The usual list of legacy ports, plus Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire, and six USB 2.0 ports reside on the back panel. You'll find no floppy drive installed in the Dimension 8400, but sadly, Dell also offers no media-card reader to aid interfacing with digital cameras and other devices. The Dimension 8400 includes two Serial ATA drives but has ports and 3.5-inch drive bays for up to four SATA drives-and a maximum of 1.6 terabytes (TB) of storage space. The 925X chipset minimizes cable clutter by moving to the smaller Serial ATA cables for connecting hard drives, leaving only one IDE channel and its cumbersome ribbon cable for your optical drives. That green thing? It holds down the heat sink.ĭespite the extreme cooling tactics, the interior of the Dimension 8400 is much neater than the Dimension 8300 cases we've seen. A pair of 512MB DDR2 SDRAM sticks occupies two of the four system-memory slots, which you can upgrade to 4GB of memory, if for some reason you should find this necessary. Eventually PCIe will replace both AGP and PCI altogether, but until more PCIe cards become available, you'll be glad the Dimension 8400 has three old-fashioned PCI slots, one of which was vacant on our review unit. The Dimension 8400 comes with one full-length 16X PCIe slot for the graphics card and one smaller 1X PCIe slot for upgrades such as Gigabit Ethernet cards and others, though cards for the 1x port have not yet been released. Replacing the decade-old AGP interface for graphics cards, PCI Express (PCIe) features faster data throughput than either standard PCI or AGP slots. Once your eye leaves the processor's huge heat sink, you'll discover one of the prime benefits of the chipset: improved bus architecture. It's not until you open the Dimension 8400 that you'll be able to see the new features of Intel's 925X Express chipset. ![]() The drives might be easier to get to, but the Dimension 8400's case hogs precious desk space when you open it up. When you finally pry it open, the case takes up more desk space compared to a standard tower case with a removable side panel. The latching mechanism still irritates us it requires you to press buttons on both the top and the underside of the case. The same, rather dull, gray-and-black-plastic exterior opens up like an Oxford English Dictionary, the motherboard and the power supply are attached to one side, the drives on the other. ![]() Despite the new technologies inside it, very little about the Dell Dimension 8400's case has changed in the three years since it was introduced as the Dimension 8100. As for the rest of us, we'll be better off waiting for software that takes full advantage of the new technology. Early adopter gamers and multimedia enthusiasts will be especially thrilled by the new hardware and the fast performance. Featuring Intel's new 925X Express (a.k.a Alderwood chipset), a 3.6EGHz Intel Pentium 4 560 processor, and the first PCI Express graphics card we've seen-the 256MB ATI Radeon X800 XT-the Dimension 8400 is essentially a showcase for the future of the PC. The case might look familiar from the outside, but the new $3,099 Dell Dimension 8400 represents the opening shot in Intel's wholesale overhaul of the desktop PC's core technology. Editor's note: We have changed the ratings in this review to reflect recent changes in our rating scale.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |