthread.php?t=43933
Isn't that in direct opposition
23 Mar 2006 ~ 3:26pm Jengo

Winga wrote:

mmmm this raises some questions...

Why is Dell selling expensive over the top PC's if they have just bought out Alienware? http://www.short-media.com/forum/showthread.php?t=43933
Isn't that in direct opposition

i bet after a while they are just going to start slapping alienware stickers on those suckers, then it wont really matter...
23 Mar 2006 ~ 5:57pm Nightwolf

Jengo wrote:

i bet after a while they are just going to start slapping alienware stickers on those suckers, then it wont really matter...

That errgs me.
24 Mar 2006 ~ 6:11pm Qeldroma I think they may pioneer us back to the day of the 5 figure PC
28 Mar 2006 ~ 8:02am Kni7es Dell hates gamers. It's a fact of life.
31 Mar 2006 ~ 12:05am RADA DELL HAS SOLD OUT IT'S $9,900 GAMING PCs

RENEGADE SOLD OUT!!
31 Mar 2006 ~ 12:13am Leonardo Yes, I saw that too. But nowhere did I find how many that was. 5000? 100? 12?
31 Mar 2006 ~ 3:24am Thrax Less than 50.
31 Mar 2006 ~ 8:37am Garg

Thrax wrote:

Less than 50.

So there's a chance that there's only 50 stark-raving mad megalomanics out there? I'll hold onto that hope until I see these things showing up at Best Buy.
31 Mar 2006 ~ 10:44am jradmin I love how they say in that article; "Who's laughing now!". To answer that...I am. Anyone who is stupid enough to pay $10,000 for something that costs about half that needs to rethink their ability at logical thought.

I'd love to see that thing against a system with comparable parts using an FX60.
31 Mar 2006 ~ 11:23am lemonlime Hahaha well said jradmin