What do you get when you put every high-performance component you can find into a sleek, charcoal case and top it off with an 18-inch digital monitor? Dell's Dimension 8250.
Dell pairs performance--a 3.06GHz P4 processor and ATI Radeon 9700 Pro graphics card--with top-notch peripherals, such as the Dell- branded, 18-inch flat-panel display that accompanied our test system. If you have a fat wallet and a use for all this power, the Dimension 8250 won't disappoint.
| Benchmarks | |
| MadOnion.com's 3DMark 2001 Pro (16-bit color): Measures the performance of a system's 3D graphics subsystem. Higher scores are better. | |
| Dell Dimension 8250 3.0GHz | 15702 |
| MadOnion.com's 3DMark 2001 Pro (32-bit color): Measures the performance of a system's 3D graphics subsystem. Higher scores are better. | |
| Dell Dimension 8250 3.0GHz | 15433 |
| Quake III Arena: Measures the performance of a system's 3D graphics subsystem using a popular 3D game title. Higher scores are better. Measured in frames per second. | |
| Dell Dimension 8250 3.0GHz | 294 |
| BAPCo SYSmark 2002 Rating: | |
| Dell Dimension 8250 3.0GHz | 293 |
| SYSMark 2002 Internet Content Creation Rating: | |
| Dell Dimension 8250 3.0GHz | 413 |
| SYSMark 2002 Office Productivity Rating: | |
| Dell Dimension 8250 3.0GHz | 208 |
Life has been easy for PC tinkerers since Dell switched to the "steamer trunk" case design. Press the latches on the top and bottom of the Dell Dimension 8250's midtower case (16.5x8.0x17.0 inches), and it splits open at the middle, giving you access to drives on one side and the motherboard and its components on the other. Cables don't get in the way, so even those who are afraid of a computer's insides should feel confident poking around in this case.
Once inside, you'll find one unfilled accessible drive bay and one vacant internal bay, both 3.5 inches, which you can use for future additions. Two free memory sockets let you raise the bar on RDRAM to a 2GB maximum, and one free PCI slot allows for board expansion. Broadband users can take advantage of the Ethernet port that's integrated on the motherboard and remove the modem to free up another PCI slot, if need be.
Not that getting inside the box is a requirement for connectivity. Aside from the front-mounted headphone jack and two USB ports that are neatly tucked away under a flip-up panel, six additional USB and two FireWire ports live on the rear panel, and all eight USB ports support the faster 2.0 spec. Along with the usual collection of serial, parallel, and game ports, the box also sports both Ethernet and modem jacks. S-Video (TV-out), analog, and digital monitor connection points give the Dimension 8250 maximum flexibility for your choice of video displays.
By juggling some of its components, you can get a less-expensive Dimension 8250 than the system that arrived in our labs. In fact, in a casual trip to Dell's Web site, you can build a version of the Dimension 8250 with a throttled-back CPU (a 2.66GHz P4), less disk storage space, and the Nvidia MX 420 graphics card. With the options available on Dell's site, you can build a system to satisfy most desktop needs, such as running business apps, editing photos, and ripping MP3s--all for less than half the price of the 3GHz Dimension 8250 that we tested. Whichever options you choose, from the lowest-end 8250 to the ultimate configuration, the 8250 series offers top-of-the-line performance.
Our test machine starts with a 3.06GHz Pentium 4 and its companion 512MB of 1,066MHz RDRAM on a Dell- designed Intel motherboard using the 850E chipset. Sure, newer, faster components may show up on the market in the blink of an eye, but right now, this is the fastest combination of core components that you can find. It falls to the included ATI Radeon 9700 Pro graphics card to make all this speed visible on the Dimension 8250's absolutely incredible Dell 1800FP 18-inch, digital, flat- panel display. The 1800FP's even illumination and its color depth and richness work equally well for games and video.
Top-of-the-line components typically translate into top-of-the-line performance. The particular Dell Dimension 8250 that we tested came with a 3.06GHz P4 processor, 512MB of RDRAM memory running at 533MHz (also known as PC1066), a 7,200rpm Western Digital 200GB hard drive (editor's note: In the Australian market, Dell is only offering a 120GB drive), and an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro graphics card revving under its hood. This all adds up to breathtaking application performance. The 3GHz P4 CPU is the first iteration of the P4 processor to include a performance-improving technology called Hyper-Threading, the benefits of which can best be reaped when the system is doing heavy-duty multitasking.
3D graphics and gaming performance
The ATI Radeon 9700 Pro is all the rage with today's hard-core gamers. For those who like to scrutinize the specs, the graphics card is actually rated to run up to AGP 8X, but the Dimension 8250's Intel 850E-based motherboard supports up to only AGP 4X. No matter, the Dimension 8250's 3D graphic performance is speedy enough to satisfy anyone--even hard- cord game enthusiasts.
Dell Dimension 8250 3.06GHz
Company: Dell Australia
Price: From AU$3798.30, depending on configuration
Phone: 1800 812 393
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