Dell Dimension XPS R450 review

In between thinking up increasingly daft names for its various new or rehashed processor releases, Intel has also managed to find a moment to finish the next incrementally faster version of the standard Pentium II. We've already seen the first 450MHz systems, and now it's the turn of major manufacturers - in this case, Dell - to bring the new CPU into the line-up.

New processor releases are often anti-climactic, as manufacturers seldom roll out a distinctive new case design for a new CPU. This certainly applies here, as the Dimension comes in the same neat, compact midi-tower box as its predecessors. Fortunately, this is no disadvantage as the case is neither too ugly nor excessively large.

There's a large, secondary fan just below the PSU and its own blower, but still the noise level was quite low, even if I did notice an odd sort of grinding or grumbling sound, which I eventually traced to the speaker on the modem card. Clearly some sort of interference was going on internally, but it was by no means clear what was causing it.

A delve in the bits box turned up a Microsoft IntelliMouse and a full-sized, solidly-constructed keyboard. The latter is better made than the typical low-quality offerings supplied with most PCs, but although the action feels positive the brittle clatter generated by typing could do with being damped down.

The Dimension XPS R450 comes with a Dell-badged 17in Nokia monitor with a Trinitron tube, which should prove pleasing to most eyes. The straightforward OSD-driven controls are comprehensive, and you also get seven fully RGB-adjustable preset colour temperatures and two customisable user-defined channels. The screen yields a 15.6in image diagonal, and the picture itself is bright and entirely stable thanks to 85Hz vertical refresh support at a resolution of 1,024 x 768. It's clearly a tube selected from the top end of the Trinitron batch. The pleasingly sharp focus holds true from the centre to the edge, and the fine 0.25mm slot pitch and crisp, rectangular pixels produced very good small text and detail reproduction.

The SoHo slant of this particular model is implicit in the fact that it's bundled with a copy of Windows 98 and Office 97 SBE, and made explicit by the provision of the sort of high-quality three-piece Altec Lansing speakers more suited to a leisure context than a busy office.

The ensemble is driven by a Turtle Beach Montego sound card, based on the emerging Aureal Vortex processor. This combines a solid basic feature set of 64-voice wavetable with chorus and reverb effects and some degree of 3D spatialisation.

There's a US Robotics 56K voice/fax modem in the bottom ISA slot, but although the ISA slot above it is free the PCI-based sound card is using its backplate cut-out and would need to be moved up out of the way if you wanted to add another ISA card. There are three unused PCI slots, all unobstructed, with the 8Mb STB nVidia ZX graphics card in the AGP slot at the top.

The 128Mb of RAM supplied as standard with this machine is now looking increasingly sensible. The memory comes on a single DIMM, leaving two free in case software gets any more bloated.

With a 28-speed NEC CD-ROM player, an Iomega Zip 100 drive, complete with three disks, and an IBM UltraDMA hard disk formatted to a 13.4Gb capacity, you might not have to fit any more drives. If you do, however, there's a choice between an internal and a front-opening 3.5in bay and a front-opening 5.25in bay, which should be enough.