Product Reviews

These pages are often dominated by attention-seeking processors, blistering along at ridiculous speeds. These are fine for unspecified end users but may not be the best solution for your needs. If you intend to run applications that can support multithreading of their executions through dual processors, you may find that two lower-speed processors provide a lot more for your money. Dell's Precision Workstation 420 showcases just such a system, sporting two 733MHz Pentium III CPUs; not the fastest you can buy, but together they create a force to be reckoned with.

In addition to the raw processing power, the Dell-specified motherboard takes full advantage of Intel's high-end 840 chipset, and Dell doesn't hold back on the RAM either. By including two 128Mb RIMMs that take advantage of the 840 chipset's two Virtual Rambus Channels, there's an incredible 3.2Gbytes/sec bandwidth. If 256Mb isn't enough, you can upgrade to 512Mb of RDRAM for £716. Add to this an Adaptec controller for not one, but two SCSI Ultra160 channels, as well as two UltraATA/66 channels for EIDE devices. The list goes on to include an integrated 10/100 network adaptor from 3Com and integrated Crystal Audio sound. The colour-coded rear panel ably assists connection to all of these integrated peripherals, leaving a row of blanking plates for four spare 32-bit PCI slots and one spare 64-bit PCI slot.

With all of these features you may be surprised to learn that Dell's chosen graphics subsystem is a Matrox Millennium G400 MAX DualHead. With 32Mb of SDRAM local memory and the extra VGA-out, this does make the system ideal for dual monitor work such as video-editing. If you need hardware OpenGL acceleration, Dell is offering Elsa's 32Mb Synergy Force for the same price.

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If you've got an eye on the new wave of graphics cards to be released, you'll be pleased to hear that the motherboard supports the new wave of power-hungry AGP Pro accelerators that require up to 110W, such as the Voodoo5.

Dell's storage solution is equally impressive. An 18Gb Quantum Atlas Ultra160 SCSI hard disk spins along at 10,000rpm, and Dell offers an upgrade to a 36Gb model for £358. You can also add additional hard disks using the two spare 3.5in internal bays. Removable storage is provided by Sony's capable CD-RW and the second of three available 5.25in bays is filled with a 48-speed Samsung CD-ROM drive.

Dell is keen to promote the physically accessible nature of this system, with no screwdrivers required for access to pretty much all the innards, but this ethos doesn't extend to removing or fixing devices. The side of the case is released by pressing a thumbhole to reveal an array of green plastic curves and modular parts worthy of exhibition in a design museum. The effort to provide accessibility through removable power supplies, drive bays et al is encouraging, but in this case there's far too much of it, and replacing all the components reminded me of a Krypton Factor challenge gone awry.

In support of all this impressive kit, Dell supplies its own-branded 19in aperture-grille monitor with a 0.25mm dot pitch Sony Trinitron tube. Image quality is up to the high Trinitron standards, but the screen isn't large enough for some of the envisaged uses of this system.

PC Pro's benchmarks are designed using standard Windows applications and as such are unable to take advantage of multithreaded processing. However, for a 733MHz processor the score of 2.66 is wholly impressive. To bring out the best in this machine, we also tested using our standard LightWave benchmark. With each processor kicking into action on this occasion, the time to render the scene of 18 minutes, 34 seconds was impressive to say the least, beating our previous top gunner, the Armari R8-2000 Workstation (reviewed issue 64, p137) by two and a half minutes.

With the Precision 420, Dell has built a purposeful system, without holding back in any of its key areas. True, it's got a price to match, but with Armari's R8-2000 Workstation costing almost £300 more, Dell is being veritably ruthless in this market area.