Excellent small computer from a company you should have business with.
Written: Apr 22 '04 (Updated Apr 24 '04)
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Pros: Small, quiet, powerful, great support, great price, excellent value
Cons: none if you think about it as a space-saver PC.
The Bottom Line: Reliable, powerful, space-saving PC backed up by excellent Dell support and variety of warranty options to choose from. With a slim LCD display looks, feels and runs great.
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| supplier's Full Review: Dell Dimension 4600C (D46CRS) PC Desktop |
As a high-tech savvy, at the moment I own four PC’s and I bought and maintaining for my relatives three more. One of my computers is a supper portable notebook from Sony, another one I assembled myself and the rest 5 I got from Dell. Probably soon I write reviews on all of them. I started having business with Dell in 11/2002 by buying top of the line Precision 650 workstation. I’ve chosen Dell as to Gateway, Sony, HP or some others by a lot of reasons. Major once are: price, configurations, warranty, ability of the hardware to be upgraded (!!), customer support and from opinions i read on professional chat sites (as well as computer rumors and articles posted everywhere on web). By now I'm in love with Dell. My second choice for computers (and the first choice for electronics -- is Sony). I was so impressed with Dell’s prices and more important Dell’s support and peace of mind return policy so I bought another PC for my daughter, Dimension 4600 ( “D-4600”) – an excellent blend of power and value with room to upgrade if needed. It’s a great family PC, period. (Eventually I bought two more D-4600’s). But for my 4-year old daughter I got Dimension 4600C (“C” stands for compact) as she has very small table and I couldn’t fit a mid-size tower in there. As have been mentioned in other’s reviews it has an appealing small case, but what is more important – what Dell puts inside of this case. And inside is top of the line Micro-ATX motherboard based on 865G Intel chipset. This chipset supports 533 or 800 MHz FSB speeds, DDR-333 or DDR-400 memory, Built-in SATA controller for the new generation of hard drives with data transfers up to 150 MB/s. If you not familiar with all that technology – please ask somebody or just believe me – it’s hot and powerful. Farther down in my review I’ll tell you how very easy to upgrade this computer to top of the line machine with a very little money.
I’m not agreeing with stlmom about Dell hiding any specs for the computer. On all computer comparison charts available all around Dell’s website Dell puts the poor rating on upgradeability for D-4600C as it doesn’t have any available empty PCI slot for any upgrades. When you going to choose any of Dell’s computer they give you a full specs, pictures with different views, available empty slots and much more. Dell very recently upgrades its website and it became even more user friendly. What is important that you can reach Dell with any question 24x7 and they are very knowledgeable people. I only agree with stlmom on CD-ROM complaint – to save space Dell put the same compact optical device as they put in all their notebooks. For an adult it shouldn’t be a big inconvenience, but for 4-year old child it’s kind of hard to put CDs in. But D-4600C has 6 USB-2.0 ports available for upgrade – so I got very cheap external DVD+/-RW burner ($59 after rebates and coupons) so my daughter can change games without my involvement and I can burn DVD or music when I need.One of the useful options to upgrade to is “Front/ Rear IEEE 1394 Ports and Dual Front PCMCIA slots with Data Fax Modem” for extra $100. You’ll get a firewire port, a modem and two PCMCIA slots which you can use to put one WI-FI wireless card and Bluetooth card simultaneously. But at this point you will have only USB ports available for the updates.
Personally, to save money and to get a better wireless reception, I did the following:
I got a D-4600C without above referenced upgrade. Bought low profile IEEE-1394 card from newegg.com ($22) and installed it in place on modem that came with the PC. Bought a D-link USB wireless adaptor for ($14 after rebate) – this adapter has a better reception than PCMCIA card adaptors and cost much cheaper.
One of the coolest upgrades that you can do on this machine (that I personally tried and I loved it)is to:
1. to buy a D-4600C without a graphic card (only internal graphics)
2. buy through a Dell’s small business spare parts division a ATI AIW-9000 low-profile graphic card with a built-in TV tuner, component video in/out and S-video out connections for $159 This card not available in stores!
3. buy from Dell a cable adapter to connect this card to a monitor ($15)
4. go to www.ati.com/support and download all drivers and multimedia center software for free – and you got a TV/TIVO recorder.( You don’t need to buy a much more expensive multimedia center PC that based on D-4600C computer and runs Windows XP multimedia center edition).
Eventually I put above mentioned ATI graphic card into the different computer as my kids can watch normal TV and don’t need to have one on PC.
The bottom line – if you need a space saving PC – Dimension 4600C is the best. It’s very advanced and powerful, has plenty USB ports for external expansions, internally can handle the latest top of the line components. It has a built in graphics if you need computer only for office tasks and the internet – you don’t need spend extra money on AGP graphic card. Fully loaded this computer handles all multimedia tasks very well. Pentium4 CPU with 800MHz core speed has a new technology called hypo-threading (HT). Windows sees one physical CPU as two logical processors and all multimedia tasks run much faster. It worth mentioning that computer comes with high quality 5.1 built-in sound (ready for surround sound experience). It’s ready for networking or high speed connection with a built-in network controller.
Dell released all fixes and upgrades for all known previous problems -- so now it's is the time to buy this machine.
Even though technology changes quickly this machine as of today can kick some butts.
After my workstation, the D-4600C is my second favorite computer in the house. I started to use it more often as it usually occupied less than D-4600 of my older daughter. So if I need a backup computer or just an extra power I use D-4600C. It’s good for burning DVDs from my digital camcorder. Just for the comparison my Dell Precision 650 workstation has two physical 3.2GHz processors (it means Windows works with four logical CPUs) , 1 GB of DDR-266 RAM, the fastest SCSI hard drives available for sale today, professional graphic card – this station renders one hour digital movie and burns it onto DVD for 2hrs and 15 minutes. The same task done with this little Dimension 4600C PC takes only 3Hrs and 19 minutes. Only just over 30% increase in time for doing the most difficult multimedia task (as compare it to a professional multimedia workstation). It speaks for itself.
Now the trick I used to save money. Before I continue I should mention that Dell’s customer support honors any upgrade or modification you make to Dell’s PC during warranty period, but if they will determent that PC got broken because of your upgrade wasn’t done by a qualified specialist – you’ll loose warranty. Also if you ever will need to send the computer beck to the Dell’s repair center you need to send it in its original configuration!
I bought the cheapest configuration available for D-4600C (2.4GHz with 533MHz FSB, 512 DDR RAM (upgraded from 256MB) and a value (5400RPM) 40GB hard drive – all for $347 (after $150 rebate, $100 instant discount and $25 off daily published coupon, no monitor). All I had to do is to get a new boxed version 3.0GHz/800MHz Pentium 4 CPU (the best prices from reliable resellers are from www.newegg.com or www.zipzoomfly.com) it’s around $220. (Boxed CPU has a 3 year warranty and OEM version only 90 days.) You can reuse heat sink and CPU fan from original CPU that came with your computer. As soon as you put new CPU into computer FSB speed automatically steps from 533MHz to 800MHz. What is important that Dell uses even for slow CPU’s with 533MHz bus speed the highest quality DDR-400 memory (which works with slow CPU as DDR-333). So by upgrading only computer’s CPU I gained the memory speed as well, without buying a new memory. At this point you have top of the line all around home or office computer. The slowest part left to upgrade is the hard drive. From the same stores I mentioned above you can get a top of the line Seagate 120GB ATA/100 wit 8MB cache for less than $100. I suggest a Seagate as it runs cooler (which is important for small cases and much more reliable than Maxtor’s drives. Your other option can be a Western Digital (WD) hard drive. Or even better you can get a supper fast WD Raptor 74GB SATA/150 hard drive with 10,000RPM from www.buy.com for $200 (or for $185 if you're first time buyer). After these very small upgrades you’ll get what I got – very speedy and compact PC under $700.
Highly recommend it for SOHO, or if you are limited on space and still want a powerful PC or for the people who never opens their PC's for upgrades. If you want to get discount coupons you must search the Internet for them from affiliated sites, before you will going shopping on dell.com
P.S. in all my reviews I refuse to spend time retyping specs from a manual or manufacturer’s websites. My goal is to show what was important to me in choosing a product, so people can make their own decisions if those features I needed are essential to them or not. Nobody should buy any product just based on someone’s review only – to be happy with you purchase you have to do your home work. But it’s strictly my personal opinion (for epinions.com).
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 347 AR
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium
Processor speed: over 1000
RAM: More than 256
Internal Storage: CD-RW
Hard Drive (GB): Over 50
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Epinions.com ID:
supplier
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Member: Vlad
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Reviews written: 10
Trusted by: 0 members
About Me:
Computer programmer at the moment. Engineer in the past. Love high tech stuff.
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