Dells all-black PowerEdge is certainly one of the coolest-looking systems of the bunch, but the 600SC also packs enough power to be a formidable SMB server. The PowerEdge range is almost exclusively built for small business users, and the servers offer great fusion between price and performance.

Installing Windows 2000 Server on this system for benchmarking was streamlined, thanks to the inclusion of a useful utilities CD which pre-loaded all the drivers for devices like the RAID controller and network cards (you would otherwise have to install them manually).

As mentioned in the earlier Acer review, the PowerEdge 600SC is awfully similar to the Altos G300: it uses the same ServerWorks GC-SL chipset and has very similar features and motherboard layout. Theyre both pretty robust systems, with 1GB DDR SDRAM, twin 40GB HDDs and Pentium 4 CPUs.

Like the Altos, the PowerEdge also uses a separate PCI-card RAID adaptor to run its two hard drives. This added RAID controller means that, in addition to the three embedded IDE ports, you can plug in a maximum of 10 IDE devices. Thats a lot of storage for a server of this class.

Unfortunately, the PowerEdge 600SC has inherited some of the same problems as the Acer. For example, its four 64-bit PCI slots also only run at 33MHz.This means adding truly high performance PCI peripherals to the system is somewhat futile, as theyll be bandwidth-limited by the motherboard.

By default, the PowerEdges operating system is an optional extra, and the system we received came without any OS whatsoever. The Dell Website lists Windows 2000 Server at just $1,670, so even when you add this, the system comes in well under the $5,000 mark. Opt for Windows 2000 Professional and save yourself even more.

The Dell had one distinct advantage above and beyond the Acer Altos G300 a faster CPU. Whereas the Acer makes do with1.7GHz P4, the Dell is streets ahead at 2.4GHz and extra processing power always comes in handy.