June 2008 - Direct2Dell

You may remember my last post on Direct2Dell, where I had announced the imminent arrival of the GeForce Dual 8800M GTX upgrade kit for existing XPS M1730 customers. In fact, we’ve been talking about this for quite some time. Back in January, Lionel blogged that Dell was offering the 8800M GTX to new customers. Last month, he said we’d be offering this upgrade to existing customers. For customers in the United States, that day has finally arrived!

The card can now be purchased from our Dell.com, either as a stand-alone part for the slightly more adventurous, or with an installation service for folks that don’t want to do it themselves. I would recommend seeing what is involved in changing your video card before deciding which option is best for you. The service manual for the XPS M1730 can be found here, and we’ll soon post a vlog with Louis Bruno that walks you through the installation process.

Update: Below is the vlog for customers who will install the 8800M GTX card themselves. If you would like to see a larger version, click on the links to download or view the Windows Media Video file or this version for QuickTime/ iPods and the iPhone.

Update 2 from Lionel: Like John mentioned in this comment, we have heard from several customers that the links to the upgrade offers on Dell.com were not working reliably. Our teams have worked to fix the issues that caused the breakage. We apologize for the inconvenience. Here's the link for the standalone card, and here's the link for the standalone card with installation service.

Also, if you are a customer who has ordered the upgrade, but are having problems through the support process, please share your details via a comment in this thread. I won't publish any personal iformation like e-mail addresses or service tag numbers. What I will do is connect you with someone who can help. As a reminder, this upgrade offer is for customers in the United States.

For those of you who opt to buy the installation service, here is what you should expect. After you place your order, a work order will be sent to a service provider in your area, who should contact you within 48 hours after you place the order to set up a service appointment for the installation. When the day of the service appointment arrives, your service technician should once again contact you to make sure you’ve received the parts from Dell, after which the technician will arrive at the appointed time to do the installation. After the work is complete, the technician will leave you to enjoy your new video card.

Also of note, M1730 customers with version 3.3 of MediaDirect will have to install version 3.5 for MediaDirect to work with this new card. The catch? The MediaDirect partition has to be enlarged for the new installation to work, requiring that users repartition their hard drives, and then reformat their Operating System partition and reinstall Windows, drivers, software, and Dell QuickSet. MediaDirect 3.5 will be included with the upgrade kit for this purpose. If you opt for the installation service, the MediaDirect reinstallation will not be done by the service technician. If you want MediaDirect functionality, you’ll have to do the MediaDirect 3.5 installation yourself.

Despite the complications in bringing this to you, this beast of a video card boosts performance over the older Dual 8700M GT cards by up to an astonishing 49%, and is capable of up to a 13,496 3DMark ‘06 score. Since I’m not a benchmark junky myself, I have to ask, what does this mean for real performance?

The answer is astounding. Dell Labs noted an average of 43 frames per second in Crysis as opposed to 30 frames per second on an identically configured XPS M1730 with a Dual 8700M GT, and 21 frames per second on an XPS M1730 with the single 8700M GT. The answer, simply put, is that the difference this card should make is DRASTIC.

So, all of you hardcore gamers out there that jumped on the M1730 when it launched, now you can upgrade your video card and make your machine truly worthy of the nickname “Beast”.

The Dell Gaming team includes a large contingent of gamers and nothing delights us more than being able to bring systems like the XPS 630 to thousands of our closest friends. We always hear a lot from our gamer customers… they tend to be some of the most active community participants at the Forum, on Direct2Dell and IdeaStorm. A lot of the feedback on our XPS 630 has been positive, but not all of it has.

There are lots of questions and some confusion around LightFX support. To clear the air, I want to have an honest discussion about what exactly LightFX technology is, what features of LightFX technology the XPS 630 and XPS 730 systems support today and what our plans are to improve the LightFX graphics user interface (GUI) going forward.

For context, let’s start with a brief history of LightFX:

• LightFX was introduced on our early gaming notebooks – about three generations ago. At its introduction, LightFX was limited to choosing the color of the LED zones via a BIOS interface. Our customers thought the feature was a cool way to customize their system, but the interface was cumbersome.
• The natural evolution of LightFX was to give the user a GUI to change their LED colors in a run-time environment. The most elegant solution at the time was to add this functionality to the existing Dell’s Quickset application; a utility application used to fine tune and customize our notebooks.
• About the same time we were plugging LightFX into Quickset, some smart developers here at Dell were also defining a slick programming interface that allowed software developers (especially game and multimedia developers) the ability to fade, flash and control the LEDs zones of our XPS notebooks. Internally this was known as LightFX 1.0.

To help demonstrate how the LED zone control could be used, plug-ins were developed for popular media playback tools like iTunes and Windows Media Player. Using these plug-ins, the LEDs on the system could be made to ‘dance’ in time with music and videos. Take a look at the end of Patrick’s vlog for an idea what I’m talking about. Again, we were pretty happy with the results and as we released new notebooks and desktops we even created a special desktop version of Quickset for the XPS 720.

• Fast forward to 2007: Developing a new round of gaming desktops, the XPS 630 and 730, offered us the opportunity to, once again, improve LightFX technology. This time the design of these next-gen systems provided us with a dedicated microcontroller that improved LED related performance (off loading the overhead of changing states etc. from the system CPU). To take advantage of this we also updated our gaming API; bumping the revision to LightFX 2.0.

Along with these improvements, however, we had to make a change. The new hardware architecture and implementation meant that we couldn’t continue to use the Quickset application as our GUI control. As a result, this functionality was moved to NVidia Control Panel, under the Chassis section of the Performance tab. The good news is that the user can still customize the LED zones and colors. The bad news is the final look and feel of this GUI was not quite on par with what we have delivered in the past and we could no longer support the media player plug-ins.

This brings us to today. The XPS 630 and 730 platforms both support some elements of LightFX technology. Users still have the ability to individually control and set the color of their LED zones. We still support the LightFX gaming API. What we don’t have today is the user-friendly GUI.

To solve this case of the missing GUI we’ve turned to our team members at Alienware. As the trendsetters of the gaming industry, Alienware offers AlienFX which is a customizable lighting effects program allowing the user to set visual colors and unique effects. It made perfect sense to leverage something so well done for our XPS systems.

So in the coming months XPS 630 and 730 users will be able to download a new, customized version of the AlienFX application that is compatible with LightFX technology. This unique version , called AlienFX: Lite, will provide Basic Mode support for setting LED zone colors, meaning that, for each of the LED zones (four for the XPS 630, and five for the XPS 730), users will be able to choose from the 16 preset colors made popular on the XPS 7xx series and XPS M17xx series platforms. Unfortunately, due to technical reasons, AlienFX Advanced Mode features like defining and saving Themes and Events will not be supported by the XPS compatible version.

Keep your eye on the download section of support.dell.com because, in the same time frame, we’ll also be posting the updated LightFX gaming API for our customers to download as well; and you can be sure that soon after their release we’ll be installing the AlienFX and API elements on our XPS 630 and 730 systems as they’re built in the factory. This will ensure that our customers are able to enjoy them right out of the box.

Jay Pinkert published a post about the new line of Consumer systems we unveiled earlier today. Beyond the blog post, you can also see information on the new line at www.dell.com/studio. 

Click on the image below to see a larger version of it, or click here to see more images in Flickr.

When we launched IdeaStorm in January 2007, it was well-received by our customers. Since then, the community has submitted over 9,000 ideas and shared more than 70,000 comments. Up to this point, besides talking about it from a social media perspective, we haven't advertised IdeaStorm to a wide audience.

Today, we're starting to do that by working with comedian and successful talk show host Steve Harvey. His radio show, The Steve Harvey Morning Show attracts millions of listeners every day. He's someone who built a career on a big idea. Take a look at this video to hear more about that from him.

You'll be hearing from more people like Steve in the future on this topic. Dell understands the importance of your ideas and want to encourage you to keep sending them to IdeaStorm so we can continue to improve our products and services. There are a lot of you who do that on a regular basis, and we appreciate your participation. If you are new to IdeaStorm, we invite you to spend a few minutes there to share your thoughts on the next big idea.

Over the last year, Dell has worked to expand its global service programs focused on our corporate business customers.  Since I get a lot of questions about these services, I thought it might be helpful to outline them:

• Pro Support  We introduced ProSupport earlier this year, ProSupport aims to customize service options for small and medium, public and large business clients by offering different levels of warranty support.  The Pro Support motto is: “Beyond One-Size Fits-All", and with its Fast-Track Dispatch model, certified Dell IT technicians can get their parts quickly from one of Dell's hundreds of 4-hour warranty part dispatch centers.

•  Partner Direct is a program focused on our global reseller partners, also provides service support for in warranty clients, as well as IT consulting and Dell product sales via the Channel partners. It’s been live in the United States for just over six months, and less than that in other countries. PartnerDirect is now available in each of Dell’s main regions—the Americas, EMEA and APJ. To date, more than 16,000 partners have registered via PartnerDirect globally.

In addition to these offerings, we continue to offer existing programs like Warranty Parts Direct (WPD) is a his service meant for Dell customers who use a  help desk for service dispatch, provide self maintenance or for customers who want to appoint a service provider to maintain their Dell branded hardware.

Programs for established companies are one thing, but, what about partnering with smaller IT vendors, who may or may not have an existing relationship with Dell?  What about extending Dell service offerings to out-of-warranty systems?  

Those are two of the reasons we rolled out the Service Partner Program (SPP Long before we finalized that program, we asked for feedback from ISPs. Two of the needs we heard most often were 1) getting a part fast – and, 2) getting a part at a reasonable price.

That feedback helped shape the Service Partner Program.  Now, technicians can order parts up until 7 p.m. CST with the option for Next-Business-Day delivery upon request.  We also did our homework to make sure our pricing was competitive with other options you have from our competitors. SPP aims to engage the independent service providers and help them improve their own business efficiencies by proving that we stand by our certified parts and warranties and stand by the technicians who are in the field working on our products every day.  

How else can we improve SPP, or any of the service programs that I mention in this post?