We hate when this happens. TG Daily, the news arm of Tom's Hardware, posted a story on Friday about how customers who ordered Dell's hot-rod XPS 700 desktop are being given estimated ship dates of as late as February 2007 if they've opted for a Core 2 Duo chip. The article speculates that this is due to Dell going with Nvidia's new Nforce 590 chipset. The TG folks checked in with PC companies, Alienware and Falcon Northwest among them. Every other vendor promises delivery of a Core 2 Duo system within 30 days or so, and none of them currently offer the Nforce 590 chipset.

Obviously, this delay is frustrating for would-be XPS 700 owners. It's also frustrating for us because it brings the validity of our XPS 700 review into question. If what we covered is not the shipping version, there's no point in having a review of it. We don't like it when vendors mess with our validity.

Right now Dell's XPS 700 configurator gives a preliminary ship date of October 17, 2006, with a build time of 50 days. TG Daily said in its article that it was waiting for a response from Dell. We--and we imagine a number of angry customers--are too.

• See product information for Dell XPS 700 (Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800)
• Read also: Gaming, desktops
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