I the past Dell have occasionally had a bit of a reputation for monkeying around with hardware. I've seen motherboards that have had the ATX connector omitted so you would have to buy a higher end model to play games (even though the print was on the board). There has even been some talk of Dell swapping around wires in the PSU so you couldn't replace it with an off the shelf model if it broke. Because of all this I have been particularly interested in the new Dell Vostro series and what improvements and changes Dell have made.

Unboxing

The first thing I noticed which you don't see very often these days is the Vostro ships with a Windows install DVD. Whilst many manufacturers offer a way to do a reinstall from the HDD or perhaps tell you to burn the disks on bootup you just cant quite beat physical media; so this is a nice touch.

The case is quite basic but at the same time cosmetically quite appealing in an unobtrusive kind of way. Its a pretty much a normal mini tower case with an attractive satin black front and top, finished off with gloss black side panels. The satin is quite a nice feature as it means its reasonably finger print resistant on the parts that are important. The drive bays themselves have a similar construction to the later Dell Dimension desktops with flaps over the bays and front access panel to make it look tidy.

Interestingly enough theres no messing around with dodgy plastic catches to open the case. Its all metal with proper metal screws all around (with two thumb screws on the main side panel for quick access). It's quite satisfying to see this as often push buttons or catch based mechanisms are the norm which either break, are confusing or just plain encourage component theft. This is the first time I've seen proper screws on a Dell case in a long time and amazingly enough even the cards being held in by a screw (albeit one screw covering all the slots but then again most people barely have more than one card these days anyway).

The connectivity is as you would expect. 4x front USB, 4x rear USB, network, multichannel sound, an everything in one media reader (on this model) and front audio. No legacy but most people usually don't need that anymore anyway and if you did a quick trip to the shop will get you a USB adapter.

Inside

On the inside we see what appears to be a bog standard 300W ACBel PSU, nothing special just the usual Chinease stuff you could get anywhere. I have yet to check the ATX pinout but one would presume after the bad publicity from last time it probably is.

Following the cables down we can see its connected to a FoxConn G33M02 motherboard. No slots removed, no proprietary modifications (that I can see) and everything as it should be. In my experience Dells usually have their own design motherboards so this is an interesting change of strategy.

The FoxConn motherboard itself comes furnished with amongst other a standard PCI-E x16 slot, in this case filled with a fan-less ATI X1300 Pro. I should point out at this point that fan-less is most definitely a GOOD thing. In my many years of experience working as a web designer and IT support contractor the most common failures I see on PC's are hard drives and fans.

Something else which grabbed my attention was for the first time in a long time I am looking at a Dell desktop with no fancy air ducting. Just an absolutely bog standard case fan and very average CPU cooler, everything pretty much as you would get if you bought an aftermarket CPU. While perhaps a little unexciting this will definitely make upgrades and maintenance a lot easier.

This particular model is equipped with two hard drives in the form of SATA Western Digital Caviars (WD2500JS). I didn't particularly want two drives but since they were free on this particular Dell offer I wasn't going to turn them down. Unfortunately I didn't have much time to look into it but it seems that they cannot easily be converted to a mirrored setup which is a bit of a shame (of course for Linux users can do RAID in software so this is a non issue for them).

Interestingly enough the drives themsleves are mounted on their sides and stacked vertically (more than likely to aid cooling and airflow). This means they take up all the space between the base of the case and the bottom of the drive bays of which there is one 3.5" and two 5.25". Once upon a time I would have bitched about this but these days I find myself very rarely using more than just a single 5.25" everything round burner and possibly a 3.5" card reader (and I usually prefer that on the desk rather than in the PC anyway) so this is more than enough, especially for a basic PC. There is no rubber insulation between the drives and the caseand I have to say I've not used it in a silent room yet but the drives appear to be of the reasonably quiet type so this is probably not a worry.

Summary

Basically the Vostro appears to be a well built, basic, but solid and practical desktop which appears to use nothing but standard components.

Dell have kept to their promise which was to deliver what people want without the fuss for a bargain price. They even managed to do it with a slight element of style in an inconspicuous kind of way..

On bootup it can be seen that most of the shovelware is gone (apart from Google desktop and a couple of other applications which are easily removed) and being shipped with a Windows DVD means you can always reinstall it anyway.

Overall I would recommend this system to everyone but the power user that wants to cram millions of drives and cards in. After all if I was to build a machine with a budget of more than twice what this box costs it still wouldn't be as nice.

Posted by Daniel: 20:50, Thu 16th Aug 2007