Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) We'll take our first question from Richard Gardner - Citigroup.
Richard Gardner - Citigroup
Mike, I was hoping you could provide a little more detail on the out-performance in the quarter on the cost side? It sounded like costs were obviously a little bit below the guidance that you provided for the quarter. Can you talk about how much of that was related to the expenses that you expected to incur in the current quarter that you said will now be incurred in the second quarter? Thank you.
Michael Lehman
So expenses were really right in line with what we had expected, within the range that we had provided, perhaps towards the lower end. The only thing that I was alluding to with regard to engineering expenses is that some of those are difficult to predict in terms of when prototypes actually are spent and then the expense of those are incurred, so many times those slip from one quarter to another. They are not entirely predictable. But that's not a large amount of money. It's just an example of the type of thing that can move around from one quarter to the next.
Bret Schaefer
Next question, please.
Operator
We'll take our next question from Keith Bachman - Banc of America.
Keith Bachman - Banc of America
Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question. My question is on the gross margin, you just had roughly 43.5% gross margin. You're going to get positive volume variance. Why wouldn't your gross margin be higher in your fiscal Q2 than it would be in Q1, please?
Michael Lehman
I think I'm just more comfortable continuing to give an overall range that gives us some latitude. We, as always, want to be opportunistic and aggressive where we can on pricing and our view is that we want to build our business model with that range of gross margin so that we can achieve our goal. So I'm just making sure that we have enough room in there for opportunities in the marketplace.
Keith Bachman - Banc of America
But, Mike, if I could just follow-up. Is there anything more specifically on mix or on product cost variances that we should be concerned about, or is it just more you're trying to give us a range and be conservative as it relates to the range?
Jonathan Schwartz
A couple things. One, we're certainly continuing to build out, as an example, some relatively low margin x64 systems products into a far higher margin profile of more innovation with products like the 4600 and the 4500. So we believe that we're going to continue investing in the volume products that allow us to attract new customers but we're also going to be building out a higher value and higher margin profile going forward.
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