Date:
Tuesday , July 03, 2007
Author:
Jason Wall
Editor:
Josh Norem
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Dell Dimension E521

Dell has been our most-frequently evaluated integrator, but we’ve never had a Dell system quite like this one. It has an AMD processor and sells for for about $1000. We find out if it’s a good budget buy and if it will tolerate a third-party hardware upgrade.

Introduction

As many of you might know by now, HardOCP doesn’t "review" systems, we evaluate the experiences they facilitate. We order the system the same as you would and evaluate every aspect of the end-user experience. Not only does this give us a better idea of what hardware an end user actually receives, it also allows us to obtain a more accurate picture of just how each company functions and treats its customers. As fast as PC hardware has become over the years, we think giving a personal computer "5 stars" based on how fast it ran a synthetic benchmark is simply irresponsible. We think service, support, and reliability are much more important factors in today's climate than speed. Fast is easily bought, but purchasing and ownership satisfaction can be elusive.

This process allows us to not only evaluate the system, but the OEM that builds it. Our goal is to give you the wide-angle lens view of the computer and the company so that you can make informed and educated decisions as to what you purchase or recommend to clients, friends, and family.

Dell and [H]ard|OCP

As stated previously, no other integrator has received more evaluations than the Round Rock, Texas-based Tier I PC-building monolith. Recently, we’ve seen a Precision 690 Workstation, an XPS M1710 laptop, and the best Dell has to offer, its overclocked, water-cooled XPS 710 H2C.

We’ve sat through some very frustrating experiences with Dell in the past, including issues with stability and general performance, to concerns about pricing and excruciating tech support. Though our last three experiences with Dell were positive overall, its checkered past means we never quite know what we’re going to get.

We’ve evaluated the extreme high end of Dell’s offerings in the 710 H2C, so we thought we would check out a low-end PC as well for balance. We also received several requests from readers to check out Dell’s AMD-based computers, so we ordered a no-frills Dimension. We were eager to see how it compares to Core 2 Duo-based PCs, and wanted to explore its ability to handle upgrades in order to give it some more muscle.

What We’re Looking For

This Dimension is a mere shadow of the $5,600 H2C that we recently evaluated, but it’s a respectable machine in its own right. We were very curious to what Dell is doing with its AMD integration, as well as what configurations it is offering. And since it’s a low-end machine, we wanted to see what upgrades we could perform on this machine to give it some more power. We have some extra video cards laying around from our recent XP vs. Vista framerate editorials, so we wanted to explore the possibility of whether or not a consumer would be able to get a machine with a warranty on the cheap and then beef it up by adding in a higher-end video card. Of course, power demands, temperatures, stability, and driver conflicts are what we’ll be looking for to make sure this is possible.

Aside from that, we’ll be looking for the regular signs of a well-thought-out integration: solid packaging, a clean OS build, quality components, stability, great tech support, and a good overall ownership experience for the price. Dell has never been able to put everything we look for together at one time, so we’re interested to see if it can pull it off in this evaluation.

What We Bought

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