Tuesday, August 01

Life

Tohru Arrives

Was on a global conference call for work (at least five countries represented) when the knock came at my door.

Which also happened last week when the keyboard and speakers arrived...

Anyway, plugged in, switched on, works.  The included keyboard is meh, but in the US it comes with the much nicer premium keyboard that I already have.

The screen is beautiful, it's whisper quiet, and lightning fast.

/images/Tohru.png?size=720x&q=95
Lookit all them cores!

(Kanna also arrived.  Kanna is my fridge.)

So, first impressions: It's compact - quite a bit smaller than the iMac, though the screen is the same size. Setup was dead simple once I realised the keyboard had a USB widget and wasn't Bluetooth.

The screen is very nice - not quite as colourful as my iMac, and not quite as sharp, but there's not a huge gap, and it was little more than half the price.

It's fast, not astoundingly so, unless you've been using a $200 netbook lately in which case it is pretty astounding; and basically silent under normal load.

I used Cities: Skylines running at 4k resolution as a load test, and it runs very smoothly.  The fan definitely picked up speed as I scrolled around, but it's a fairly pleasant low-pitched sound and not noticeable if you have the game music on.  It spins back down to silent within a few seconds of exiting the game.  My main worry with this system was that it would turn into a hair dryer while gaming, but it seems to cope very well.

The sound from the internal speakers - which can't be more than an inch and a half in diameter - is okay.  I also ordered a set of external speakers because I was expecting the sound to be only okay, and the speakers are...  Fine.  Not remotely audiophile, but fine.  I wouldn't recommend buying them unless they came in a package deal from Dell.  Though there seems to be some audio processing going on, and they sounded substantially better when I switched the external speaker type in the menu, so maybe there's room for improvement.

What I wanted was a fast Windows machine for software development and occasional gaming that wouldn't take up much space and could be set up in ten minutes.

What I got was exactly that.  And a fridge.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:09 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 "It spins back down to silent within a few seconds of exiting the game."
One thing you have to give the last several generations of Intel procs, if your thermal solution is adequate, the CPU can drop like 10C of temp in about a second, once the load comes off (my 3570K with a Hyper 212 on it will lose 20C in a couple seconds when you, for example, shut of OCCT's CPU stress test.)  Ryzens aren't quite as fast, but are still pretty responsive.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 02 2017 01:43 AM (ECH2/)

2 Yep, Intel have done a lot of work on that, particularly on the notebook front.

This system has one fan for both CPU and GPU, which had me a little concerned about noise levels, but it turns out to be very well engineered and quieter than my old system - even though my old system is on the floor under my desk and this one is right in front of me.

Now I just need to install about a thousand apps and transfer a squigabyte of data...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, August 03 2017 04:17 PM (PiXy!)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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