Dell Targets Consumer Market With Powerful Gaming PC

Although consumer sales represent only a small portion of Dell's total revenue, chairman and founder Michael Dell believes high growth in the market will continue and used the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Thursday to introduce several new consumer-targeted products, including a gaming PC that he said is four times more powerful than anything previously offered by the company.

Dell said 85% of the company's revenue currently comes from business, government, and educational accounts, and 15% from consumer sales. Consumer sales, however, have increased from 1.2 million units in 2000 to 6.8 million units in 2005.

"We see the PC increasingly at the center of the digital lifestyle, and have a pretty good understanding of that market since Dell sells one of every three PCs sold in the United States," Dell said in his keynote address at the show. "A lot of people have tried to downplay the importance of the PC, but we shipped 10 million PCs in the fourth quarter, the first time any company has accomplished that. The PC still remains supreme."

Dell provided details of several upcoming products, including the SPX 600 Renegade gaming PC. The "limited edition" system has a red and yellow flame design on the cabinet, and boasts the most powerful processors ever used in a Dell PC, he said.

The Renegade will use a 4.26 GHz dual-core Extreme Edition Pentium processor and, for the first time, Dell will use four NVIDIA NForce graphics processors in a PC. Previous generation Dell gaming PCs have used only two graphics processors. The resulting system will have 5.2 teraflops of total computing power, which would rank 70th in the current top 500 supercomputing list.

Dell did not provide pricing or availability details at the conference, and none are currently available on the Dell Web site.

Also introduced was a 30-inch widescreen monitor providing 1.4 million pixel resolution, or about twice the resolution of a typical high-definition television, Dell said. The company will continue to expand it reach into LCD and flat panel televisions "as a natural extension of our business," he said.

Another offering that has yet to be fully productized is a laptop computer with 20-inch display and detachable keyboard. The display has eight speakers with sub-woofers, "allowing you to take your theater with you," Dell said. The system is finished with a "leather-like" surface and folds in briefcase style for carrying.