Dell's new mainstream Dimension 4700 is an affordable, forward-looking PC that's well suited for the home or the small office.
More than just a minitower for the masses, Dell's new Dimension 4700, boasts a slew of new technology that should keep it happily humming atop your desk for years to come. The Dimension 4700 is built on Intel's forward-looking 915G Express chipset and features DDR2 memory and the PCI Express (PCIe) expansion-card interface. Prices for this midrange PC start less than AU$1,300 and can climb up to around AU$6,000 by selecting upgrade options. Our AU$2,633 test system included a 3.0GHz Pentium 4 530 processor, 512MB of DDR2 memory, a spacious Serial ATA 160GB hard drive, and a crisp 17-inch LCD. Gamers and power users looking for a midrange bargain will want to add a graphics card after purchase; our test system relied on Intel's new integrated Graphics Media Accelerator 900 chip, and Dell offers but one graphics card, ATI's low-end Radeon X300 SE. For most mainstream users, however, the Dimension 4700 is an attractive proposition for basic home and business tasks.
The Dell Dimension 4700 uses the same minitower chassis as the Dimension 4600, Dell's mainstream home PC. Although it would be too harsh to call the case ugly, the bland black-and-gray design that we've seen for the past few years doesn't exactly cry out to be placed at the center of attention. Fortunately, since it measures 38 by 18 by 43 centimetres (H, W, D), this inconspicuous computer lends itself to easy placement under a desk.
If you plan to get your hands inside the box, you'll appreciate the rear-panel latch that lets you remove the side panel faster than you can with any other system. With a minitower case, however, you'll find the interior a bit cramped. For example, the placement of the hard drive is less than convenient. The two 3.5-inch drive cages are positioned so that the drives sit upright and are stacked on top of each other, so you can't simply slide the drives out; you need to unscrew and remove each cage entirely. Home users who might not regularly crack the case open won't care too much, but this cumbersome process won't go over well in a small-business environment if--for the purposes of security, adding more storage space, or easy maintenance--quick removal is a necessity.
Thankfully, accessing the rest of the components is easier. The two standard PCI slots, one 16X PCI Express (PCIe) slot, and one 1X PCIe slot are unobstructed by cables, and all are unoccupied except for a standard 56Kbps modem card. With relatively competent audio and video chips integrated into the motherboard, this self-sufficiency demonstrates the versatility of Intel's mainstream 915G Express chipset. Even without dedicated graphics and sound cards, the Dimension 4700 delivers all of the features necessary if you're using it for day-to-day home computing or in a small-business setting. And with four DIMM slots (two of which were unoccupied in our test system), plus support for PCIe graphics and faster Pentium 4 processors, the Dimension 4700 can become an even more powerful system down the road with a few component upgrades.
On the outside, optical drives fill both of the front-accessible 5.25-inch drive bays, and although there's an empty 3.5-inch bay, the front panel is designed to accept a standard floppy drive but not a media-card reader. Along with standard legacy ports on the rear panel, there are also six USB 2.0 ports. You'll find an Ethernet jack that supports both 10/100 and Gigabit connections, plus audio jacks to connect up to a 7.1-speaker system (although you'll need to switch the function of the microphone jack in the BIOS to activate an additional outgoing channel). On the front panel, are a headphone jack and an additional pair of USB 2.0 ports, providing easy access and plenty of room for connecting devices such as your digital camera or MP3 player.
The Dell Dimension 4700 comes with almost all of the basic features you'd want in a basic home or office desktop computer. Built on Intel's new mainstream 915G Express chipset, our Dimension 4700 review unit featured an Intel Pentium 4 530 CPU (clocked at 3.0GHz), 512MB of new DDR2 PC3200 system memory, and Intel's new integrated graphics solution--dubbed Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 900. All of these new parts offer improved performance over that of their predecessors, and considering that Dell bundles the Dimension 4700 with a generous 160GB hard drive and a quality, 17-inch LCD monitor, you get a lot of PC for only AU$2,633. Even more exciting: because the 915G Express chipset supports the new PCI Express expansion cards, you can transform the Dimension 4700 from a utilitarian workaday computer into a powerful PC for gaming, home entertainment, or other advanced functions.
The new GMA 900 graphics chip is a vast improvement over the previous integrated video chip, Intel Extreme Graphics 2. The only problem with the chip, as with any integrated part, is that it needs to share the system memory--as opposed to a graphics card, which comes with its own. Our Dimension 4700 test system contains 512MB of memory, so you shouldn't run into trouble with day-to-day applications used for browsing the Web, sending e-mail, word processing, or working with other productivity software. If you have your eye on Doom 3 or Half-Life 2, you'll definitely want to take advantage of the 16X PCI Express (PCIe) slot and purchase a dedicated graphics card. Dell offers a low-end ATI graphics card on the Dimension 4700's configuration page for an additional AU$130, but serious gamers will want to shop around for a more powerful option.
Dell considers the Dimension 4700's 17-inch E172FP LCD one of its Value Flat Panels, but the monitor's 70-degree horizontal viewing angle, 25ms response time, and 400:1 contrast ratio rival the features of the high-end LCDs of just a few years ago. The specs also exceed those of most current value LCDs, which start with 350:1 contrast ratios and 55-degree viewing angles. The image quality--with crisp text and sharp graphics--was excellent in our tests, and that's a good thing because one of the two optical drives is a Samsung DVD-ROM drive, making this system well suited for watching movies. The other drive, an LG 48X CD-RW, accommodates music and data archiving. Our test system will give ample room to store multimedia files with its 160GB Maxtor 7,200rpm Serial ATA hard drive.
If you use this PC for home-entertainment pursuits, your ears will come up against Dell's three-piece, A425 2.1 stereo-speaker system. It's just 30 watts total, which is perhaps enough audio power to rattle a sheet of paper. At least the speakers deliver clean output, provided you don't crank the volume too high. Intel's integrated High Definition Audio chip supports up to 7.1-channel audio output, and you can find speaker upgrades on the Dimension 4700's online configurator.
The Dimension 4700's software bundle includes Microsoft Works 2004 productivity software, the Sonic RecordNow CD-burning application, and Cyberpower's PowerDVD LE for watching movies, in addition to Dell's Picture Studio 2.0 photo-editing software and its own branded version of Musicmatch's Jukebox music-management app. While we've seen more fully featured software packages, there's enough here to get you up and running with the Dimension 4700's basic functions.
3%
2%
I couldn't help but respond to this article.
I recently purchased a Dell Dimension 4700 and 8400 unit (3/12/2004 actually).
While being happy with the 8400 (well so far anyway) I have been very disappointed with the 4700. I am very interested in the comment
"If you have your eye on Doom 3 or Half-Life 2, you'll definitely want to take advantage of the 16X PCI Express (PCIe) slot and purchase a dedicated graphics card. Dell offers a low-end ATI graphics card on the Dimension 4700's configuration page for an additional AU$130, but serious gamers will want to shop around for a more powerful option. "
When I purchased this machine I wasn't aware that the end user, a 13 yr old girl, was going to be playing The SIMS 2 on it. Not knowing much about The SIMS 2 I didn't think much of the potential challenges this 4700 may have with playing this game.
The unit I have came with the INTEL 2.8 GHz chip 512MB of Memory and the onboard video. Essentially the same as your review machine.
No more than 20 minutes into a patched version of The SIMS 2 it would hang producing an error relating to the drivers for the video card. After searching for different drivers and more patches I found myself fighting with the amazingly incompetent technical support people at Dell.
Then after fighting with the Customer Care people who wanted to charge me AU$175 for shipping if I decided to return the item and also started to mention the fact that the GST component of the cost could not be refunded ( I interrupted them at this point :-O )I decided to keep this now apparent waste of money.
I told the customer care person that I was not going to take up their opportunity to upgrade the video card at a cost of approx AU$1000 and would perhaps upgrade myself later. Then they told me that that would void the warranty on the unit.
Since then I have checked on the web and despite this 4700 having a PCIe slot it is next to useless for a gaming machine as a nice card like a gforce 6600GT won't work in it without some unfortunate issues at boot time.
If you want to play anything more than solitaire or minesweeper I would strongly recommend staying away from the Dell 4700 until Dell get their stuff together.
I am now scratching around in Internet land looking for info on getting this machine running properly.
Very dissatisfied customer.