Dell Dimension XPS M233s

Housed in a medium-sized tower case, the Dimension XPS M233s has a total of seven drive bays, three of which--external 5.25in. and 3.5in. bays and an internal 3.5in. bay--are free. The other four bays are occupied by the floppy disk drive, IBM 6Gb IDE hard disk, NEC 16-speed IDE CD-ROM drive and an Iomega 100Mb IDE Zip drive.

The motherboard is based on an Intel 430VX PCIset and an AMI BIOS. The 233MHz Pentium MMX processor sits in a Socket 7 ZIF connector, and is supported by 512K of Level 2 cache. There are just two DIMM sockets, both occupied in our review system by 32Mb memory modules to give the maximum 64Mb of RAM. There's the usual set of I/O facilities, including two USB ports, a serial port, PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports, a parallel port, plus the floppy and IDE hard disk interfaces. Also built into the motherboard is a Creative Labs Vibra 16C FM sound chip with its associated MIDI/joystick, audio line in, microphone and audio line out connectors. Supplementing the FM synthesis and digital audio playback/recording facilities of this chip is a wavetable upgrade card fitted with an EMU800 wavetable chip and located in one of the system's two ISA slots.

For expansion, there are two ISA slots, a shared PCI/ISA slot and three PCI slots. One of the PCI slots houses the system's graphics card, a Matrox Millennium with 4Mb of WRAM, which can deliver a maximum resolution of 1,600 by 1,200 with a 16-bit colour depth. Output is fed to a Dell D10254E 17in. monitor, which can handle resolutions up to 1,600 by 1,200 with a refresh rate of 70Hz. However, most users will prefer to use the Millennium's 1,280-by-1,024 or 1,024-by-768 modes, for which the monitor supports 100Hz and 110Hz refresh rates respectively.

The Dimension XPS M233s comes with Windows 95 and Office 97 Small Business Edition loaded, three blank 100Mb Zip disks, an IntelliPoint PS/2 mouse and a Windows PS/2 keyboard. It's well built and suitable for use either at home or in the office.-by

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