Dell Dimension 8400

This LCD made watching DVDs on our test system a terrific experience. We saw smooth and sharp movement, no graininess, and vivid colors, and the included Dell 5650 5.1-channel speakers produced crisp, rich sound.

Port design, however, was a mixed bag. We counted a whopping 14 USB 2.0 ports--2 on the front of the PC, 6 on the rear, 4 on the LCD, and 2 on the keyboard--but just one rear-mounted FireWire port, which was on the Sound Blaster Audigy card. Unless you opt for this card or for a FireWire adapter card, you won't get any FireWire ports. We also disliked the way the front port door opens upward, hampering access to the front USB 2.0 ports and the headphone jack.

When configured like our review unit--with dual 160GB hard drives in a performance-enhancing RAID array, a 3.6-GHz Pentium 4 660 processor, and 1GB of DDR2-533 RAM--the 8400 has some muscle. Our system scored 101 in our WorldBench 5 test suite, just making it one of the fastest ten performers among currently tested PCs.

The 8400 is no slouch at game play, either. Equipped with a 256MB ATI Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition graphics card, it posted 143 frames per second at a 1024-by-1280-pixel resolution in our Castle Wolfenstein tests and 314 frames per second at a 1024-by-1280-pixel resolution in our Unreal Tournament tests. Again, these scores put the unit in the top ten among our currently tested systems, about half of which were more expensive.

The easy-to-open case allows quick access to the tidy interior with two open memory sockets and the tool-less drive bays. The overly wide graphics card, unfortunately, blocked an adjacent PCI Express slot, leaving only one open slot available for expansion.

The 8400's owner's manual comes with extensive troubleshooting guides, and a troubleshooting panel of four lights on the back of the PC helps diagnose problems such as bad memory or possible processor failure.

Upshot: Configured with a TV tuner, a sound card, a top-of-the-line video card, and a crisp LCD, our Dell Dimension 8400 test system was a solid home-entertainment machine.

Scott Plamondon