Dell XPS 410: Core 2 Duo for the Masses
by Jarred Walton on September 18, 2006 12:20 PM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Multimedia Capabilities
One final item to talk about is the included TV tuner. The card is manufactured by Lumanate, Inc., and it includes a couple of Micronas chips as well as two NEC chips on the PCB. Windows Device Manager lists the dual TV tuner as Angel II MPEG. The card is naturally fully compatible with Windows Media Center Edition 2005. First, here's a shot of the card itself.
We did not try to test the TV tuner with other HTPC applications, but we did conduct some basic quality testing using the standard Windows MCE interface. Once MCE was set up for our location, watching and recording channels was extremely easy. In terms of quality, the picture looks good and subjectively compares to most other dual analog TV tuners. Without extensive testing time with additional cards, we can't say for certain whether it is equal to, better than, or not as good as other TV tuners we have reviewed. We would suspect it has a slightly lower quality image than the top analog tuners, but even the best analog signal pales in comparison to your standard HDTV signals. We captured a few sample videos to demonstrate the quality, seen below.
Note that deinterlacing is handled in part by the software during playback, so the output of Windows Media Center looks slightly different than what you might see in other media players. We chose to capture the unprocessed videos at their native resolution using Windows Media Player 10. You can spot some interlacing artifacts because of our capture methodology.
If you are looking for the absolute best quality analog tuner on the market, you'll probably want to do more research. Of course, if you are purchasing the XPS 410, you don't really get a choice about what TV tuner you want included. You can either get the dual-TV tuner or the single channel tuner, but both offer similar quality. In terms of out-of-the-box experience, the TV tuner left little to be desired. It works, the image quality looks about as good as most other analog TV tuners we have tested, and the Windows MCE interface is very easy to use.
One final item to talk about is the included TV tuner. The card is manufactured by Lumanate, Inc., and it includes a couple of Micronas chips as well as two NEC chips on the PCB. Windows Device Manager lists the dual TV tuner as Angel II MPEG. The card is naturally fully compatible with Windows Media Center Edition 2005. First, here's a shot of the card itself.
 |
| Click to enlarge |
We did not try to test the TV tuner with other HTPC applications, but we did conduct some basic quality testing using the standard Windows MCE interface. Once MCE was set up for our location, watching and recording channels was extremely easy. In terms of quality, the picture looks good and subjectively compares to most other dual analog TV tuners. Without extensive testing time with additional cards, we can't say for certain whether it is equal to, better than, or not as good as other TV tuners we have reviewed. We would suspect it has a slightly lower quality image than the top analog tuners, but even the best analog signal pales in comparison to your standard HDTV signals. We captured a few sample videos to demonstrate the quality, seen below.
 |
 |
 |
| Click to enlarge |
Note that deinterlacing is handled in part by the software during playback, so the output of Windows Media Center looks slightly different than what you might see in other media players. We chose to capture the unprocessed videos at their native resolution using Windows Media Player 10. You can spot some interlacing artifacts because of our capture methodology.
If you are looking for the absolute best quality analog tuner on the market, you'll probably want to do more research. Of course, if you are purchasing the XPS 410, you don't really get a choice about what TV tuner you want included. You can either get the dual-TV tuner or the single channel tuner, but both offer similar quality. In terms of out-of-the-box experience, the TV tuner left little to be desired. It works, the image quality looks about as good as most other analog TV tuners we have tested, and the Windows MCE interface is very easy to use.
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JarredWalton - Tuesday, September 19, 2006 - link
No problem - gotta do my job as author! :)You might want to email Gary on the HDD stuff, as that's basically beyond the scope of system testing. He's handling HDD reviews, so maybe you can pass on your suggestions. I think he's covered HDD performance well, though getting repeatable results with real world tests is going to be somewhat difficult.
JarredWalton - Monday, September 18, 2006 - link
^^ Er..."defragment" not "the fragment"
*EIGHT* thousand words, not "a thousand".
LOL Stupid Dragon NaturallySpeaking! (Stupid editor for not proofing my post before hitting reply.)
biggersteve - Monday, September 18, 2006 - link
An amazing story. XPS has a special support number 800-999-3355. We called this number and the guy in India was pretty efficient and helpful. XP had died with a reboot loop. Could not even safe boot. The guy advised us to use ctl-F11 to completely erase the HD and start over. We'd only had it a week so that was ok, though I suspect we could have done a roll-back, though we couldn't even safe boot. Anyway, all this happened after Microsoft helpfully installed 37 automatic updates. The guy at Dell said half the calls they're getting are because of this. (The other half must be the battery recall...) So he told us to turn off Windows Automatic Updates and never ever ever use it again. I only have one data point, but it looks like Microsoft released an automatic update that whacks all the XPS 410's out there and maybe more. So now we have a standoff where Dell is telling everyone to never use Microsoft automatic updates. Who wins? The virus and spyware writers. And Apple... since Apple controls the hardware and OS alike, they'd never release a cluster-fsck like this one.yyrkoon - Monday, September 18, 2006 - link
well, this should be obvious, but the person who told you to turn off windows automatic updates, and to 'never ever ever turn it on again' is an idiot. Sounds like either you had/ have spyware, or a virus, OR, you installed a hardware update from MS, instead using Dells drivers. I have personally run into 'MS certified drivers' issues with Dell systems in the past (more than once). I dont own a Dell myself, but the majority of our customers, that want a prebuilt in-expencive systems, we recommend to buy from Dell, so we do see our share of them.My recommendation, would be to USE automatic updates, but instead of having it download, and install the updates for you, configure it to notify you only, then you can manually download, and install yourself. When installing the updates, make sure to choose 'custom', and read what each update is all about. 9 times out of 10, if it isnt a critical update, or a security fix, you dont need it.
mino - Tuesday, September 19, 2006 - link
Agreed on the auto-off stuff.However it is possible some MS priority update will not like some HW/drivers even WHQL-ed ones. Compatibility is the word. Windows world is simply too diverse to check all of the possibilities.
mino - Monday, September 18, 2006 - link
Experienced such a story many times... SP2, .NET 2.0, specific "hot-fix" ...Cynic would say "Welcome to the world of Windows!". ;(
JarredWalton - Monday, September 18, 2006 - link
Interesting. I did download and apply all of the currently available patches from Microsoft without any problems. Note that I downloaded these manually rather than letting Windows do the patch automatically during the night. I don't know if that would make a difference, but I don't particularly like having the automatic update process running all the time.mino - Tuesday, September 19, 2006 - link
Most of the times things work, the problem are the situations when they do not.Not once have I had to spend a day installing a few updates a time, just to find out which one was incompatible .. so that some Windows feature would work.
Pastuch - Monday, September 18, 2006 - link
I am actually a Dell employee at their technical support centers in Ottawa Ontario Canada. I can say with all honesty that if you get anyone in north america youll probably get great support. The problem is that Dell phone support has a large number of different queues and our customers tend to get bounced around quite a bit. The company is really trying to improve their customer service which is why they have moved most of their tech support to Canada. If you know someone that isnt tech savy they have the option of buying a "Dell on Call" plan. This is an annual plan or single incident that provides support for pretty much anything. If you are going to get a Dell you can get a 30day trial of DOC (Dell on Call) support with your system. A typical DOC call will have the agent remotely connect to your computer and show you the basics of spyware/adware prevention, updates, system maintenance , etc. I have been an Anand reader for years and I think the type of people likely to buy this PC would benefit from Dell on Call software support. I actually worked in DOC for the last 6 months and was resently promoted to IT operations for the building here in Ottawa.For the record: I've never bought a dell and I'll continue to build all my PCs from scratch and overclock the $hit out of them. Nothing like taking an Opteron 146 (2.0) to 2.8 on AIr!
P.S. In the next year you will be able to get almost any of our machines with AMD or Intel chips. I was one of the thousands of Dell employees that have been pushing for this for a long time. ;)
regpfj - Monday, September 18, 2006 - link
To Jarred - great review, nice job. I liked the discussion of the case features and proprietary motherboard. It's fun to see a legacy-free setup, although serial and IDE have their place too. These unusual things make Dell stuff a bit more interesting to read about.On to my question -
On page 9, the fps vs resolution graphs confused me a tiny bit. For all games except Bf2, performance is a bit lower at 1600 x 1200 than at 1680 x 1050. I think 16x12 is about 9% more pixels than 16.8 x 10.5, right? So is Bf2 just weird, or did the numbers get turned around a bit?