As Dell strives to get rid of the image of them being a producer of cheap, low-grade machines that aren't worthy of notice by anyone into serious computing (at least for the home), they continue to add to their performance line of offerings. Lately, the addition of two new XPS boxes in Europe and the U.S. are their attempt at the performance market. The XPS 700 is a dual core 3.73GHz Pentium beast, using the nVidia 590 SLI MCP, an AGEIA PhysX physics accelerator and a 512MB Radeon X1900 XTX or a 512MB GeForce 7900 GTX. The machine can have multiple configurations adjusted, such as RAM amount and type/size of HDD, but either way at a bare minimum it's going to run someone close to $2000 for the system. Premium parts come at a premium price.

Dell also is introducing the XPS M2010, a “hybrid” machine, that is a combination between a desktop and a laptop. It isn't something you'd take with you on a plane, but it light and small enough to easily move between locations, complete with wireless keyboard and touchpad. It sports a Core Duo, though with all the integration it has a bit of an iMac look to it. At an obscene price tag of $4,000, it may be relegated to “novelty”.