XPS M1730.jpg: Voodoo PC co-founder Rahul Sood and the Blackbird 002 desktop computer. (Ian Harvey)

It's a dichotomy: With desktop PCs crashing below the $300 mark, why would Hewlett- Packard make a big deal about launching a computer selling for $2,500? And why would Dell Computers look to up the ante by offering machines for even more money?

Furthermore, why would other PC makers such as Gateway and Toshiba also be jumping into the upper end of the market?

Because it's all about fun and games — as in video games and hard-core gamers. And for manufacturers, it's a competition where market share and image are at stake.

"Gamers drive the market," says Susan Kittleson, director of games marketing for Dell Inc. "They make us push the envelope."

Indeed, high-end video gaming is much like auto racing, where teams compete to squeeze the last drop of performance from a combination of engine, drive train, chassis, braking system, suspension and driver. Each technical advance or innovation by one auto racing team is countered by the competition, and the same thing happens in the market for high-end desktops.

"What the manufacturers are trying to do is get those early adopters and enthusiasts," says technology analyst Eddie Chan with market research firm IDC Canada. "And they want — Dell through Alienware and HP through VoodooPC — to transfer that image appeal to their other lines."

Early adopters

In the personal computing world, high-end game machines may represent only a tiny segment of the overall desktop market, but they also represent a live research-and-development lab. This allows manufacturers to ultimately transfer learning, test new concepts, and give themselves a step up on the competition as they prepare to move new designs into the mass market space.

Not to mention the prestige factor. As they say in motorsports: Win on Sunday, sell on Monday.

"It's true that gamers have driven design," agrees Jason MacIsaac, a game developer, video game historian and steering committee member of the Toronto chapter of the International Game Developers Association.

"At one time, 3D video cards were called graphic accelerators, now they're just part of the system," he says, indicating how cutting-edge technology developed for people like gamers eventually goes mainstream. "And now we're talking about things like physics cards which process the way 3D objects appear to collide on screen. They're out there but they're not common because they are very expensive. There's also some talk of things like artificial intelligence cards in the future."

The Canadian connection

High-end desktop PCs are a pretty rarified niche, but one that has the red maple leaf indelibility tattooed on it thanks to VoodooPC. The niche game PC builder out of Calgary was founded by brothers Rahul and Ravi Sood, who cashed in big time last fall when HP bought their company.

Since then, the brothers have been working to infuse "our DNA into HP," and the result is the Blackbird 002, launched in September. The sleek, finned, all-aluminum black chassis has easy access doors, five hot-swappable hard drive bays with dual graphics cards, little LED lights that illuminate the back ports to make connecting cables easier in the dark, and liquid cooling (with twin air fans and Ferrari-like air channeling to dissipate heat). And it's going to cost you. Blackbird 002 starts at $2,500 for the basic box and quickly rises to about $7,000, depending on how many hard drives, how much RAM and how many goodies you want built in.

The Blackbird 002 runs more quietly than the average desktop, but gobbles an awful lot of electricity. It's driven by a 1.1 kilowatt power supply, which is nearly three times the average desktop computer standard and pretty much guaranteed to blow breakers on overloaded house circuits.

Why so much power? Dual graphics cards with cooling fans and liquid-cooling plumbing require energy to move the heat out. Fast components tend to generate a lot of heat, but heat is also the enemy of performance — cooler motherboards, CPUs and graphics chips mean more efficiency when processing data.

"It's all about moving pixels [the tiny dots that make up an image on a screen] through," says Lane McCullough, Dell's senior product line manager, consumer desktops. "When the monitors get up to about 24 inches, that's a lot of pixels to move and that's where you need [high-performance hardware such as] dual graphics cards."

Dell also offers a couple of high-end machines, specifically in the XPS line with its liquid-cooled XPS720H2C, which nudges the $7,000 mark. Last year, Dell acquired a gamer PC builder, Alienware, whose out-of-this-world desktop and laptop designs are also aimed at the high end of the computer market. The manufacturer is working to incorporate some of its ideas into the main Dell lineup.

"Things like terabyte drives [a terabyte is one thousand Gigabytes] you see in game machines will be standard in PCs," says Dell's Kittleson. "When people see what you can do when you overclock a machine [tweak the processor to run beyond factory specifications], it's amazing. But this is the gift gaming gives to every one who uses a PC — ultimately faster and better performance and innovation."

Going mobile

XPS M1730.jpg: Dell's XPS M1730 notebook. (Dell)

She adds that Dell is also looking at bringing these types of features to laptops.

"The future, we think, is very much in mobile, so we're going to be bring that high performance experience to the laptop," says Kittleson, noting the trickle down from Alienware is about to have a huge impact on Dell.

In late September, for example, Dell launched the XPS M1730 notebook (also known as "the beast") aimed at gamers. The 4.5 kilogram (10 pound) machine is more of a "luggable" than a laptop, but packs heavy duty processing power, lots of memory, a 17-inch main display screen, and a separate small Logitech LCD screen designed to keep track of game essentials like how many bullets and other goodies the players has left in a game. It starts at $3,200 but adds-ons will quickly push the price higher.

IDC's Chan notes that desktop sales are expected to increase only 3.6 per cent in 2007 over 2006, and are expected to slow again to 2.3 per cent in 2008 over this year's figures, representing worldwide sales of about 144 million units this year and 148 million next year. Mobile computer sales, on the other hand, says Chan, will be up more than 28 per cent this year over 2006 and in 2008 will top this year's sales by 23.6 per cent at about 148 million units worldwide.

And performance bragging rights will play a role in the battle for business in that mobile future.

"We see mobiles outselling desktops by 2009," he says, which is one of the reasons manufacturers want to put a little pizzazz in the segment in the form of highly noticeable notebooks.

The need for speed

So, what do you get for when you splash out $7,000-plus for a computer? Power to burn. And who's willing to lay down that kind of cash?

One of the primary groups is PC game players seeking the optimum experience.

And it's an eager segment, because staying in the moment is everything when you're a hard-core gamer. The slightest lag — because the broadband connection isn't fast enough or because the processor isn't able to crunch the data quickly enough — means the difference between shame and fame in the gaming culture, where competitions are won and lost based on sheer reflexes and reaction time. Money often isn't an issue. It's all about performance, and premium components quickly drive up the price of a machine.

But as an early adopter and do-it-yourself PC builder himself, IDC's Chan says he's impressed by designs such as the Blackbird's chassis that widen the appeal of cutting-edge machines beyond gamers. "They have been clever in that the chassis is standard and DIYers can add on stuff, so they stand a good chance of getting both ends of the market," he says.

And like the "tuner" culture, where hobbyists lavish money on the engine and aesthetics of street cars, consumers of these high-end machines are also investing in image.

"Guys will custom paint their machine because they want it to look good," said Toronto game developer MacIsaac, whose current hook is BioShock, a role-playing shooter game. "They'll take it to [video game] parties and people will ooh and ahh. Then people will ask them to tell them what's in it. It's a status thing. If they can't afford the high-end machines, they know all about their dream machine from the magazines."

"It is an odd market, akin to the hotrodder market on the automobile side," agrees Roger L. Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates Inc., a U.S.-based analyst. Endpoint projects the global high-end PC market to grow 39 per cent to 2.7 million units worldwide – a much faster rate of increase than desktops generally.

"There are really two demographics that go for gaming systems: young men still living at home with some disposable income and middle-aged men whose kids have moved on to other interests," Kay adds. "The former don't have many expenses and the latter have excess revenues. Both have the time and disposable income to pursue their interests."

Ironically, though, Voodoo's Sood says only about a quarter of his clients are out-and-out gamers, something Dell's McCullough echoed: "I can't say 100 per cent of our customers are gamers, and there is something of a trophy PC aspect to it."

High-end machines are also somewhat of a celebrity toy, says Phil McKinney, HP's chief technology officer and Sood's corporate boss. McKinney admits to using the Blackbird as his new everyday computer at home. "I do my weekly podcast on it because it's so quiet — there's no fan noise — and I use if for a lot of digital photography which is my [hobby]."

Aside from better margins at retail, high-end computers also have luxury market cachet, he admits.

"Lots of people buy our product because it's like the Ferrari of PCs, they can afford the best and they buy the best," Sood says. "Some use it for music, other[s] [for] video and others like the power."

And, of course, there are buyers who actually need the power for serious work that a regular PC just can't handle — commercial grade flight simulators, medical imaging capabilities and high-powered digital graphics capability for things such as computer-assisted design (CAD), he adds.

So, the short answer to what do you get for the money when you buy a high end machine: the computer of the future, and the prestige and bragging rights that come with owning the F1 version of a PC — and you don't even need to have a driver's licence.

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