My Review of the Dell Inspiron 8600

My Dell:

1.8ghz pentium M 745
15.4" WSXGA+ Screen
512 MB RAM
128mb Radeon 9600 Pro Turbo
30GB 4200 RPM HDD
1 Year Warranty
24x CD-RW DVD Combo Drive.
Dell 2100 Wireless
Roughly $1600 after coupon

Performance: 9 This is my first experience with a pentium M, and I am not disappointed (I beat the entire forum at Super-pi[ ]). I got roughly 4000 PCMarks using PCMark 2004. Window changes are snappy, and I can burn a CD in 3 minutes.

Gaming: 9 I can run Unreal Tournament 2004 at 1680x1050 resolution smooth as butter. This rig cranks out over 2900 3DMarks and got 21588 in Aquamark 3. Though a far cry from top-of-the-line desktop rigs with over 12,000 3dmarks, it plays every game I have tried at max settings with no anti-aliasing.

Screen: 8 The screen is big, but not too big. Bright, but not quite bright enough. I do notice slight ghosting when scrolling quickly, but I am usually too absorbed into games to tell. The color is right on. It is worlds better than my 9-year-old compaq. I couldn't even tell if that was backlit!

Weight: 4 The 8600 is a bit heavy. I usually carry with two hands, but i could be carried with one. I regarded battery life as more important than weight.

Battery life: 8 I get about 4.5 hours with maximum performance set, when doing e-mail and internet. Because of its massive GPU, I can set it at maximum performance and still play UT2004 at 1280x800 for 3 hours. I would like to see a pentium 4 do that.

Heat: 5 Dell did a terrible job cooling the graphics card. They used wax to transmit heat from the die to the casing of the card, and the put a heat pipe on the casing! This caused the GPU to reach 100 degrees Celcius during gaming, terrible for the life of the card. I went in myself and connected the heat pip directly to the die with copper and a light coating of arctic silver. This lowered the temperature to 75 degress, even under heavy loads. Dell, you can do better. The CPU is cooled very well, which is deserved for a $450 processor. I have never seen it go above 55 degrees C.

Overall score: 8.5

Questions are welcome Thank you [ ]

 

Why only 1 year warranty?

 

I got a two-year warranty on a desktop, and really regretted it. I am such a tweak monkey that the extra money would be wasted with the warranty void. Check out my signature, if I didn't know what I was doing I could have fried the video card and yield much higher temperatures than desired [ ] If you have no interest in overclocking, by all means, go for the longer warranty. I figure that the money I save would cover for a lot of the individual components (ie video card, hard drive, RAM...) Those are the kind of things that I could install myself.

Completed mods:
GPU cooling (100°C->75°C)
Mods in progress:
8600c to 8600 keyboard swap (to get the eraser head).
Tweaks: Radeon 9600 pro (337/242) at 400/300
~TWEEK

 

that is a colossally good price... yeesh. I just went and checked out how much it would cost for me to buy that right now, and it runs up about $2060, assuming you and I are both using US dollars. (I got that number by converting from canadian)

I'm considering the 8600, but without the 9600 pro and an 80 GB HDD and 1.6 GHz instead. Roughly how heavy is yours..?

 

I have an 8600 similar to Andrew's and mine is just over 7 lbs.

 

It is about as heavy as 1 1/2 reams of paper, or a 3/4 full milk jug.

Completed mods:
GPU cooling (100°C->75°C)
Mods in progress:
8600c to 8600 keyboard swap (to get the eraser head).
Tweaks: Radeon 9600 pro (337/242) at 400/300
~TWEEK

 

Or, go to the gym and get a 5 pound and 2.5 pound weight, stick them in one hand. there ya go

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by spets

 

Mine is:
WUXGA 15.4"
Pentium M 1.5 GHZ
512 MB, 1 slot
64 MB Nvidia GO5200
40 GB 5400 RPM HDD
Intel Pro 2200 802.11 b/g
24x CD-RW DVD Combo 8600
Basic 1 year warranty
$1563.16 delivered to my door