Dell Dumps XPS To Focus On Alienware

According to the Wall Street Journal Dell is taking a surprising leap and dropping several of its most popular XPS models to focus on its recently acquired Alienware line.

Dell purchased Alienware back in 2006, since that time the company has seen sales drop due in large part to competition with high end Dell XPS systems. Dell had maintained a mostly hands off approach to Alienware allowing both companies to compete in the gaming market simultaneously.

Dell is also going to end the tie-in with World of Warcraft and its XPS machines. Arthur Lewis, who joined Dell with the Alienware purchase, as the head of its gaming PC division, says that Alienware is going to be updating its boxes, which have had the same look for a long time, by using new materials for the exterior of the systems.





Alienware has also said that it will be bringing a low-cost (by gaming PC standards) gaming system to market in the next few weeks powered by AMD/ATI.
The new Alienware system will be priced at $1,699 according to CNET. The machine will use a quad-core Phenom X4 9550 processor running at 2.2GHz. Graphics for the machine will be via ATI’s dual GPU HD 3870 X2 video card. The system is reported to use an Asus mainboard with the AMD 790FX chipset.

Price is one of the places Alienware is criticized the most. Anyone with even a limited amount of computer building experience can build a system far cheaper than they can buy from Alienware. However according to Marc Diana, Alienware product marketing manager for desktops, customers are still flocking to them. “We're seeing huge demand from customers." Diana says.