Dell Studio Desktop
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The Dell Studio Desktop ($1,079 direct, $1,369 with
a 20-inch widescreen monitor), aka Studio 540, is
the quintessential middle child: It's positioned as
Dell's mainstream multimedia PC, wedged right above
the Inspiron line and just below the high-end XPS
line. The result is a system that is the jack of all
trades, yet master of none. Sure, it can handle typical
multimedia tasks, but it doesn't really distinguish
itself from the crowd.
The Studio Desktop is a fairly attractive glossy
black minitower that looks similar to the Dell Vostro
410 business PC. It houses an Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200
processor, 2GB of DDR2 SDRAM, a largish 640GB hard
drive, ATSC/HDTV TV tuner, and an ATI Radeon HD 3650
graphics card—not bad parts, at all. These components
are enhanced by a few multimedia-friendly I/O connections
like two FireWire ports, a HDMI port on the graphics
card, and a digital audio-out port on the chassis.
This system can easily be hooked up to your home theater,
say, in your den.
The Studio Desktop also comes with a DisplayPort
for connecting new DisplayPort-capable monitors. So
far those are rare, and DisplayPort won't be a "must-have"
feature for another year or so, if ever. I like the
inclusion of multimedia-friendly 802.11n wireless
networking, but you'll need to have an 802.11n router
at home to use it at its full speed. (The networking
card will shift down to 802.11b/g networking, if that's
what you're router is—but maybe it's time to
upgrade.)
There's a bit of internal space for expansion such
as an extra hard drive (though its vertical orientation
inside the case would make installing a little awkward),
another PCI card, and an additional optical drive.
The available space for the optical drive highlights
the Studio Desktop's most glaring omission: while
the Studio Desktop line is available with Blu-ray
readers, there's no Blu-ray drive in this configuration,
at this price point. There's a garden-variety DVD
burner instead, which is a shame, since the rest of
the system is so HD-oriented. The built-in TV tuner
can record HD over the air or from your local cable
TV's unencrypted HD feed (that is, the basic channels).
The Dell Studio Desktop, like the Velocity
Micro Vector Z20, comes with very little installed
crapware. (You know, those programs that sit on your
desktop or in your Start menu and wait for you to
try them out so they can offer to sell you the full
version.) It omits the Microsoft Office 2007 60-day
trial and extraneous links to eBay that seem to infect
PCs like HP's and Gateway's, which often sell in big-box
retail stores. Dell isn't entirely innocent of product
placement, though: There's an icon on the Dell Dock
(a quick-launch program on the desktop) that brings
you to a Dell Web site where you can download all
of the usual crapware offenders, including "Dell
Games" by WildTangent. But the important point
is that they're not preinstalled, and that's a very
good thing.
Dell does give you a paltry 30-day trial subscription
to McAfee Internet Security (antivirus, antispam,
and so on). By comparison, Velocity Micro provides
a 12-month subscription. Appropriately for a multimedia-focused
system, it achieved above-average multimedia scores
on our benchmark tests. It completed our Windows Media
Encoder test in a quick 46 seconds and the Photoshop
CS3 test in just 28 seconds. This is a capable system
for multimedia tasks. Gaming results are another story.
The Studio Desktop can load fairly strenuous 3D games,
but it can't play them. The Studio Desktop got a very
jerky 20-frame-per-second score on Crysis at 1,280-by-1,024
resolution, and couldn't complete the Crysis test
at 1,920-by-1,200. Likewise, the Studio Desktop's
scores were low for World in Conflict (26 fps at 12x10
and 4 fps at 19x12). You'd need a much more powerful
graphics card to improve its 3D capability. That said,
older games like Company of Heroes and Prey should
play fine on the system as is.
The Studio Desktop is a competent system, but its
price is a strike against it. At about $1,080 without
monitor, it's more expensive than similar systems.
The Gateway DX4710-UB002A, which costs $179 less than
the Studio Desktop, performed almost identically to
the Dell on the benchmarks. In addition, the Gateway
surpassed the Dell in features by including an eSATA
port (for adding an additional hard drive), slightly
better graphics, more memory, and wireless networking
capability. (Then again, the Gateway is annoyingly
bogged down with crapware.)
Overall, the Studio Desktop is a solid-performance
system that can do many of the multimedia tasks that
the savvy PC user demands, but there are systems for
sale that do more for less money.
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