Dell Inspiron 8200 2.2GHz P4-M

A worthy desktop replacement that is rich in features.

Price: £2055.08

Manufacturer: Dell

Ratings

Overall rating:

Rate this product

Verdict

Pros:

The fastest notebook graphics
Good battery life
Very fair price

Cons:
The underside of the chassis gets hot in use

Overall:
Dell has made the first true desktop replacement notebook. Add a mouse and a pair of headphones and you'll never be tied to a desk again. Although the processor and memory are impressive, it's the Radeon Mobility 9000 graphics that really makes a difference

Leo Waldock, Personal Computer World 31 Oct 2002

Dell has overhauled its Inspiron 8200 notebook. It now includes a 2.2GHz Pentium 4 and ATI's new Mobility Radeon 9000, and is available at a reduced price.

A quick glance at the features shows the processor is a Mobile Pentium 4 running at 2.2GHz backed up by 512MB of DDR PC2100 memory. You also get a 60GB hard drive, so the innards resemble a desktop PC more than a notebook. However, this 8200 includes Microsoft Works, where the previous one had Office XP, so there's an explanation for the price difference.

The most interesting aspect of this desktop replacement is that Dell has used the new ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 chip in place of the previous Nvidia Geforce4 440 Go.

Just look at the massive 3Dmark 2002 score of 6,627 and you'll be convinced. That's substantially faster than the score of 3,794 previously achieved with the Nvidia chip, although that was with a slightly slower processor.

Dell was able to make the switch from one chip to the other as both graphics packages are pin-compatible. Dell installed both Nvidia and ATI drivers in our review notebook so we suspect it had been doing back-to-back testing of the two chips.

The Mobility Radeon 9000 comes in three versions and can include dedicated graphics memory. The version we received has 64MB of DDR memory, whereas other options are 32MB DDR, and one without any dedicated memory. The latter relies purely on system memory.

You can see from the model name that Mobility 9000 is a mobile version of the desktop Radeon 9000 chip. The major difference is the addition of a technology called Powerplay, which aims to save battery life. That comes down to clock gating, where different parts of the graphics engine shut down when not in use.

For instance there is no need for the 3D part of the chip to be working when you only have Word open. We'd say that Powerplay is a success, as the 8200 battery lasted for one hour, 58 minutes in our tests.

The rest of the chassis is impressive too. There's a combo drive on the left side along with TV-out, Lan and modem ports. On the right are the usual mini jacks plus Firewire, infrared and a pair of PC Card slots.p>The sound is nothing special, but notebooks are never designed for audio.

Both the trackpoint and touchpad are responsive and easy to get to grips with, and the keyboard is well laid out and comfortable to use.

The 15in screen is excellent and has a wide viewing angle, although we found the native resolution of 1,600 x 1,200 a little too small for comfort, and the majority of other resolutions are rather blurred.

The chassis is fairly bulky but that's not a real criticism, as Dell has included every feature we could hope to see. However, we were slightly dismayed by the heat generated by the hardware, and both the chassis and power brick get rather hot to the touch.

As Dell has chosen to install Windows XP Home as well as Works 6, it is fair to say this isn't a business notebook, despite the Lan and infrared.

In our Sysmark 2002 test we got a score of 178, which is superb for a notebook. It means that the 8200 can genuinely be used as a replacement for a desktop PC.

We feel this notebook would be ideal for students or road warriors; anyone who doesn't want to transport a whole PC about. In an ideal world it would be smaller and lighter, but that would make heat dissipation more awkward.SPECS