A customer just purchased a Dell T5500 (for photoshop work), and asked me to configure it.

It had been upgraded to a decent amount of RAM and HDD space, So all I needed to do was install Vista 64 (she had mistakenly installed XP x64… yuck).

After Vista had been installed, I took a look at the CPU specs… hmmm, an E5502, 1.86 Ghz, dual-core CPU… that doesn’t sound right.

But it was correct.

I thought it might have been a really old computer, but the Intel E5502 had only been released in early 2009.

The CPU does have the same QPI technology found in the i7, i5 and i3 CPUs, but the low clock rate and “only” 2 cores (when the other e55xx CPUs have 4 cores and range from 2Ghz to 3.2 Ghz) means that the computer seems like a white elephant before it even arrived on the desk.

At least she had a fast video card and a 27″ monitor, but when I told her that the CPU seemed slow, she didn’t seem to mind. Since I didn’t really want to sound critical of her new purchase, I just dropped the topic.

But I (once again) wonder what the salesman was thinking when selling this PC… the customer upgraded many components (eg vista 64, bigger HDD, more RAM, bigger monitor and fast video card… I’m sure trading off a slightly slower video card for a significantly faster CPU (eg a quad core E5504 at 2Ghz, or even a non-xeon CPU!) would have been the best option.