New Trends in Hardware

HP DX5150 Business Desktop PC Review
A is for AMD, ATI, and Alternative
Eric Grevstad

Automakers call them fleet sales -- high-volume, low-profit-margin purchases of scores of sedans by rent-a-car companies or government agencies. PC manufacturers' equivalent of the Hertz Taurus or Avis Impala is the enterprise desktop: your average office worker's minitower with adequate power for PowerPoint and Excel, a motherboard-mounted graphics chip with no ambition to play 3D games, and legacy ports for IT departments still using their inventories of serial or parallel peripherals and PS/2 mice and keyboards.

Want an example? See the HP Compaq DC5100 -- part of HP's mainstream or middle business-desktop series, with budget models below and ultra-secure, ultra-manageable platforms above. It's available in a minitower or small-form-factor case, with various Intel Celeron D or Pentium 4 processors (but none of the 64-bit-capable or dual-core chips). It uses Intel's 915GV chipset with previous-generation Graphics Media Accelerator 900 integrated video and neither an AGP nor PCI Express x16 slot for upgrades (though you can order one with a vintage PCI graphics card). It's as plain vanilla as a PC can get. Instead of buzz, it has zzzzz.

But hang on a second: There's another, newer model in HP's midpriced lineup. It's called the HP DX5150 (interestingly dropping the old Compaq label). It comes with AMD's Athlon 64 processor and can be ordered with either 32- or 64-bit Windows XP Professional, as well as up to 4GB of memory. (Penny-pinchers can opt for AMD's Sempron CPU.)

Its ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chipset delivers business-class graphics, but with both analog VGA and DVI-D outputs standard, so companies can equip busy workers with the productivity boost of dual displays, plus a PCI Express x16 slot for high-performance upgrades. Order a DX5150 with dual Serial ATA hard disks, and you've got RAID 0 and 1 support for creating a single virtual drive or automated backup mirroring, respectively.

We don't expect enthusiasts to thrill to the DX5150, but we think it's more tempting than most of the fare offered to PC fleet buyers.

Reference:http://www.hardwarecentral.com/hardwarecentral/reviews/5944/1/

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