Dell Precision 610 MT review

Intel's much-vaunted Pentium II Xeon processor has been on the cards for some time now, but it's only now that the first Xeon systems are beginning to emerge. While most manufacturers are promoting Xeon-based servers, Dell is one of the first manufacturers to ship a Xeon workstation, in this case one using the 440GX chipset and two Xeon CPUs.

The 610 MT is based around the standard Precision product line midi-tower chassis. This allows quick access to its interior by the use of an easily removable side panel. There are two free external 5.25in drive bays and two free internal 3.5in drive bays. The motherboard is dominated by the housing for the two Xeon CPUs. Each processor is fitted with a large heat sink, while a separate fan sucks hot air out of the chassis. Fortunately, with the chassis closed, the 610 MT is no noisier than a standard PC. Both Xeons are 400MHz and are each fitted with 512Kb of full-speed Level 2 cache for super-fast performance. Despite the 256Mb of RAM, the 610 MT still has two free DIMM sockets to support a maximum 512Mb.

The other main feature of the motherboard is a single 64-bit PCI slot. This is the first such expansion slot ever seen in an x86 family PC and is occupied with an Adaptec ARO-1130xA card. This superb device is fitted with 16Mb of RAM and the ability to act as a RAID controller for the motherboard's own Adaptec SCSI controller. Taking advantage of this super-fast disk controller are two of the latest Seagate Cheetah 2 LVD SCSI 9.1Gb hard disks. The other SCSI device is an NEC CD-ROM drive. Unfortunately, this drive takes around eight seconds to decide whether there's a disk inserted and is also very noisy. It's one of the few components that lets the Precision down.

Dell supplies four main options for the 610 MT's graphics subsystem. The model we were supplied included the entry-level graphics card, an 8Mb Diamond FireGL 1000 Pro, based around the 3DLabs Permedia 2 chipset for average 2D but superb OpenGL performance. Other options include two Appian Geronimo Pro cards for quad-monitor support and the high-end Intergraph Intense 3D Pro 3410T, although these options add between £600 and £1,500 to the price. Likewise, a number of monitors can also be supplied. We tested the 610 MT with a 19in Dell-badged unit of Philips origin. Image quality is satisfactory, although the display suffers from moirÚ interference and a slightly grainy appearance.

Not surprisingly, the 610 MT is the fastest PC yet seen in PC Pro and the Xeon has certainly proved to be the fastest production x86 family CPU. In our standard 2D office benchmarks, the 610 MT produced a fast score of 3.59, which is impressive when compared with the score of 3.19 produced by the next-fastest PC we've seen, the Panrix Fusion S400 (reviewed issue 45, p142). The Xeon really shows its mettle in intensive tests, literally bulldozing through our Access and PageMaker tests. As the 610 MT is really designed as a graphics workstation rather than a power PC, we also tested it using NewTek's Lightwave 5.5, a professional 3D modelling and animation package. Here, we timed a render of some asteroids from a sequence in the forthcoming film Lost in Space. With its dual-CPU configuration, the 610 MT produced the render in 47 minutes and 23 seconds, just three per cent faster than the similarly priced Intergraph 400MHz Pentium II system (see p230) at 48 minutes and 40 seconds. Interestingly, when using both CPUs, the Dell was seven per cent slower than the single 600MHz Alpha system from Armari (see p229), which managed the render in 44 minutes and 40 seconds. The Armari costs around £1,000 less, and while the Dell is inexpensive compared with some equivalent workstations it's certainly not the cheapest around.