Dual Dell

Either me or Dell have somehow misunderstood the concept of dual core / dual graphics card computers. :) Yesterday UPS delivered the XPS 600 computer I had ordered, and it came in two huge boxes, so that the UPS guy had problems getting them into my appartment. Turns out Dell has accidentally delivered two computers, instead of one. Ooops! Well, I called them, and they are going to send somebody to pick the second computer up, it was a fault in their billing department. They even asked me whether I would be willing the keep the second one at a 300 Euro rebate, but I wasn't interested. I was wondering whether they would have noticed their mistake, or whether I could have kept the second computer for free if I hadn't called. But I'm too honest to even try, and I can't imagine that they wouldn't eventually have noticed and come down like a ton of bricks on me. So, goodbye second computer.

Not that the Dell XPS 600 is not a good computer, I just don't need two of them. The new Dell is lightning fast. I installed Futuremark's 3DMark03 and 3DMark05 to see how fast the new computer is for 3D graphics gaming. Basically it is an astounding 3 times faster than the computer I bought one-and-a-half years ago, easily beating Moore's law this time. In detail:

The new computer, a Dell XPS 600 (Pentium 4 640 3.2 GHz, 2 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTX) has a 3DMark03 score of 15,613, and a 3DMark05 score of 6557. Good that I haven't gone for the expensive option of a second graphics card, this is fast enough for now.

Last years computer, a Athlon XP 3000+, 1 GB RAM, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, has a 3DMark03 score of 5,556, and a 3DMark05 score of 2,494. Although the comparison is slightly unfair, last years computer with 19" CRT screen cost as much as the new Dell without monitor.

The 3-and-a-half year old computer that is going to be replaced, a Athlon XP 2000+, 512 MB RAM, ATI Radeon 9600 Pro, has a 3DMark03 score of 2,540, and a 3DMark05 score of 1,146.

The Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop I bought this year has a 3DMark03 score of 2,536, and a 3DMark05 score of 989. Still okay for a laptop, but I shouldn't install any too graphically demanding games on it.

Besides the delivery problem, I'm quite happy with the new machine. Not only is it fast, it also runs a lot more silent than the computer I'm going to kick out. Dell put in six 120 mm fans, because you can run a hotter CPU and a second graphics card in that case. But as the fans are so many, and bigger than the usual 80 mm fans, they turn relatively slowly and noiselessly. The case is silver and black, with a LED-lit front panel, colors can be chosen (or turned off) in the BIOS setup. It was preset to blue, which I like, so I didn't fiddle with that. Getting the network and internet up and running was a breeze. The only bad surprise I had with the new machine was that it doesn't have a parallel port, so my printer is still connected to the Athlon 3000, and will be used via the network.

I'll still have a couple of hours ahead of me installing things and transferring data. The WoW reinstall and patch already took some time, and then I took the opportunity to go through the list of addons I used previously. I didn't reinstall those I didn't really need, and got the latest version of those I did. I installed Microsoft Office, and set up Outlook so I could get my e-mail. I also uninstalled the Norton Internet Security trial version the Dell came with, and installed Mcaffee Security Center instead, which is a lot less annoying. The last program I installed last night was Prime95. That is a program to calculate prime numbers, but it has a "torture mode", in which I let it run all night to test if there were any hidden faults with the memory or anything. No problem, the computer ran stable without crashing for over 8 hours.

If I remember then, I'll write another piece on the Dell XPS 600 in a year, seeing how it worked out in the long run. As far as I can see from the device manager the components are all good quality, like Western Digital for the hard disk, Philipps DVD RW, and so on, not no-name stuff. I'm not sure whether I could have built the machine cheaper myself, but I'm pretty certain that I wouldn't have enjoyed it. The Dell way, where I can choose the specs, get the computer in a week, unpack, and go, is more to my liking. I prefer fiddling with the software to fiddling with the hardware.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:08 PM Permanent Link