I've had this notebook for 2.5+ years. It was my first notebook and when buying one I wanted the best I could get and afford. It had a 1.8GHz Intel Mobile Pentium 4m when I bought it along with a 40GB IBM/Hitachi 5400RPM HDD, NVidia 440Go video card with 32 MB RAM, 15" SXGA+ screen (1400x1050 resolution), side CDRW drive and 256MB RAM (never buy extra RAM from Dell when making the purchase, more than likely you can buy it elsewhere and even from Dell cheaper than you can with the system or at least that has been my experience). I have since installed a 2.4GHz Mobile P4m CPU, ATI 64MB Radeon video card, 1GB RAM and changed the HDD out to a seagate 40GB 5400 RPM model. I also added a DVD-ROM/CDRW drive to the media/modular bay which I can take out to install a second battery.
I liked it a whole lot when I got it but I really needed a notebook to take with me almost everywhere I go for various reasons and the i8200 is big and heavy. Not bad if you move it around the house from one room to another but to throw it over your shoulder, along with the bag and all the junk you need or choose to carry with it in the bag, it gets REALLY heavy in a short period of time. The design of the i8200 CPU heatsink and fans leave a little to be desired. The heatsink has a heat pipe going from the plate locked down on the CPU to a fin area where the fans are. It does have 2 fans but these fan only blow air across the CPU heat pipe fins and do nothing for the GPU which sits near the middle of the notebook. At times, when ripping music CDs or gaming, the GPU can get to 60-65 degrees C along with the CPU going over 70C. Once you stop using the full power/speed of the CPU the fans cool the CPU down fairly quickly but the GPU still stays hot. There is a heatsink on top of the GPU with a heat pipe mounted to the bottom of the keyboard to try and take some of the heat away but it isn't that efficient. The battery life isn't bad when you have both batteries installed, about 4+ hours, but with only one battery the run time drops to around 2 or less hours. All in all it has served me well and I have never had any problems with it. It is fast, the screen is crisp and bright and has not failed to run any game I have, including Doom3. I like the layout of the older Dell notebooks more than the new ones. If Dell had kept the older 3 spindle design with the option to have 2 batteries installed at the same time and have a CD drive installed with the newer Pentium M CPU I would of bought a newer one buy now. Look for my review of the Dell C610.
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by Shootist  edited by 2kmaro
last modified: 2005-08-14 00:54:00 |
