Vostro 200

Nice writeup JoeC.

I ordered the same thing (although the slim tower version) for my boss earlier this year and I've been impressed with it. The case is pretty decent, the G33 chipset seems like a good performer, and I love the screwed heatsink design compared to Intel's stock design. The one I got came with 1 GB of RAM, an E4500, XP Home, and a 20" widescreen LCD for $488 after shipping and tax.

No FSB padmods in sight for this system but it's nice to know it will take it. It was nice to see that Dell used two sticks of 512M instead of four sticks of 256M, freeing up two RAM slots from the factory. I bought a couple of gigs of Corsair Valueselect from Newegg for $40 to bring the system up to 3 gigs total and it's worked like a charm since. Pretty quiet system too, the boss mentioned that he never hears it running, unlike his old Shuttle XPC that I'd previously built for him. He's pretty happy with it, and the screen too.

No beef with Dell from this IT manager, I've bought a few of their systems now. All solid. The one time I had to deal with support was for an Inspiron laptop with a failed keyboard, and Dell's support services were exceptional. Also, nice to see that you can still get XP through the business section if you want.

I'm tempted to buy one for the Mrs.

I'd like to see Joe do a 333 fsb padmod on it and see how well it runs then. I'm almost positive that the proc should do that on stock vcore, since it only has a 9 multi on the proc in his system. That would make a 3 GHz economy machine out of it.

muddocktor said:

I'd like to see Joe do a 333 fsb padmod on it and see how well it runs then. I'm almost positive that the proc should do that on stock vcore, since it only has a 9 multi on the proc in his system. That would make a 3 GHz economy machine out of it.

Click to expand...

http://www.overclockers.com/articles1522/index07.asp

Temps in the low 50s during prime, with that stock-like heatsink that's not too bad at all. A simple 266 mod on the slim Vostro with the E4500 should be a piece of cake...it's very tempting. I don't suppose these Vostros would support voltage pad-mods too?

benbaked said:

http://www.overclockers.com/articles1522/index07.asp

Temps in the low 50s during prime, with that stock-like heatsink that's not too bad at all. A simple 266 mod on the slim Vostro with the E4500 should be a piece of cake...it's very tempting. I don't suppose these Vostros would support voltage pad-mods too?

Click to expand...

Nice write up. Cudos to Joe.

Just need some pics of his Mods.

Thanks for sharing your info Baked.

Yeah, I saw that article yesterday too. Just like I thought, it worked out just fine. These Core based processors have so much headroom with the lower clocked models that it makes doing a padmod overclock a viable option even with a cheapo system such as the Vostro that JoeC has.

I was one of the people that emailed him to try out a 333 fsb padmod too.