Dell Dimension 8400 review

Application performance
The Dell Dimension 8400 is the first PC we've tested with Intel's new 925X Express chipset. Despite support for faster processors and memory, this next-generation technology does not demonstrate any performance advantage over older hardware with today's applications. As we can see from the charts, until we see more robust applications especially designed for Intel's newer CPU architecture, performance won't be that much different from the technology that is already on the market.

The Dimension 8400's benchmark scores placed it among our highest-performing PCs. Bested only by the blazing Alienware Area-51 Extreme and its 3.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor, and the nonstandard, FAT-32-formatted hard drives of the AMD Athlon 64 FX-53-powered Polywell Poly 939VF-FX53, the Dimension 8400 achieved a SysMark 2004 score of 214, about 13 percent faster than the last Dimension 8300 we reviewed. We can see that neither the DDR2 memory nor the faster 3.6GHz Pentium 4 560 processor give the Dimension 8400 a major performance boost. While the Dimension 8400 is a powerful system, it will need supporting software before the hardware reaches its full potential.

Application performance (Longer bars indicate better performance)

BAPCo SysMark 2004 rating

SysMark 2004 Internet-content-creation rating

SysMark 2004 office-productivity rating

Alienware Area-51 (3.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, 1,024MB DDR SDRAM 400MHz)

226

237

215

Polywell Poly 939VF-FX53 (2.4GHz, AMD Athlon 64 FX-53, 1,024MB DDR SDRAM 400MHz)

216

230

202

Dell Dimension 8400 (3.6EGHz Intel Pentium 4 560, 1,024MB DDR2 SDRAM 533MHz)

214

243

188

Cyberpower Gamer Infinity 8000 (3.6EGHz Intel Pentium 4 560, 512MB DDR SDRAM 400MHz)

199

231

171

Dell Dimension 8300 (3.2EGHz Intel Pentium 4, 1,024MB DDR SDRAM 400MHz)

189

212

169

To measure application performance, we use BAPCo's SysMark 2004, an industry-standard benchmark. Using off-the-shelf applications, SysMark measures a desktop's performance using office-productivity applications (such as Microsoft Office and McAfee VirusScan) and Internet content-creation applications (such as Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Dreamweaver).

3D graphics and gaming performance
The Dell also marks the first time we've seen a PCI Express version of the new 256MB ATI Radeon X800XT graphics card. This card marks a brand-new processor for ATI -- and a huge performance boost. Looking at the charts, you can see the tremendous difference between the previous-generation cards from both Nvidia and ATI. The most significant result is the 1600x1200 Unreal Tournament 2003 test. With a score of 115.1fps, the Dell beats the next-best system, the Alienware Area-51 Extreme, by a staggering 82 percent.

This performance increase is likely due to the graphics chip technology more than the new PCIe interface. There are no games on the market yet that can truly take advantage of PCIe's increased bandwidth, so while the 82 percent increase over the Alienware system is impressive, we expect that performance gains will be even greater as we see more-demanding software.