WE'VE BEEN HEARING all about Dell's upcoming XPS 1730 notebook for some time now. The successor to the 1710, which pretty much announced Dell's arrival in the gaming space, it's been making waves for sporting a spec list the length of a mouse cord.

Well, two days after the machine accidentally leaked onto Dell.com, the folks from Round Rock have finally gotten around to announcing the official specs and giving members of the esteemed web press (or blokes in bedrooms on blogs, depending on your perspective) a first look at the behemoth.

There are lots of pics here.

The machine has a 17" screen, and is incredibly chunky. There's no official weight listed, but the answer is 'bloody heavy'. The base is practically two inches thick, to accommodate the amount of hardware packed in. To be fair, you do get a Core 2 Extreme 7900, two Geforce 8700s in SLI, 4GB of RAM, an Ageia PhysX card, Blu-ray drive and more hard disk space than you can shake a stick at.

With all that hardware, you can expect a battery life of, ooh, about 25 minutes, so don't expect to do much gaming on the go. But for LAN party fans, this could be the new must-have machine. µ