Dell Dimension L466C review

If you're buying on a budget, Intel has its eye on your money.

Over the past few months we've seen its cheapest processors, the Celerons, develop into desirable pieces of kit that make AMD's lesser offerings look second rate. Not content with this, the silicon giant has launched a new chipset aimed at those with the shallowest pockets. Called the i810, it incorporates Intel's own i752 2D/3D graphics accelerator, as well as being tailored to provide audio and modem features with the help of software alone. In effect, manufacturers get all three of these components thrown in for free, thus saving them - and us - money.

Dell's Dimension L466C is one of the very first machines to use the i810, and it also hosts the recent 466MHz Celeron processor. The i810 will be available in three variants, of which Dell has wisely selected the most sophisticated, the i810-DC100. This provides support for the new UltraDMA/66 channel for connecting EIDE hard disks (faster then the current UltraDMA/33), and 4Mb of memory dedicated to the graphics subsystem. The latter acts as a cache and will boost performance relative to the other versions of the chipset, which enlist only system memory to prepare your screen image. Like the other versions of the chipset the DC100 also uses main memory for graphics. It is a combined graphics processor and memory controller which means the graphics accelerator gets direct access to system memory in the same sort of way that AGP does.

Because graphics are integrated, i810 motherboards don't bother with an AGP slot. Nor do they have ISA slots, or indeed a conventional PCI bus architecture. There are PCI-type slots - in the Dell's case, three of which are free. But the PCI bus has been replaced by something Intel calls the Accelerated Hub Architecture. Now, instead of the drives, expansion cards and USB devices all sharing one PCI bus, the i810 chipset provides fast, private links for each class of device.

The Dimension comes with 64Mb of SDRAM as standard, and a respectably large 13.6Gb Western Digital Expert hard disk (which uses the new go-faster UltraDMA/66 interface). There's a 4.8-speed Toshiba DVD-ROM, but no hardware MPEG-2 decoding. Consequently, playback wasn't quite as smooth as you'll get with dedicated hardware, but DVD films are certainly still watchable.

The reduced cost of the system unit has allowed Dell to fit better peripherals than you'd expect in a £799 PC already sporting DVD and a big hard disk. You get a Dell-badged 17in monitor and a set of Altec Lansing ACS340 speakers. The deal is further sweetened with some decent software, including Word, Works, Money, AutoRoute and Encarta Reference Suite.

Interestingly, although the chipset would have allowed software-generated audio and modem functionality, Dell has chosen not to let the CPU bear the load. Instead, there's a Creative Labs Sound Blaster 64V sound chip on the motherboard itself, and a US Robotics V.90 voice fax modem card is fitted in one of the expansion slots. Also, although the Dimension seems to be pitched more at the home than the business user, it could go straight onto an office network thanks to a 10/100Mbps Ethernet adaptor integrated to the motherboard.

The monitor has a basic FST tube with a 15.9in image diagonal, support for a flicker-free 85Hz refresh rate at 1024x678 resolution and OSD-based controls for a good range of shape and colour corrections. The overall focus was reasonable, if not amazingly sharp, but the loss of clarity was too slight to affect the readability of text to any serious extent.