Dell Dimension 8400

The Dimension 8400 family bridges the gap between Dell's extreme XPS gaming machines and its more sedate lower-cost systems. Dell's configurator will allow you to include only a high-end graphics card - in this case, a Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition - but not the fastest Pentium 4s. However, today's processors have more than enough grunt for most uses, so the Dimension 8400 series will still prove a powerful performer.

To make a high-end PC for £1,099 still requires compromises. A truly extreme machine should have a 20in TFT, but these are rather expensive. Dell uses a 19in TFT to get a comparable screen size, if not the increased resolution: you'll have to make do with 1,280 x 1,024. Our tough display tests are designed to highlight even minor flaws, but Dell's 1905FP passed them all with only a couple of minor hiccups. DVDs are displayed accurately too, although some detail was lost in very dark or bright areas. This is common in TFTs and not of particular worry, although the obvious lag is more of a concern. Action scenes appear more frenetic and indecipherable, while gaming pleasure is impaired by the smearing.

This is a shame, as the Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition deserves to be paired with the best of screens to show off its brilliance. Our Unreal Tournament and Halo tests weren't enough of a challenge for it, so we unleashed our more extreme tests: Far Cry and Doom 3 with full detail settings at 1,600 x 1,200 resolution and 4x anti-aliasing (AA) and 8x anisotropic filtering (AF). They still didn't trouble the screen, as both raced along at playable frame rates. In fact, Far Cry was a significant 13fps faster than the dual 6660 GTs of the currently A-Listed Mesh Matrix Fireblade SLI (see issue 125, p53). Doom 3 ran at 33fps on both machines. With AA and AF turned off, we saw negligible differences between the systems of a few frames per second, with both games running at over 50fps.

Gaming performance is helped further by the 3.4GHz Pentium 4 550, 1GB of PC3200 RAM and 925X chipset. The system's no slouch in real-world work applications either. With an overall score of 1.88, most tasks were completed about 80 per cent faster than on our reference 2GHz rig; media tasks were completed twice as fast. If you want all-out processing power though, the AMD Athlon 64 3800+ in the Mesh Matrix Fireblade SLI beats the Dimension 8400 in all of our benchmark tests.

The Dimension 8400 comes with both a DVD writer and a combo drive to help distribute the movies and other files you make, or just to make backing up easier. Both are 16x speed, although the DVD writer lacks support for dual-layer and DVD-RAM discs.

Although the 160GB hard disk is adequate for most, it's restrictive for a system costing this much. Fortunately, you can upgrade to a larger hard drive or even a striped array. According to Dell, an upgrade to a 400GB disk will cost £230, and choosing a 500GB striped array (composed of two 250GB disks) will add £210 to the current £1,099 price.

We'd certainly consider making this upgrade. If you don't, you may have to use the a/b/g external wireless card to offload some data onto a home media server, or else burn DVDs of files you don't regularly use. The wireless card has to be external, as the double-height X850 XT PE graphics card, 56K modem and Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS card leave no free PCI slots.

The Audigy 2 provides for 7.1 audio, but Dell supplies a 5.1 speaker set. The central speaker tidily attaches to the underside of the screen, neatly hiding the dangling cables. Sound quality is good too: the sub largely keeps to the lower frequencies, and the satellites output a rich sound. The only niggle was a lack of volume, although they still pack enough punch for a large room.