Hi,

 If you want avoid wasting 5 minutes of your life just scroll down to Summary. Otherwise, enjoy!

 I received my X51 four days ago. Worked fine until today. Got back from work (just want to let Dell know that I do have better things in life other than waiting in for them to fix my computer). Switch it on (actually, I woke it up from sleep mode). Started play the game (I will refer to the game I am play as "The Game" as I don't want anyone to know that I am play a game more than 4 years old). 

After play "The Game" for less than 5 mins, I won't bore you with the facts of started the load process, then the wife (sorry, princess) requested I made tea; the load screen was up for several minutes while I made the tea, had a quick chat about a picture I should not have looked at via FB. Then sat down for what I was hopping to be a good waste of 2 to 4 hours driving arounds a city doing mundane jobs. But the X51 had a better idea.

I had just broken into a car and was hot-wiring it, actually I pressed "F" followed by "W" (I won't going into the thought process I was having of hot-wiring a modern car, and how stupid this is, nobody at RockStar heard of immobilisers?). This seem to take ages (as you can tell about how much thinking I was doing), then the car started moving and the screen rotated clockwise 90 degrees. Now I have only been playing this game for 3 days and was not familiar with this camera orientation. It didn't take me too long to realised that this was not a new camera angle but something different. This was mainly prompted because the game screen went blackish gray (correct spelling of Gray) and shaky. I thought to myself that's funny (funny peculiar, not funny haha, I am very far from funny hahaha at the moment). 

As the screen rotated I'am afraid I don't remember much of this as i was panicing a bit and making funny noises (normally I make the Family Guy "Bird is the Word"). Been having great fun entertaining the wife (opps princess) and several colleagues at work with this one (actually, I believe they think I am crazy or it's the British sense of humor).

Back to the plot, after what seem like 4 mins (I think it was about 36 seconds). I managed to get to windows login screen. Tried flipping between the login screen and the game to see if a recovery was possible. It was not. Then did a quick search on the "how change orientation on X51" just incase I had managed to do this inside a the game (separate machine). Decided that powering it down was going to be the best solution.

Managed to get to the login screen and move the mouse over the windows turn off-ee button. No mean feat I can tell you. The mouse as all over the place, I normally only have mouse control like that after I've had several mass (actually quite a lot more than a several to loose mouse control). 

Now falling back on the old professional practice of turning off/on. This didn't seem to yeild the expected out come. I got fan noise (or someone at dell has been cruel and place a hamster with asthma in the computer), then single beep. Then the computer powered down, the computer did still look like a Disco! Now being an expert in these sort of things. I tried the process again, and again, and again (I think you get my drift). I also removed all the cables from the back of the computer. It still didn't work. Before I hear you cry "you left the power cable out" I have you know I only did this once! as I was curious if this was going to work better without the power cable. Actually, it did, there is a lot less disappointment when a computer fails to start with no power cable. I then thought, maybe it's the head phone cable at the front of the computer that was causing the problem. Funny enough it was not. 

At this point I thought I would contact customer support. I then found out another dell "fact". The sales lines are open until 20:00 in Germany, but the technical support is open until 18:00. I have always wondered why the sales lines are open latter, rarely at 19:50 do I feel the need to buy a computer. But funnily at 19:50 I did feel the need to contract technical support. I hate to say it but the wife was right about the technical support, bugger princess :-)

Summary

i7-3770, with Monitor & blue-ray player it cost 1500 euros (not really relevant except to ME)

Start up from sleep

While running 3D game (short duration ~3mins) the screen orination change 90 degrees clockwise

Shutdown via windows

On start up fans turned on, single short beep noise, fans power down. Lights on the front and sides on. Blue light from back is on 

Tired unplugging from PSU, PSU from plug. Removed all cables from PC. Reattached PSU, tried starting again. Same as above

Tried powering up over 5 mins, 20 mins, 3 hours etc. Same as above

---

Now, I am not holding out much hope of getting the computer fixed as I am getting old and reading this fine Forum and my own experience of buying a computer. it seem that repairs take considerably longer than a day. So, I am afraid that I will being asking for a refund with shipping from my address to where ever dell wants to send it (NMP). I only post here in the hope that it will help Dell solve their problem with the hardware. Also, I need 2 hours to kill, I was expecting to be playing GTA4 :-)