Product Reviews

Dell's Dimension 9100 is housed in a smart and well-engineered BTX case. Only the grey drive bay surround spoils an otherwise attractive three-tone colour scheme.

BTX is a new design for motherboards and cases that streamlines airflow though a computer. Air is sucked though the front grille and passes though the processor heat sink, over the graphics card and out at the back. Consequently, the Dimension 9100 sounds quieter than most PCs. Dell has ditched all legacy ports on the 9100, so there are no PS/2, serial or parallel ports, leaving four USB2 ports at the rear for all your peripherals.

Internally the Dimension 9100 looks crowded. The dual-core Pentium D 840 processor is hidden beneath a plastic air guide and large heat sink, and the two sticks of 512MB DDR2 PC3200 memory are submerged in a tangle of wires. Two 160GB drives are fastened to the bottom

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of the case and connected in a RAID 1 configuration, giving 290GB (formatted) fast access. This aids performance, but if either drive fails you'll lose all your data.

Our benchmarks only hint at the potential of the dual-core processor, but they show that you can happily run two tasks together, such as encoding a video and playing a game with no noticeable slowdown.

Only the 256MB nVidia GeForce 6800 graphics card has free space around it, which is all the better for cooling. It's fine for the latest games, but it seems underpowered given the rest of the setup. Upgrading is also limited; the BTX motherboard has only one PCI Express x16 slot, so you'll have to replace the card rather than supplement it with a second 6800 in SLI configuration.

The DVI-fed 19" LCD panel supplied is superb. A flawless greyscale is complemented by lively colours with near-perfect definition through all tones. Keyboard and mouse are wired, though the mouse uses a ball rather than the more responsive optical sensor we're used to. The Dell-branded 2.1 speaker system is fine for music, games and movies, as long as you don't want surround sound. A double-layer DVD writer and DVD-ROM are fitted.

Dell's Dimension 9100 is an excellent PC. It's fast enough to cope with tomorrow's applications without sounding like a vacuum cleaner, has plenty of storage and a superb 19" monitor. All it lacks is a faster graphics card to fully justify its £1,349 price.