Dell AIO PC
Dell’s AIO gets a new look, but is there anything inspiring beneath the surface?
This year’s Inspiron 27 7000 has gone through a rather large metamorphosis, transforming from a stock monitor-looking AIO to a device with a pair of TV-esque legs and a soundbar running along the bottom. This speaker is wrapped in a grey mesh that connects it to some of the more adventurous PC systems we’ve seen from Dell over the past few years and while we’re on the fence on the overall design, the tilting mechanism seems to work well enough to make it practical.
Wrapped in a set of compact bezels is the hero feature – a 27-inch FullHD display that can be configured to include multi-touch compatibility. The glossy display looks vibrant and the white screen surround highlights this bright display even further.
In addition to opting whether or not to set it up as a touch display the Inspiron 27 7000 offers Core i5 or Core i7 CPU variants. These units feature the recently released Intel Core i510210U or i7-10510U CPUs which both have faster Turbo boosts than previous processors, but also lose two cores against the previous Inspiron 27 7000s. Systems with the i5-10210U, 8GB of RAM and Intel UHD 620 graphics start at $2,199, or for the higher specced models including a i710510U, 16GB of RAM and a Nvidia GeForceMX110 GPU, you’ll need to fork out $2,799.
The closest machine we have on record for comparison is a Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1 with an Intel Core i5-8265U CPU, which was generally only a few percent behind the Inspiron 27 7000 across all our benchmarks. This means that this all-in-one has more than enough power to do general work tasks with ease, but we did notice a little lag on the included security software and the default Internet Explorer browser… so it’s not a powerhouse by any means.
When it comes to graphical capabilities the integrated UHD graphics 620 GPU is really the bare minimum, so don’t expect the Inspiron 27 7000 to be able to do any graphically intensive tasks. It’s even 10-15% behind the Latitude 7400 in all graphical tests, despite supposedly being the same class of integrated GPU. Even on the higher end models with discrete GPUs graphical performance should only be around 50% better than what’s offered by the UHD Graphics 620.
The Inspiron 27 7000 comes with a rudimentary wireless keyboard and mouse combo that will get you up and going quickly. While these will suffice for many business users, the stiff keyboard and simple mouse are no-frills solutions that you might want to upgrade, if you can.
Ports for this unit are on the lower rear of the device and include everything you’d need with a few USB 3.1 Type-A slots, a USB 3.1 Type-C, an ethernet port, an SD card reader 3.0, 3.5mm mic/headphone jack and an HDMI 1.4 out.
There are some alternative AIO units with AMD Ryzen 5 CPUs that you can get pretty easily for $500 less and the former Core i7 Inspiron 27 7000s are more powerful and cheaper, so this unit simply isn’t the best value.