Product Reviews

In recent months, the Dell PCs that have appeared in the pages of PC Pro have boasted good quality and value for money, balanced with the latest in technology. This month Dell, along with Gateway (reviewed p153), has submitted one of the first AGP-(accelerated graphics port) equipped PCs and has still managed to keep the price of the machine below £2,000.

All of the bits and bobs come housed within a standard Dell tower case. Beneath the NEC 24-speed CD-ROM drive there's one free front-opening 5.25in drive bay yet to be filled and a further one 3.5in bay above the floppy and Iomega Zip drives. Both the mouse and keyboard are acceptable units, with the former being a standard OEM Microsoft mouse, while the latter is much improved over previous Dell keyboards I've seen. It has a far more robust and firm feeling action than before.

Visual output is dealt with by a 17in rebadged Nokia monitor, which simply oozes quality. I'd much rather have one of these than the 19in unit supplied by Gateway, despite having to take a cut in screen real estate. In conjunction with the STB AGP Velocity 3D graphics card, you can squeeze out a maximum of 1,600 x 1,200 in 16-bit colour at 65Hz, although 60Hz is recommended. Even at this ludicrously high resolution using small fonts, text was crisp and readable all over the display, even in the corners. If you don't want to strain your eyes that much, then a more reasonable 1,280 x 1,024 or 1,152 x 864 can be achieved at an absolutely rock steady 85Hz.

The on-screen menus make access to a

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complete geometrical and colour adjustment line-up easy. In fact the only omission of note was the lack of horizontal and vertical convergence controls, although if this unit is anything to go by, you won't need it.

After a struggle, I managed to remove the side of the case. The interior subsequently revealed was reasonably spacious and uncluttered, with adequate upgrade space, although the cabling was a little messy and slightly obscured the memory slots. There are three DIMM slots, two of which host 32Mb SDRAM modules, leaving one free for expansion.

Sound is taken care of by the onboard Yamaha wavetable and is supplemented by an AWE64 upgrade card, which takes up one of the two ISA slots. Apart from this, all of the Dell's expansion slots are left free. This means there's a total of four usable slots left: four PCI, or three PCI and one ISA.

Finally, to top it all off, Dell supplies an Altec Lansing ACS290 three-piece speaker set. These speakers produce a fulfillingly balanced sound that's just about the best you'll get from OEM speakers. The solid bass and crisp treble produced is light years ahead of most of the weak and weedy efforts we normally see supplied with PCs.

As you'd hope to expect, the combination of the Pentium II/300 processor and the latest in graphics setups combine to produce some pretty impressive results. The score of 1.92 is very fast for a Windows 95-based machine and only fractionally slower than the Gateway PII/300-based machine (reviewed p153). Most impressive is the graphics score, which at 2.20 is better than anything else, except the Gateway PII/300 which is reviewed later.

Like the Gateway, the Dell Dimension XPS D300 is extremely reasonably priced for something so quick. For a price of £1,849 æexc VAT, you get all of the above plus the Small Business Edition of Office 97, which æis the sort of good value for money we've come to expect from Dell. This system represents even better value for your money than the Gateway, and despite the fact that it lagged fractionally behind it in terms of performance, is a worthy winner of our Recommended award.