Dell Vostro 410

Tag : bluetooth usb hub

There's no doubt that Dell's Vostro line-up of PCs is good-looking.The 410, in particular, is black and svelte, with glossy trim andconcealed ports. It's easy to forget that this is a PC that isessentially aimed at the small to medium business market, becauseit looks like it would fit in nicely in a home environment.
It doesn't just look good; it's also a functional PC, with four USB2.0 ports, as well as a media card reader and audio ports locatedon its front panel. Meanwhile, the inside of the case sports astandard ATX form factor. There's no upside-down motherboard,topsy-turvy drive bays with clippie things or anything elseproprietary. That means if it ever breaks down and it's out ofwarranty, you can easily work on it with a screwdriver, and withouthaving to get back in touch with Dell to procure parts.
However, unlike a custom-built system from your home-grown PC shopdown the road, the Vostro 410 probably won't have all the modernconveniences that you might require. This might be OK for abusiness environment where upgrades may occur every time Haley'scomet passes the Earth, but we'll dwell a little on it as we thinkhome users might also be interested in this PC.
While its motherboard is of the full-sized ATX variety, it is stillreliant on numerous PCI slots. It has three of these slots, and thesame number of PCI Express slots. Its biggest PCIe slot houses anNVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT-based graphics card, and there are two PCIex1 slots underneath it. Chances are you might not need to use aPCIe x4 or x8 slot during this PC's lifetime, but we think one morelong PCIe slot should have been included. We do like the fact thatDell offers an 802.11g wireless card (although we do wish there wasa draft-n offering), which makes it ready for hooking up to awireless network straight out of the box.
Dell has done away with IDE ports on this motherboard (DG33A01),which is based on Intel's G33 chipset and I/O Controller Hub 9, butstill includes a floppy disk controller. There are eightready-to-use USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, as well as six SATAports, and all of them were occupied in our test machine, which wasdecked out with four 160GB hard drives (WD1600AAJS-75PSA0) but notin a RAID array. We also got a DVD-ROM drive along with a DVDburner. Luckily, Dell machines are customisable, so you can decidethe amount and type of drives you want installed.
The computer features an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU that runs at2.4GHz, and it has 2GB of DDR2, 667MHz RAM. There are two freeslots for expansion, but the 410 ships with the 32-bit version ofWindows Vista, which won't recognise more than 3GB of RAM anyway.
The Vostro 410 breezed through our WorldBench 6 applications,scoring 105, and it would've been even faster if the drives wereset up in a RAID 0 array. It also recorded a time of 1min 6sec inour iTunes MP3 encoding test, which is bang on the money for itsCPU. Basically, all you need to know is that this system willeasily handle office applications, even photo and video editingsuites, and with its GeForce 8800 GT card it won't burden yoursystem RAM; it will also let you run a few games when you've gotsome downtime.
It's worth noting that the 8800 GT is very much last year'stechnology. A card based on the 9800 chip would offer more grunt,but for this there is Dell's XPS range of PCs, which are aimed atgamers instead of businesses (unless your business is games, ofcourse).
As for comfort, the system ships with a Bluetooth keyboard andmouse. The keyboard is weirdly shaped and it has media controls,which are probably unnecessary for a business environment.Meanwhile the mouse is even weirder: its buttons are not separateto the main body of the mouse, and the design of the mouse itselfis long and uncomfortable. Furthermore, the left-click buttonrefused to single-click, forcing us to do a little troubleshooting.The best part about these two devices is their wireless nature,which is handy in an office environment. We just wish they weremore comfortable.
Heat shouldn't be a problem for this machine. It has one 12cmextraction fan at the rear and venting at the front near the harddrives. A fan at the front wouldn't go astray, especially if youopt to install four hard drives. However, for most businesses onelarge fan should be enough. The rear fan, along with the powersupply, CPU and graphics card fans, combine to produce very littlenoise at all, apart from a slight whirr, and the Western Digitaldrives in our test machine are quiet by design.
The machine will consume 80-90W of electricity when idle, and 17Wwhen switched off but still plugged in to an outlet. Our testconfiguration costs $1890, but this is with two 320GB drivesinstead of the four 160GB drives we tested it with, and it alsocomes with a 20in Dell E207WFP LCD monitor. The price includesdelivery and Dell can also recycle your old monitor for free.