Dell Inspiron 8200 Pentium 4-M 2.0GHz

Construction - Under the Hood (continued)

The back of the Inspiron 8200's motherboard is home to the remainder of components. Square in the middle of the motherboard's backside is the 845MP northbridge. The 845MP is simply the mobile version of the desktop 845DDR and, in fact, shares much in common with the desktop chipset. This gives the 845MP features such as a 400MHz processor bus, support for up to a 266MHz DDR memory bus, and support for external AGP 4X graphics. The warm-running northbridge is cooled via a metal plate that also serves as the bottom of the CPU heatsink mount.

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To the left of the northbridge are the system's memory slots. The Inspiron 8200 offers two 200-pin DDR SODIMM memory sockets, both of which are accessible via an access panel on the bottom of the system. Our system came with a total of 512MB of PC2100 DDR memory provided by one 256MB stick of Toshiba memory and one 256MB stick of Micron memory. Both sticks offered a CL rating of 2.5.

To the left of the memory is the internal 56k modem which happens to be a an ActionTec MD560RD modem.

On the right side of the motherboard there are a few more logic chips. First up is a a Texas Instruments PCI4451 PCMCIA controller.

There is also a TI TSB41AB1 chip located to the upper left of the PCMCIA controller. This chip gives the Inspiron 8200 its IEEE-1394 support.

The final item of importance on the rear of the Inspiron 8200's motherboard is the MiniPCI slot which is located on the upper right side. In our system this slot was occupied by a Lucent WCND 802.11b MiniPCI card. In use the internal 802.11b network card actually provided better connectivity than our D-Link PCMCIA 802.11b card. The internal antenna that our Lucent WCND was connected to ran along the side of the system up to the front right side.

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The Dell Inspiron 8200 is the first notebook we have been able to get our hands on that offers a 5400RPM hard drive. In our first notebook review, we showed just how big of a bottleneck a mobile hard drive is. We saw that performance of a system using a notebook drive can fall up to 15% compared to the same system running on a desktop drive. Obviously a faster hard drive will reduce this bottleneck and produce a system that is faster over all.

Although we did not compare the 5400RPM 40.0GB Toshiba MK4019GAX hard drive in our Inspiron 8200 to 4200RPM hard drives (that will be in its own review to be published soon), the specifications of the drive are impressive. The average seek time of the drive is 12ms compared to 13ms for a typical 4200RPM mobile hard drive, the average latency is 5.55ms compared to 7.14ms for many 4200RPM mobile hard drives, and the MK4019GAX offers a 16MB buffer compared to the 2MB buffer on many other notebook hard drives.

The high performance of the 5400RPM Toshiba MK4019GAX does come at a price. The power consumption of the drive is higher than that of 4200RPM hard drives, at a 5.0 watts start, 2.9 watts seeking, and 1.05 watts idle (compared to 2.7 watts, 2.45 watts, and 0.80 watts in a similar 4200 RPM drive).

Again, keep on the lookout for AnandTech's mobile hard drive roundup which should be published soon.

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The speakers on the side of the Inspiron 8200 appear to be fairly standard notebook speakers. The sound quality proved to be on par with other notebook audio solutions.

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The Inspiron 8200 makes use of decent sized 8-cell lithium-ion batteries. The system comes standard with one 66WHr battery rated at 4600mAh at 14.8V. A second battery can be installed in the modular bay. The battery includes a set of five LEDs mounted on the top edge that indicate battery status with the push of a button; useful in determining charge of extra batteries without having to put the battery in the system.

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