I'm sure many of you out there already saw the Engadget story last week. Today, we're officially taking orders for the 720 H2C here in the United States. Customers in Europe will be able to order soon. I know that a lot of you were waiting for details of our next-generation motherboard, and this is it. The 720 H2C utilizes the same motherboard we will ship in the XPS 720. In other words, it's the one that XPS 700 users can soon upgrade to for free, and the one XPS 710 customers can purchase.
The XPS 720 board is a Dell implementation of NVIDIA's 680i chipset. If you're familiar with the 680i chipset, you already know it brings several performance enhancements, like support for processors like Intel's QX6700 and QX6800 processors that support a 1066MHz front side bus, Corsair Dominator 800MHz Enhanced Performance Profile (EPP) memory overclocked to 1066MHz.
I've seen some of you asking if the memory runs at 1066MHz native speed. No, it does not. Corsair also makes it clear in this PDF that the Dominator EPP memory runs at 800MHz native and can be overclocked to 1066MHz.In the BIOS, customers who purchase Corsair memory with their system will have two options for the memory settings. Standard runs at the native clock speed of 800MHz, while SLI/EPP will run it at the overclocked 1066MHz speed.
The XPS 720 board provides more overclocking flexibility compared to our previous gaming systems. XPS 720 customers will have the ability to overclock the CPU, the memory, and the graphics processor. The board also allows CPU and memory overclocking in the BIOS and via NVIDIA's nTune software. Through nTune, users can modify systems clocks, voltages, memory timings, fans and more. One 680i feature that the XPS 720 board does not support is NVIDIA's dual Gigabit ethernet controllers. That also means that it doesn't support NVIDIA's DualNet or FirstPacket technology capability.
Note: You can click on the attached nTune screenshot below to open a larger version of the image.
The XPS 720 H2C ships with the following components overclocked from the factory:
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2.66GHz QX6700 factory overclocked to 3.46GHz
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2.93GHz QX6800 factory overclocked to 3.73GHz
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Corsair 800MHz EPP memory factory overclocked to 1066MHz
The H2C part is our liquid-cooled solution that we've been shipping in the XPS 710 H2C. In case you missed it, this blog entry features a video overview of how the cooling technology works from one of the lead engineers on the product, Chuck Hood.
The 720 H2C also ships with a 2X Blu-ray optical drive. Those of you that have seen our XPS M1710 gaming notebook might already know about our LightFX toolkit. XPS 720 customers will now have more flexibility with 16 LED colors. Game developers can use LightFX to incoroporate LEDs into gameplay to simulate things like fire, damage, and life drain.
In this video, David McClintock, the platform design engineer, talks about how the XPS 720 H2C and the 720 board were designed for overclocking. He discusses how EPP memory works, and more.
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