Dell Dimension 8250 3.06GHz

This month's three-price-point Labs will cater for most people's needs, but if you want that little bit more Dell's Dimension 8250 could be just the ticket.

One way the Dell differentiates itself from the high-end competition is through its case design. The midnight grey chassis would look equally great in the office or home, especially with the matching monitor, mouse, keyboard and speakers. Two USB 2 ports and a headphone jack are conveniently placed at the front, and a further six USB 2 ports can be found on the I/O backplane, although I'd have preferred more of these to be front-mounted.

If you're after a quiet working environment, the Dimension 8250 will bring you very close. Simply depressing a top and bottom catch splits open the case on its heavy-duty front hinges, showing a passive heatsink covered by a cowling that directs hot air through a rear extractor fan.

Access to the system components is unhindered through tidy cable clips, which also contribute to good airflow. All drives and peripheral cards are held in place by sturdy green retainer clips, and data cables can be pulled from their slots with the attached orange pull straps.

Upgrade potential is one area restricted by the case design, though. Of the front bays, there's only one 3.5in bay free and no spare 5.25in bays. Of the four available PCI slots, only two are free, but future memory upgrades are possible, with only two of the four RIMM sockets occupied. There's room for two extra hard disks, but with no on-board RAID controller these will only boost storage.

However, with such a fine original component specification, it will be some time before upgrade restrictions begin to frustrate. First, you have a healthy storage quota courtesy of a 200GB Western Digital hard disk. Although beaten to our A List by IBM's Deskstar 180GXP (see p144), it still returned respectable performance. Large capacity backups are possible with the new quad-speed NEC DVD+RW drive at up to 4.7GB per disc. An accompanying 48x CD-ROM allows for direct disc copies.

Creative's Audigy 2 Player is on sound duty and, being THX-certified, it complements the Altec Lansing ADA995 5.1 THX speakers perfectly for DVD movie playback. Finally, a V.92 modem is included and the motherboard features an integrated Intel Ethernet controller.

Best use of the Dell 17in TFT is through DVI at its native resolution of 1,280 x 1,024. The image quality is very sharp and the screen response is fast enough for 3D gaming. Should this be a deciding factor in your purchase, you'll be pleased to note that the ATi Radeon 9700 graphics thrust the Dimension 8250 to a 3DMark2001 SE score of 14,707 in 32-bit XGA.

Of course, Intel's new 3GHz Pentium 4 also brings Hyper-Threading to the desktop, but this is disabled for all benchmarking (see Hyper-Threading: best thing since sliced thread?). Accompanied by 512MB of PC1066 RDRAM memory, the Dimension 8250 returned a fantastic score of 1.72. However, AMD remains at the top of our performance charts with a score of 1.84 from the Athlon XP 2700+ and nForce2-based Mesh Matrix XP 2700+RD97.

The Dimension 8250 may not be the fastest PC, but the price, components and build quality can't be faulted. And with the reassurance of a warranty providing one year of on-site service and support, Dell receives yet another Recommended award. To order, use E-Value code 200-d56REV.

Author: Ian Robson