Dell offers first AMD-based OptiPlex

Dell continues to take their newfound love for AMD platforms to new heights, most recently introducing AMD Business Desktops. Dell tends to be a popular choice for workstations, largely in part due to their ability to deliver in mass quantity. Their new Dell OptiPlex 740, which will retail for a mere $725, doesn't rely on a low-end Sempron, but instead uses the ever-popular X2. While details on the sales page are rather sparse, a bit of digging reveals a fairly decent workstaion, coming equipped with a dual core 3800+, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, an nVidia Quadro integrated card and an 80GB HDD. Quite ideal for a business.

At the same time, Dell also announced the release of their next Intel-based workstation as well, the Pentium D based OptiPlx 320, which comes with essentially the same hardware but relies on Intel's older dual-core CPUs.