Dell Dimension 5150c review

There are five discrete audio ports at the rear of the PC, courtesy of the motherboard's integrated audio card. This features an optical digital Sony/Philips Digital Interface (SPDIF) output port for driving a set of surround-sound speakers using cables that provide the highest possible sound quality. The 2.1-channel speakers provided in the package weren't very impressive but you can always customise your PC with a superior 5.1-channel speaker setup (an extra £70 on the Dell site).

Adding a set of surround-sound speakers is easy thanks to the variety of audio ports

Being a Viiv PC, the 5150c includes the Windows XP Media Center Edition operating system. This lets you access all your digital images, movies and music files via a single, easy-to-use interface.

Its 250GB hard drive provides plenty of space to stockpile over 200 hours of high-quality video. A 500GB drive is available for extreme Napster junkies, but only one internal hard drive can be installed in the 5150c at any given time.

Despite its abundance of disk space and unabashed multimedia focus, the 5150c lacks a TV tuner. This omission is strange in any Media Center PC, but seems even more bizarre considering our review sample comes with a Dell 2405FPW 24-inch widescreen TFT monitor (a £458 premium on a standard 19-inch flat-panel monitor). Dell doesn't offer a tuner as part of the customisation process, but there is one on their Web site available separately for £78, although at time of publication it had seemingly disappeared.

The screen is undeniably impressive and has a height-adjustable base, a swivel function so you can use it in portrait or landscape orientation, and a picture-in-picture (PIP) mode, so you can view two separate video sources simultaneously. It runs at a very high native resolution of 1,900x1,200 pixels, and  though it can't quite play high-definition movies at 1,080p -- the highest commercial video resolution -- it'll happily run 720p content.

This imposing 24-inch monitor is a compelling part of the bundle

Performance
The 5150c offers impressive performance when running everyday applications. It scored a respectable 3,241 in PCMark 2005, which isn't bad for a mid-range small form-factor PC.

Gaming performance was far less inspiring. Its integrated Radeon X600 SE graphics card racked up a pathetic 587 in 3DMark 2005, and only managed to run Doom 3 at 8fps. If you're a keen gamer, we recommend you look elsewhere. 

The speed of the 5150c's optical drive is also questionable. It took approximately 13 minutes to transfer 4GB of data between from a DVD disc and the hard drive -- a fact we attributed to the drive's laptop heritage.

Edited by Mary Lojkine
Additional editing by Nick Hide