Product Reviews

Dell Dimension XPS Pro 180n  [PC Pro]
COMPANY:	PRICE: £1,575  (£1,851 inc VAT)
RATING:	ISSUE: 28  DATE: Dec 96

When I first set eyes on the price tag of this PC, I was convinced there must be some mistake - perhaps Dell had forgotten the monitor? But no, the net price is indeed £1,575, and if you opt for the basic model with 16Mb of RAM and a smaller hard disk, it plummets to £1,299.

Before you rush out on a buying spree, it's worth considering whether or not there really is a good deal in the offing. And on closer scrutiny, against the current low price of Pentium/200s, the Pentium Pro/180 does appear to be a less attractive alternative.

The Dimension is housed in the standard Dell medium footprint desktop case, embellished here with an embossed blue logo and distinctive name bar set into the top of the fascia. In cosmetic terms, the machine succeeds, its restrained and business-like styling exceeding the plain dull, while a reasonably quiet fan helps to foster this impression of quiet efficiency.

As usual, Dell supplies a two-button Logitech mouse which, like the keyboard and monitor, bears its own badge. The keyboard is fairly typical - narrow border, all-plastic build, Windows 95 keys and an anonymous, slightly hollow action.

The 15in FST monitor however, is more impressive with a reasonably large 13.75in image diagonal and commendably high 85Hz vertical refresh support at 800 « 600 resolution. This resulted in a remarkably solid, steady picture which, even in the periphery of my vision, was flicker-free.

A basic set of push-button digital controls include barrel/pincushion and trapezoidal edge correction, and these can be tweaked to produce an acceptably squared-up picture; the overall focus was very good

The case is slightly unusual in that just the top section comes off, rather than the whole hood, revealing a delightfully spacious and uncluttered interior with four unobstructed ISA slots and three PCI slots up for grabs. This is a by-product of the plain configuration - no sound card, no modem - and also because the sensible design of Pentium Pro motherboards pushes the whopping great processor and its equally obese heatsink off to one end, out of the way.

The drive cradle is arranged so as to allow room for one internal 3.5in secondary hard disk, a front-opening 3.5in drive and a front-opening 5.25in drive below the 12-speed Mitsumi CD-ROM drive which is mounted at the top of the stack. You could, if you wanted, add a further 3.5in hard disk using a vertical slot next to the floppy drive.

Thanks to the lack of clutter inside the box, the memory SIMMs are fully accessible. The 32Mb of EDO RAM fitted has been sensibly confined to one bank, leaving the other free for a further upgrade.

You'd expect to see a Matrox Millennium or similar in a machine such as this, but Dell has opted for a Number 9 FX Reality 332 card which combines S3's 3D-accelerated ViRGE chip with 2Mb of EDO memory on a neat quarter-length board. Sadly, as the Labs tests show (see Labs, p116), this juicy-sounding technology doesn't actually deliver much in the way of sparkle, coming in ten per cent slower than similar offerings from Matrox.

The 2Gb IBM hard disk also failed to shine, which pretty much sealed the Dell's fate. Because it's a clock-tripled 60MHz device, the Pentium Pro/180 is somewhat hampered in terms of bus speed, so it can't deliver the same kind of performance that the Pentium Pro/200 is capable of. Here it was combined with slow components and to top it all, NT Workstation 4, which is currently still heavily reliant on generic NT drivers and therefore pulls overall performance down. The result was a level of performance in our benchmarks that has actually been bettered in the past by fast Pentium/133s running Windows 95. This really puts the Dell system's low price into perspective, effectively barring it from being a good alternative to a fast Pentium.

By Dominic Bucknall