When we turned on TI’s PC we were shocked at the noise, but when we turned on Dell’s PC we thought it was broken. It’s whisper quiet thanks to the BTX cooling unit which quietly directs air through vents at the front of the stylish case. Dell sensibly offers an OS upgrade from Windows XP Home to MCE for $89 for those who want a quiet media centre.

But quietness wasn’t the first thing we noticed: that was the matching 19in LCD monitor – astounding for the price. But all this engineering and design comes at a cost and you don’t have to look far to see which corners Dell has cut.

Not only is there no graphics card, but there’s no motherboard connector for a graphics card. The proprietary Dell motherboard has only two PCI slots and a 1x PCI-Express slot. A modem sits in one of the former. The major design flaw is that the integrated graphics connector is VGA, so it can’t make use of the LCD’s DVI connector. That said, we found few faults with the display which remained crisp and sharp. We had no real problems with lag either as the 8ms response time was sufficient. Also worth noting is that the monitor has a four-port USB hub. This is useful as the BTX technology only allows USB peripheral connections (there are four on the back and two at the front of the case). An all-format media card reader is included, as is 5.1 audio and 10/100 Ethernet. There’s no FireWire, though.

Only 512MB of RAM is included, and the hard disk is only 160GB – with space for only one more. All in all we’re disappointed with the insides as the excessive dead space offers little scope for upgrading. Dell has also kept the price down with the processor. A single-core 3GHz Pentium 4 630 managed only 0.73 in our benchmarks – twenty seven percent slower than our performance reference PC and some way behind even the ‘low-powered’ notebooks we have seen recently.

But we shouldn’t be too harsh on Dell. This PC isn’t designed for the enthusiast and undiscerning buyers will be very happy with its design, quietness and build quality. We’re even fans of the stylish keyboard with its lack of bezel. Also, the mouse, while basic, was the most comfortable on show. Add to this Works 7, Sonic MyDVD and Dell’s one-year onsite warranty, and people who simply want a PC predominantly for office applications and web browsing will be very happy indeed. If it had a DVI port it would win our recommendation, but for now it just misses out.