This entry-level Media Center PC can handle home and office chores as well as manage music and photographs, but it lacks the TV tuner and remote control needed to fully exploit Windows XP Media Center Edition's multimedia capabilities.
A less capable Dimension E510 with a CRT monitor sells for as little as $749, but Dell beefed up our review unit's storage with a 250GB hard drive, a dual-layer 8X DVD+/-RW drive, and a 16X DVD-ROM drive. They also bumped the amount of DDR2-400 SDRAM up to 512MB, added an ATI Radeon X600 graphics card, and threw in a 19-inch Dell UltraSharp E193FP LCD display. These upgrades pushed the price up to $1394 (as of January 17, 2006).
The Dimension E510 delivered adequate power to handle home and office tasks, but its performance was a bit slower than we would have expected from a PC with a 3.2-GHz Pentium 4 640 processor. Its score of 89 on our WorldBench 5 test suite ranks closer to the marks posted by systems running on Pentium 4 500 series CPUs.
The Dimension E510 turned in merely acceptable results on our gaming tests, too. The ATI Radeon X600 SE graphics card supplements its 128MB of on-board memory with up to 128MB of system RAM, and it produced middle-of-the pack frame rates on both our Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Unreal Tournament tests. Game play on Return to Castle Wolfenstein looked smooth, but video images seemed very dark--even at the full brightness setting. Serious gamers who want to play newer, more-demanding games will want a graphics card that doesn't share system RAM.
Colors looked rich and sharp on the 19-inch LCD monitor, and small (6.8-point) type was impressively easy to read at the display's native 1280 by 1024 resolution. However, the Dell UltraSharp E193FP LCD supports analog RGB input only; a digital LCD display running off the system's digital DVI connector would probably yield sharper images.
Thanks to a special fist-sized ventilation port that perforates the front end of the attractive gray-and-black midsize tower case, the Dimension E510 can use a slow and quiet fan--enabling it to run with noticeably less noise than other systems. The case is upgrade-friendly. Too: An easy-off cover provides entry to the interior. Our test system's one free PCI slot--the other was filled with a modem--and its one PCI Express X1 slot are readily accessible. The hard-drive chassis is rotated so that the drive connectors face outward for quick access; and because they're fitted with quick releases, adding a hard drive to the one open bay is simple.
The Dimension E510 offers other nice touches for upgraders: Small clips secure the SATA power and data cables to the fan housing. An extra data cable for a second hard drive is already in place, as is a connected IDE cable for a floppy drive--very convenient for floppy drive emergencies, since the system has no floppy drive. (A 13-in-1 media card reader fills the only 3.5-inch external drive bay.)
Two USB ports and a headphone and microphone jack sit beneath the card reader on the front of the system, and four more USB ports reside on the back. DVI and VGA connectors, an S-Video-out port, and analog audio jacks for 7.1 surround sound sit on the back of the case. Unlike many Media Center PCs, the Dimension E510 has no digital audio-in or -out ports, so audiophiles seeking all-digital connections will be disappointed.
Dell's small but sturdy keyboard has firm and responsive key action, eight programmable buttons, and the best multimedia control buttons I've seen. A large, easy-to-locate volume control knob provides a nice reference point so you don't have to look at the keyboard to find the control buttons clustered around the knob.
This entry-level Media Center PC lacks a TV tuner and digital audio ports, but serves well as a home or home office PC.
Kirk Steers
