According to Direct2Dell (thanks Robert Richelson), Dell will be offering free motherboard upgrades to its XPS 700 customers when it begins to offer its 'next generation XPS gaming motherboard' later this year. Even the service and installation will be provided free of charge via a Dell-authorized onsite technician. In addition to this, the customer will also have the option to upgrade to a quad-core processor for a 25% discount. The reason?

In late May last year, we launched the XPS 700. Many customers purchased it, anticipating strong performance along with an upgrade path to future technology.

At Dell, our number one goal is to delight our customers with our products and services. As anyone who reads Direct2Dell knows, we did not do that for some of our XPS 700 customers. On behalf of Dell, I want to apologize for that. We have taken steps to improve your experience.

So what have we learned from this? First, where the chipset is concerned, XPS 7xx-class customers want more information on what features we do and do not support in our implementation. Take a look at the chipset section of the XPS 710 Tech Specs page. Second, if we do experience significant delays, it's important for us to give customers more detailed insight as to the causes where we can. So, what's next? We want to show XPS 700 customers our appreciation for sticking with us throughout this process—we appreciate your business.

Also included in this announcement is the release of a new BIOS update in the meantime that allows for NVIDIA SLI-Ready EPP Memory, BIOS overclocking for Intel Extreme processors, RAID 5, and RAID 1+0.