In many respects, this system is very similar to the one which was reviewed in last month's issue (see issue 23, page 92). The only major differences between this month's Labs system and last month's review system is that the 17in TFT display has been replaced with a 17in CRT, the hard drive is slightly larger, coming in at around 20Gb, and there is no CD-R/CD-RW drive. Nevertheless, this is still a very well featured system which offers plenty of multimedia functionality.

This system is stuffed with expansion cards and has very little room to grow with only two PCI slots left free. Also, these cards make the already cramped confines of the Dell mini-tower even more difficult to get into. But despite this, Dell has done a very good job of keeping the internals of this system quite clean and relatively easy to manage.

One of the most striking aspects of this machine is its 3D performance. Although it does not appear to be the fastest in our graphs, the graph tests reflected the 32-bit performance of the T600's Diamond Viper V770 Ultra card. Whereas the Also Technology and Pioneer Computers machines, which scored better on the graph, utilise 3dfx Voodoo3 chipsets which are only capable of 16-bit rendering. Tested in 16-bit, the Dell machine scored 5435 in our 3DMark Max 99 tests.

The other important feature of this system is the hardware decoder card for the DVD-ROM drive combined with the excellent Altec Lansing ADA-880 speakers. Combined, they provide an outstanding platform for viewing DVD content by supporting full Dolby Digital sound. Another advantage of the decoder card is the ability to output the video signal to an external television or projector source making it ideal for home entertainment applications.

The performance of the Dell Dimension XPS T600 was not among the fastest in our applications-based benchmarks. However, the Dell machine was the fastest system in our Photoshop tests and was a reasonably solid performer overall.

At just shy of $4,500, this system should certainly have provided more consistent performance, especially considering the price to performance ratio of the AMD Athlon-based systems. But if
you're looking for a system with loads of multimedia grunt, it's hard to fault this machine from Dell.