After January's shenanigans with this system, it's nice to have it back in the testing Labs. My initial impressions haven't changed: this  is one mean system that will handle anything you throw at it, and the benchmarks back that claim.

Internally it's running the 3.06GHz Hyper-Threaded (HT)  Pentium 4 with 256MB of RDRAM,  which makes this it formidable regardless of what you intend to use it for, but Dellhas also given it some of the best multimedia components available. This includes a 120GB hard drive, 128MB RADEON 9700 Pro graphics card, a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 and a DVD+R drive. We benchmarked with the patch from Microsoft applied, and tested it with HT both enabled and disabled. As we mentioned with the Intel reference system in January, HT doesn't give you a huge performance boost, but its advantages are in multitasking.

If we were looking for some of the highest benchmark scores we could attain we'd highly
commend this machine, however speed isn't everything and cost plays a massive part. Dell's pricing is better than spot-on – it's under what we'd expect.