Dells unwraps XPS upgrade kit

Today, us readers are lucky enough to glimpse the silicon that will be appearing in upgrade kits.

Owners of an XPS 700 are entitled to the hardware kit, along with in-home installation if they want it, at no cost - as well as 25% off an optional QX6700 purchase. Owners of the 710 are entitled to purchase a hardware kit at a reduced price if they want one.

The hardware kit gets you the XPS 720 motherboard, which is based on the 680i chipset (although is a proprietary Dell implementation). This will replace the aborted nForce 5 chipset in the original 700 and 710. Buyers will also get new front panel I/O connections.

The opportunity to move from nForce 5 to 680i is going to be a no-brainer for Dell customers. Of course, the situation wouldn't have arisen if Dell wasn't so fussy about re-speccing all of Nvidia's chipsets and simply went with standard configs. But then, what's the point of being one of the biggest computer shippers in the world if you can't throw soe weight around once in a while?

Still no date on when exactly XPS owners will get the kit, but Dell's bloggers seem to be anticipating some time soon. µ