Thanks to Connie and Peter for your answers.

Here are some more details about the chipset:
The Graphics Device would probably be an integrated NVIDIA GeForce 6150 
graphics GPU for the desktop or an integrated ATI Radeon^®   Xpress 1150 
256MB HyperMemory^TM for the laptop
The Dell website doesn't provide any more information on the motherboard 
used unfortunately.

Thanks again

Benjamin Ooghe

Peter Scott wrote:

>I've recently installed SL 5.0 on my machine, for which the
>cpu is
>AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+
>and it all works like a charm.  Well I did spend a little time
>zeroing in on an appropriate nvidia graphics driver for the
>kernel, but eventually found that
>NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-1.0-9742-pkg2.run
>which is a somewhat older "beta" driver, works for me.
>I switched to the SL after struggling with trying to deal with
>Fedora 7 for several weeks (eventually my machine would not
>even boot with this OS, but it could have been due to a virus
>infection---I have no idea).
>
>So far, SL has given no trouble at all, even with SELinux in
>the "enforcing" mode.
>
>Good luck, and post a note if you run into any glitches.
>
>    -- Peter
>
>==========================================================
>On Aug 17, 2007 at 11:50 am, Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou wrote:
>| Hi everybody.
>| 
>| I'm currently working on porting a software to 64bit machines using 
>| Linux, so I'm planning to install Scientific Linux 5 on a new machine 
>| for that, but before I purchase this new machine, I want to be sure I 
>| can install SL5 successfully on it, and I'm not sure which 64-bit AMD 
>| CPU are correctly handled by the x86_64 version of SL.
>| 
>| Dell proposes these CPU:
>| for desktops: AMD Athlon? 64 X2 Dual-Core 3800+ and faster
>| and for laptops: AMD Turion^TM 64x2 Dual-Core Mobile technology TL-50 
>| and bigger
>| or AMD Turion^TM 64 Mobile technology MK-36 Processor
>| 
>| Did any of you successfully install SL on any of those processors? 
>| Otherwise would you know any detail which would comfort me in choosing 
>| one of these?
>| 
>| Thank you very much in advance.
>| 
>| Benjamin Ooghe
>| Department of Physics & Astronomy
>| The Johns Hopkins University
>| 3400 North Charles Street
>| Baltimore, MD 21218-2686 USA
>| 
>  
>