Product Reviews

Although it's still early days yet, it's already becoming apparent that Intel has decided to price Pentium II in such a way as to make it relatively affordable from the outset. This may well be an attempt to suppress the challenge presented by AMD's excellent K6, but whatever the reasons, it's you the buyer who stands to benefit.

Priced almost identically to Gateway's G6-266XL (see review opposite), the Dimension's extra £50 before VAT can probably be accounted for by the inclusion of Windows NT Workstation 4 as its OS. This is a wise choice, and with the extra backup in the shape of a 4Mb Matrox Millennium inside, the Dell machine pipped the Gateway to the post in performance.

In fact, it's tempting to speculate that Dell and Gateway are shaping the PC of late 1997 - Pentium II, 64Mb of RAM, a big 5Gb plus hard disk, respectable graphics and multimedia, plus a 17in monitor and decent speakers. Of course, this all comes in at a price tag of around £2,000. Dell has certainly fulfilled these hypothetical criteria for a 'new' PC - with the exception of price, which isn't far off. Despite the powerhouse silicon throbbing away at its core, the Dimension is an unassuming, though not unpleasant-looking, machine housed in a smallish midi-tower case with a tidy fascia.

Dell still ships a standard Microsoft mouse, accompanied by a reasonably solid keyboard. The boat has been pushed rather further out where the monitor is concerned, and you get a 17in Trinitron-based unit with extensive digital controls and a nicely executed on-screen setup menu.

ADVERTISEMENT

There are bags of geometry controls, and very detailed and flexible colour balance manipulation is possible thanks to the combination of a sliding colour temperature scale with individual gun intensity adjustments. The tube will support a solid-looking 85Hz vertical refresh at 1,024 x 768 resolution and the image proved to be well above average, although I've seen slightly crisper Trinitrons.

Dell has used a Matrox Millennium graphics card fitted with 4Mb of video memory, which is a good choice for a high-end machine as it runs a lot faster in Windows, especially in 24-bit mode at 1,024 « 768. It also highlights the difference in targeting between the Dimension and the Gateway G6. The latter was supplied with a card based on the S3 ViRGE 3D accelerator, which is a much more games-orientated choice than Dell's Millennium.

You're also treated to a pretty good set of speakers in the form of an Altec Lansing three-piece comprising a big, beefy woofer and a pair of punchy satellites, which are driven by a Yamaha OPL3/OPL4 sound chip and wavetable integrated into the motherboard.

Both Dell and Gateway have opted for the same Intel Portland motherboard, which is essentially a modified ATX-type Pentium Pro based on Intel's 440FX chipset. There's rather more room inside the Dell because it only has the Millennium installed, leaving three PCI and three ISA slots free along with a fair bit of fresh air.

The drive bays contain a 12-speed Mitsumi CD-ROM, a 100Mb Iomega Zip drive, the floppy unit and a cavernously large 6.4Gb IBM Deskstar EIDE hard disk. If you should ever need to, there's room to add another hard disk in an internal 3.5in mount, and there's one 3.5in and one 5.25in front-opening bay going spare as well.

As previously mentioned, the Dell's performance was slightly faster than that of the Gateway, mostly down to the choice of the Millennium card, and also NT 4, which runs Microsoft's own Office applications considerably faster than Windows 95. With this in mind, if you're looking for a reasonably priced, high-spec Pentium II machine for a business workstation, you should take a look at the Dell.