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The hardcore PC gaming market is a tough one. With so many different companies out to offer buyers just the right rig for what will hopefully be just the right price, it's gotten hard for any one competitor to claim dominance over the rest, especially when the hardest of the hardcore gamers prefer to buy individual parts and assemble their dream rig themselves. With so many different options, the best each company can do is push technology to the limit to offer gamers the best options and prices possible.

Earlier this week, Dell announced the debut of their new XPS 720 H2C gaming rig, claiming the behemoth offers a marked improvement over other entries in the 700 line such as the 710. Not content to simply learn about nothing more than the new system, I arranged interviews with a few Dell executives to learn more about the XPS line itself, and what the company typically associated with general consumer needs plans to do in order to keep the interest of the hardcore PC gaming market. Glen Robson, General Manager of Dell's Gaming Line of Business, and Abizar Vakharia, Marketing Manager for the Gaming Line of Business, spoke to me about Dell's gaming history, while Ketan Pandya, Product Marketing Manager, took time to give me an overview of the new 720 H2C itself.

Shack: Tell us a bit about your job, Glen. Is work strictly business for you, or are you a gamer as well?

Glen Robson: Before this job [General Manager, Gaming Line of Business], I was actually in charge of some of Dell's desktop groups, so I was the guy behind the desktop products and I was the crazy guy, also, behind the [Dell XPS] Renegade gaming box. I'm now the head of the gaming division. Am I a gamer? Yes, I am a self-confessed absolute addict. RTS, FPS, simulations... Those [genres] are where all my spare time goes.

Shack: Dell is typically known for serving general purpose consumers. How did the idea for a gaming line of machines come about?

Glen Robson: If you go way back into Dell's history, you'll see we've always had an interest in the high performance parts gamers have a use for. If you go back maybe three, four, maybe five years ago, we had maybe five or ten XPS machines, which were actually pretty good gaming boxes. We then moved into graphics, and at that point it became apparent to everyone here working in XPS that one of the key groups of thought that was driving the performance and technology [divisions] were gamers. So we transitioned from designing workstations. The importance of gamers has become far, far greater in recent years. They kind of became the basis for what is the performance of the XPS line of systems.

Shack: So the XPS line wasn't always focused on gaming?

Abizar Vakharia: When the XPS line actually was first born--about ten or eleven years ago now--at that time, it was really focused on a very high-end enthusiast customer. Now, over time, Dell continued to grow and continued to focus on consumer needs, and we reached a point where we didn't feel our [XPS] boxes were the kind of machines we should be putting our brand on. So, we actually for a while did not have an XPS product in our consumer lineup. About 5 years ago, we re-introduced a product line called XPS, where we had the right performance, we were able to that high-end enthusiast base. From then [five years ago] to now, we've actually had a lot of success and have understood the enthusiast customer better and better over these last several years. We've realized that one of the biggest uses these enthusiasts have [for computers] is playing computer games.

Now, you know, the products have certain features in them that we believe are fundamental to all enthusiasts. You can over clock the processor, we have a rapid driver [update] program so [you'll always have] the latest NVIDIA or ATI graphics drivers. If you want to play, and you're experiencing problems, you can always get the latest [video card drivers from us] to play the games that you want to play. XPS is an evolution of that enthusiast line due to the gaming space.

Shack: How did Dell's acquisition of Alienware come to fruition?

Glen Robson: Alienware was just a natural choice. Being XPS, we wanted the key performance and the best enthusiasts in the industry, so we had to look for something that would be complimentary to the XPS line of business. Really, there was only Alienware. They were doing a lot of cool things, and we felt they'd be a great addition to the Dell family.

Shack: Late last year, Hewlett Packard acquired Voodoo PC, and before that, Dell purchased Alienware. Did Dell consider other gaming-oriented computer manufacturers such as Voodoo PC, or was Alienware always your choice?

Glen Robson: As part of our business, you naturally tend to look at what other people are doing and make sure that you're well aware of everything. Alienware seemed the only company established enough to be added to the XPS line. They have the kind of value we want.

Shack: Many gamers feel XPS machines are rather over-priced, even in terms of gaming rigs. Other competitors offer similar configurations for sometimes quite a bit less than an XPS computer. Why go with an XPS over the competition?

Abizar Vakharia: That's an interesting comment. I've actually been inundated over the last three to four months with tagline after tagline from the industry talking about our XPS 710 H2C product being one of the best deals in the marketplace for a performance-class system. Really, the value that XPS brings to the market is, we deliver performance-class systems to the industry with robust ability and quality. So, specifically when I say that, I'm talking about the fact that these products come over clocked from our factory--such as the H2C--and not just our desktops, but our notebooks as well. As we look at our customer data, we've had a lot of satisfaction to tweak their systems in ways that don't allow the system to crash, but to get the [best] performance. That's one of the cornerstones for us--we want to deliver the latest technology, and we'll deliver it in a way that is scalable and of high quality.

Shack: When running a PC game, it's important to have the bulk of a machine's resources dedicated to the game, not to lots of background applications. One common complaint* many PC gamers have had about Dell is the existence of bloatware, software that hogs necessary resources that could and would be better used to run games. Has Dell acknowledged these complaints, and has the company done anything to remove bloatware from its machines, specifically the XPS line of gaming rigs?

Abizar Vakharia: You know what? You're right. One of the beauties of the direct model is that we get to talk to our customers directly, and we heard about this issue, oh, I'd say right around eighteen months ago. It was something that, as we started penetrating the gaming space, not just the enthusiast space, we started getting those customers. We set up our IdeaStorm that is now up and running, things like that serve as conduits that tell us these things about our products. When we heard [about bloatware cramping game performance], right around thirty days after we started hearing these complaints, we launched the ability for our customer to buy an XPS gaming box with a completely clean install. So, they can elect to buy just the OS, or some productivity applications, or some security features, or any combination therein. So today, if you go to our website and look at our new [XPS] 720 H2C that we just launched, you can buy it with a clean [installed] OS. Same thing with our notebooks--we've got a clean install option there, too.

Shack: Casual gaming is a market that has always existed, but one that's gaining more and more ground. Casual gamers may not be interested in spending upward of $6000 to run Supreme Commander and Crysis at maximum settings. What does Dell do to cater to the casual gaming sector, or is that a concern for a line as powerful as XPS?

Glen Robson: That's a great question, David. I think one of the most exciting things that's happening to PC gaming today is, there are more and more people trying PC gaming for the first time. Games like World of WarCraft have brought a whole new set of gamers into PC gaming. And we realize that. The XPS extends beyond the $6000 system. True, there are much higher-priced gaming rigs that can play a lot of games, FPSs and RTSs. If you want that experience, we can give it to you. However, there's also XPS 410, not as trendy as an H2C system, but again, it's got the capability that would appeal to casual gamers. We've also got options in our Inspiron and Dimension lineups that many of our customers buy to play games.

Shack: What research goes into finding out what technology gamers want in their rigs?

Glen Robson: Really, it comes down to multiple paths of information. First and foremost, one of the biggest changes we've seen in the XPS line, is that we're not just in tune with getting the best boxes out there. We're now playing a much bigger role in the gaming ecosystem, in that we make sure upcoming games can take advantage of the technology that we have. We've got a huge set of gamers internally who we talk with, and we've also got very good relationships [with our buyers] through conduits such as IdeaStorm. We've actually created multiple routes we use to talk with gamers, and many of us are gamers ourselves, so it goes beyond the standard marketing techniques we're all familiar with. This is our life, twenty-four hours a day seven days a week, we're all pretty passionate about it.

Shack: Along those same lines, many gamers have often wondered what sort of tests are conducted on finished rigs to find out if they're fast enough, stable, won't overheat, and so on. Could you tell us a bit about those tests and other aspects of that process?

Abizar Vakharia: One of the things we kicked off about a year and a half ago was a program called the Gaming Partner program. What we do is we actually are working with pretty much all developers and publishers, and actually helping to do a lot of testing and validation in their Quality Assurance Labs with all of these really high-end heavy games as they go through alpha and beta. Electronic Arts, Crytek, and even Blizzard--we work with these guys and make sure they've got our newer systems, and also make sure they understand some of the key technologies so they can write games that are optimized for that [the XPS experience].

Shack: What does Dell see as the future of PC gaming, and how is the company preparing for that future?

Glen Robson: That's another great question, and I wish I had you here so we could walk you through the labs and get you hands-on answers to that question. The main thing for me, as a long-time PC gamer, is online gaming. World of WarCraft and various others are driving a whole new demographic for PC games. The online experience is pretty unique to the PC, it's probably the best in the world. We've got some incredibly high-end technology and interfaces we're thinking about. Between ourselves and Alienware, we'll continue to push technology boundaries. PC gamers just want in terms of everything, in terms of frame rate and graphics technology, in terms of physics, and you're just going to see more of that. The experience will continue to grow and become more life-like, and [be] centered more around communities.

Abizar Vakharia: I'd like to add that one of the beauties of the PC's architecture is that boundaries can be sort of unlimited. We had this idea of taking the lighting which is in existence on a lot of our systems and actually exposing the lighting controls to game developers so they can continue to take the gaming experience to the next level. Today, there's a Dell LightFX 1.0, actually 1.1, SDK that many game developers used to control the lighting on the [XPS] system. And that goes beyond gaming. The lights work with Windows Media Player, iTunes. You can actually take your desktop and use it to play music and play games, and the lighting becomes context-based. We have a LightFX 2.0 coming out in the future which will have even more features and more controls, it will have zones within the computer, to get even more lighting effects with games.

Turn the page to read about the new Dell XPS 720 H2C.