Dell’s Vostro 410 Touts Green Performance

The latest small business machine out of Dell looks like a gaming rig in a suit and tie, with tidy energy habits to match.

We know it’s tough to get excited about the raw spreadsheet-crunching power of a middle-of-the-line business PC, but with the skyrocketing price of energy, Dell’s new, lean and green Vostro 410 might just set a (small and efficient) fire in your heart. Dell claims the machine’s Energy Smart technologies could cut your computer-related energy costs nearly in half without sacrificing performance.

If that sounds like a familiar claim from machines that end up packing enough computational horsepower to rival your TI-83, Dell seems to actually be backing it up with the Vostro 410. The machine gets Intel’s latest Core 2 Quad processors, up to 4GB of 800MHz memory, and even a selection of high-end Nvidia GeForce or ATI Radeon graphics cards.

Dell’s claimed 47 percent cut in electricity use comes from testing the same Vostro 410 box with and without its Energy Smart settings turned on, so you can be sure there are some pretty aggressive modifications being made, but Dell isn’t too keen to share just what. Besides tossing around the Energy Smart name in all of its marketing, the company never really lets on what the technology is doing under the hood.

The Vostro 410 is available immediately in North and South America as well as the United Kingdom, in configurations starting at $599. The machine will reach Asia on June 2 and the rest of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa on June 5.