Slimmer is better

Jun 27, 2007 12:36 GMT  ·  By

If you look at Dell's product line you will notice that each time a new device, LCD or system comes out it draws a lot of attention especially if it belongs to the XPS line. However it seems than not only XPS products can turn heads especially if you look at the latest Inspiron desktops. Just take a quick look at the latest 530s/531s series and you will understand why.

Dell's new Inspirons are available with both AMD (Sempron, Athlon 64 X2 ranging from 4000+ to 5600+) but also INTEL (Celeron & Pentium D, Core 2 Duo up to E6400) CPUs. AMD-based Inspirons use the NVIDIA MCP 61 core logic and as a result they come with an integrated GPU based on the Nvidia Geforce 6150 design.

On the other hand INTEL-based Inspirons use the new G33 Express chipset and that means you will have to settle for a crappy GMA 3100 GPU which lacks P.S. and V.S. hardware layers. As for the Dram / storage setup, the new Inspirons support up to 4GB of memory and up to 1TB of HDD storage when both SATA ports are coupled with HDDs (Dell offers a 500GB hard drive as the maximum available).

Dell's Inspirons also come with DataSafe image mirroring technology and RAID 0 if you want to spice up your storage performance a bit. On the optionals side you get a WiFi adapter, a classical 13-in-1 media reader, a TV tuner compatible with Windows Vista (in terms of drivers) and a Creative X-Fi audio card if you're not satisfied with onboard audio quality.

On the Os side, Dell offers Windows Vista Home Basic or Windows Vista Home Premium for all the Inspirons. As an option the 530 series can also come preinstalled with Ubuntu Linux which is good if you don't want to pay the extra bucks for a Vista license. Price-wise, both the 530s and the 531s Inspirons are selling for $349 or more, depending on your configuration and list of optionals. All systems come with 1-year limited warranty.

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