Review of Dell Vostro Slimline 200 Desktop With E4500
Processor (under construction)
I ordered a Dell Vostro 200 in a Slimline case back in October for our
son's apartment so that he could use it for studying, communicating and
that I could use it for work when staying with him. Dell had a very
nice deal at $489 for an E4500 processor, 1 GB of RAM and their low-end
80 GB SATA drive. The deal also included a 20-inch LCD display with
analog and digital inputs and it came with Windows XP Home which I
preferred over Vista.
I brought the boxes over to the apartment and they were conveniently
small as I had to park some distance from the apartment. Once in the
apartment, I was surprised at how nice the desktop box looked and at
how clean, simple and small it was. I put it together and got it up and
running using a wireless USB device for internet access. The wireless
USB device was awful for performance and I later moved the router so
that I could use CAT5 cable and turned off the wireless.
Our son has used the computer for a few months and is pretty happy with
it. It's at home right now as he's home for the break between
semesters. The one main thing that I noticed about this computer and
processor is how cool it runs. There's no heat coming from the exhuast
fan on the side or the top of the unit. It uses the Intel E4500
processor which is said to be very power-efficient and the use of
integrated video, audio and ethernet probably help in the power
consumption area. I swiped some speakers from another system at home so
that he could listen to course video lectures and a power strip so that
we could turn everything off to save power and the system works well
for the application.
At home, I wanted to improve performance. The performance wasn't bad in
that it's a little slower than my X2 5600+ Dell system but I wanted a
little more speed. I had it on Max Battery and moved it to Home/Office
in the power settings. I added 2 GB of 800 Mhz RAM and killed the
pagefile. And that made a noticeable improvement in performance. And
it's a popular machine at home. Our son is using the Conroe E6600 which
is the fastest machine in the house most of the time but he likes to
use the Vostro in the living room when it's cold in the basement. My
wife is the main user of the Vostro in the living room.
I'm considering added more disk space to the machine if he takes it
back to college. He needs a Linux system for his classes and I'm not
crazy about installing it in a virtual machine as I'm not very good
with Linux system administration. I did used to do system
administration on time sharing systems in the past but that was a long
time ago. So I might get him a new system if Dell announces Penryn
systems in the next week or might go with a MacBook Pro. OSX is close
enough to Linux for his computing class. But I can't wait too long. I
could add a 160 GB SATA drive for use as a Linux VM but that's not my
first choice.
Of course what most folks want to see are the pictures.
Here's the Vostro set up in a desk in a corner of our living room.
That's an old monitor that we used to use with the PowerMac and it
isn't the one that shipped with the Vostro. That monitor could use a
little time with the vacuum cleaner. It's using the leftover Mac
keyboard and Microsoft optical mouse.
Here's a view of the Slimline from the top where you can see the
exhaust. The Slimline can be oriented as in the picture above or it can
be oriented flat on the table. You can see the feet on the left that
support the Slimline when oriented for a low profile. I would guess
that many put the LCD screen on top of the Slimline when it's in
low-profile mode. You can also see some of the protective plastic that
I didn't remove on the left hand side. It has two USB 2.0 ports on the
front to go along with headset and microphone ports and the on-off
button. The optical drive is on either the left or right top of the
front. In my system, only one is used.
This is a view of the left-side and you can see a little dust on it.
The table was dusty and I did try mounting the display on this side but
decided to just leave it upright. You can see the other ventilation
grill in this picture.
The next picture is a closeup of the front and you can see the ports
and the switch. The button in the middle-top is to open the optical
drive bay I believe. The power switch is a bright blue when the system
is on (see first picture).
The back is pretty spartan. You can see the integrated video output
(VGA), six-speaker stereo, four USB 2.0 ports, integrated Ethernet,
room for four expansion half-size slots (two PCI, one PCI-X and one
PCI-X16, and power cord socket. The two screws require a screwdriver to
use the first time. Finger pressure works after that. There are also
tabs that you can attach a small lock to if you don't want others
opening up the system.
This is what we see when we take off the cover. Is pretty tight in
there but it still runs cool. The CPU and heatsink are under the big
fan on the motherboard. The optical drive is to the upper right and the
hard drive bays are to the lower right. The power supply is to the
lower left. That crossbar is probably there to support the weight of a
monitor placed on top of the box. Cabling is fairly clean although the
pasthrough of the brown and black cables is a little tricky. You just
slide them over the metal toung to install or deinstall.
Here's a closeup of the motherboard (or most of it) after removing the
crossbar. The memory is interleaved so adding memory in pairs is done
according to the color of the memory socket ends. You can see the case
fan at the top. The CPU heatsink and fan are pretty small compared to
the E521 with the X2 5600+ processor. Putting a second 5 1/4 device in
looks like it would be a little tricky as a few things would have to be
moved out of the way.
Here's a view of the inside near the back and you can see the expansion
slots and the power supply.
And here's a nice view of the disk area. You can see that there's room
for another 3 1/2 inch drive and space between the two drives for a
cooler. I don't think that a cooler is necessary with the smaller
drives available now. Maybe with the larger Seagate drives though.
This picture shows the lever that holds the expansion card ends in
place.
And that's it for the tour right now.
Last Updated January 5, 2007.
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