Dell Dimension 9200 review

Dell's Dimension 9150 won a coveted Best Buy award back in our July group test for providing dual-core processing power for just £599. Now Dell is looking to repeat the trick with the 9150's successor, the Dimension 9200.

Looks-wise, there's not much to separate the 9200 from the 9150 - it comes in the same sturdy and rather dashing case, finished in creamy white with black and silver trim. Beneath the surface though, the Dimension 9200 has evolved significantly and the Intel Pentium D 820 processor has been supplanted by an Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 The E6300 has two cores operating at 1.86GHz, which sounds particularly modest when compared to the Dimension 9150's Pentium D which had two running at 2.8GHz. Big numbers don't automatically always translate into great performance though, and with 1GB of memory in tow, the 9200's Core 2 Duo chip trounced the 9150 with a benchmark score of 144% - that's 23% quicker than its now seemingly elderly cousin.

Gaming performance has taken an equally decisive step forward thanks to the nVidia GeForce 7900GS. Our Call of Duty 2 benchmark was dispatched swiftly with an overall score of 123%, proving the Dell's gaming credentials.

Store crazy

Storage comes courtesy of two 160GB Samsung hard disks. For some applications, such as video or image editing, having a second hard disk to store your footage on is almost essential if you don't want your C: drive to regularly grind to a halt. However, Dell has chosen to use the two 160GB disks as a RAID 0 array and combined, they create one huge 320GB disk. This means that the data is automatically spread across both drives by Windows, giving faster read and write times than using each disk individually. There is a very serious downside to this arrangement, though - in the unlikely even of one drive failing, you lose the contents of both.

The problem is compounded by the fact that while there are three spare SATA ports on the motherboard, there's no spare hard drive. In light of this, we'd much rather choose a single larger hard drive and leave space to add another in the future when funds allow.

Eccentric, moi?

The Dimension does things a little differently than other PCs and another of its peculiarities is the interior of its case. Virtually all PCs use the standard, and admittedly quite elderly, ATX case design, but Dell is one of the few manufacturers to adopt Intel's esoteric BTX layout. BTX uses a different motherboard layout to give improved airflow and this reduced cooling means a quieter PC. The Dimension 9200 is certainly quiet compared to some PCs we've encountered and the whole thing is only spoiled by the whiny fan on the nVidia graphics card. In contrast to the lack of hard drive bays, there are 3 PCI, one PCI-Express 1x and one 8x slots, too which is more than enough to accommodate any add-in cards we can think of.

Dell's package is rounded off nicely by a classy-looking Dell-branded 19in TFT and a set of 2.1 speakers. The monitor delivered good image quality across the board and even the speakers, often a weak point with many PCs, provided a very listenable, crisp sound whatever music or soundtracks they were faced with.

The Dimension 9150 offers a solid specification for its £799 price, but it's certainly not the unassailable bargain its predecessor was. Mesh's Elite E6400 CB, the winner of our December group test, may just be a base unit, but its £599 price gives you a better all-round specification, greater upgrade potential and leaves you a couple of hundred quid to spend on a monitor and speakers.