During the past two years we have seen the clock speed of Pentium and Athlon chips steadily increasing, and now the 2GHz barrier has fallen.

Intel's 2.2GHz Pentium 4 is the star of the new Dimension 4400 from Dell. The machine clocked up the fastest overall score we have to date seen in our Labs test and showed that it will deal admirably with any job you throw at it. But aside from performance, is the rest of the system up to par?

The tower case is finished in a matt black and has a clever design, allowing it to be swivelled open. The right side holds the drives and the left everything else, enabling easy access.

Considering the 4400's princely processor, the 256MB complement of DDR memory is a tad stingy. One spare DIMM slot is available to accommodate upgrades.

Similarly, the 40Gb hard disk drive seems a little slim these days, though it provides sufficient storage for most tasks. An excellent CD-RW/DVD combination drive delivers further storage flexibility.

The GeForce3 Ti 200 graphics card produced a great result in our 3D visuals benchmark and, combined with the 17in monitor, will make most games and DVDs look fantastic.

Elsewhere, the Turtle Beach sound card combines well with the Harman Kardon speakers to provide quality sound, so it's a good system for gamers and/or film and music fans. There is no FireWire port, which is disappointing, but there are four USB ports for adding peripherals.

Dell wants plenty of money for this PC and the bulk of it pays for the fancy Pentium 4 processor. It's undoubtedly a good machine, but can you afford to be this fancy?

SPECIFICATIONS

Contact

Dell: 0870 152 4850 www.dell.com/uk