Product Reviews

Don't you just love corporate sponsorship and product placement? If you've seen John Travolta's recent cyber-action flick Swordfish you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. Not only is every single PC made by Dell, but the Dell logo takes up the whole screen every time a notebook is opened. You have to admit that it's an eye-catcher, though, and the same logo can be seen on both sides of the new Dimension 8200, adding a proud name to an already stylish system.

The Dimension retains the black colour scheme, but the previous silver plastic has been replaced by a grey and purple mix with echoes of Sony written all over it. Combine this with the black and you have a kind of gothic VAIO desktop, and very good it looks too.

Looks aren't everything though; for £1,799 you want something fast, and luckily the Dell offers lightning-quick performance. The 2GHz Pentium 4 made a disappointing debut with the Evesham Evolution 2000 (see Reviews, issue 84, p125), but this time it helped the Dell clock up an overall score of 4.67 in our 2D benchmarks - right up there with 1.4GHz Athlon machines.

This is the fastest Pentium 4 PC we've seen at PC Pro by a substantial margin, and with a GeForce3 you can expect similarly stunning 3D performance. Running at 1,024 x 768 in 32-bit colour, the Dimension 8200 turned round a 3DMark2001 score of 5,857 - not quite as quick as the 5,986 from the Evesham, but still fast enough nonetheless, and the 3DMark2000 score of 8,357 was similarly striking.

The main advantage of the GeForce3 is uncompromising high-resolution 3D performance, and Dell has wisely accompanied it with its 19in P991 Trinitron monitor. This has all the hallmarks of a Sony display, with an identical OSD that offers all the essential functionality. The image quality is superb, with bright colours, crystal-clear focus and spot-on geometry. It goes up to a resolution of 1,600 x 1,200 at 85Hz at which it's still usable, albeit

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with a squint. Optimally it runs at 1,152 x 864, again at 85Hz, providing a sharp picture with plenty of screen space. All that's missing is a USB hub, but this won't matter with four ports on the system unit.

Two of these are underneath the front-mounted flap, along with a headphone socket for easy access. The latter is linked up directly to the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card (distributed as the VideoLogic SonicFury in the UK), which in turn is hooked up to a set of attractive Harmon Kardon HK695 speakers. This is the one pitfall of the Dimension 8200, as although the speakers have a great dynamic sound they're not nearly powerful enough. That said, they're still enough for the average desktop, but with a six-output 5.1-compatible sound card, wouldn't you rather have a set of VideoLogic DigiTheatre speakers?

The real treat with the Dell, however, is the case itself. The first thing you notice is that it's incredibly quiet, and that's not because it's short of fans. On the contrary, the processor fan is larger than the usual case fan, but Dell has put a lot of work into sound proofing the case so that the noise isn't obtrusive. The result is a fast PC that sounds like the good old quiet PCs of yesteryear.

Getting inside has also been made easy; just push the top button and swing the case out towards you, giving instant access without a screwdriver. Two PCI slots are free and these are also instantly accessible by removing the retainer clip and slotting the card in. There are also two spare RIMM sockets and one free internal and external 3.5in drive bays, again with appropriate clips to fit extra drives without screws.

However, with a 7,200rpm 100Gb Western Digital hard disk already in place, it's unlikely you'll need any more drives in the machine's lifetime. With this in mind, it might have been wiser for Dell to provide a spare 5.25in bay for a DVD-RW drive in the future.

Otherwise, the Dell Dimension 8200 is a well-designed machine with everything you need. The performance is amazing in every respect and you get all the features you need, including Windows 2000 Professional and Microsoft Office XP Small Business Edition. However, while the £1,799 asking price includes a one-year collect-and-return warranty, it's still uncompetitive when compared to a machine like the Evesham Athlon 1400 DVI (see p150), which offers similar performance, a superb TFT monitor and full speaker set for £1,199. If you can afford it though, the Dell is easily the best Pentium 4 machine you can buy.