SHOULD YOU BLOW YOUR BUDGET ON A £1,299 DELL?
What’s the difference between £799 and £1,299? Due to a clerical error by Dell, we have the answer in the Inspiron Gaming desktop
For most of us £799 is a lot of money, but in desktop PC terms you’re still only just into the mid-range. This point was hammered home when Dell sent in what was supposed to be its entry-level Inspiron Gaming desktop, but sent a high-end version by mistake. Where the £699 version ships with a four-core/ four-thread Ryzen 3 1200 processor and a rather modest 2GB AMD Radeon RX560, our test sample came with a water-cooled Ryzen 7 1700X, a 6GB GeForce GTX 1060 and no end of mod cons. However, this is reflected in a price of £1,299 inc VAT.
What exactly does that buy you, and does it make a difference? Well, the first thing to say is that the whole Inspiron Gaming line comes in a beautifully designed and sturdy case, showing that Dell has learnt a lot from years of working with the designers at Alienware. While there’s more internal cabling visible than in some of the PCs from UK system builders, there’s plenty of good airflow, well thought-out venting and low noise levels. Those vents also dish out a cool blue glow from nearly every angle, adding to the impression that you’re looking at a high-end gaming system.
There’s plenty of expansion potential here as well. Dell has – rather unusually – fitted a half-height DVD writer, but there’s space below that for another 5.25in drive, while a drive cage at the bottom of the unit has space for another 3.5in drive to go with the 1TB Seagate Barracuda drive already fitted. There’s one more PCI-E x1 slot and another PCI-E x4 slot on the motherboard, plus space for an M.2 drive. And if you did want to switch out the GTX 1060 for, say, a GTX 1070 Ti or GTX 1080, there’s room to do so and an additional 6+2 pin PCI-E power cable if need be.
If you’re expecting a speedy M.2 drive you might be disappointed. Dell has fitted a SATA 6GB/sec SSD made by Hynix. It’s a good performer, with sequential read speeds of 518MB/ sec and write speeds of 475.73MB/sec, but isn’t unusually fast. It’s also small, with a nominal 256GB capacity.
What, then, are you paying for? How about the 6GB GeForce GTX 1060? At this price we might have expected the next GPU up, the GTX 1070, and the 6GB GTX 1060 doesn’t really give you much in the way of a tangible improvement over the 3GB version until you go beyond 1080p resolutions to 1440p and 2160p/4K. The Dell beat all the £799 systems in our Rise of the Tomb Raider and
Metro: Last Light benchmarks, but not by the kind of margin that would justify an extra £500 of spending.
A more likely reason is the watercooled Ryzen 7 1700X processor. This isn’t quite AMD’s most high-end Ryzen CPU, but it’s an eight-core, 16-thread monster running at a 3.4GHz base clock with a 3.8GHz boost. With the watercooling there’s scope to overclock it to 3.9GHz or even 4GHz, and at stock speeds the PC is almost unnervingly quiet, even when the GPU fans speed up under load.
At the moment you won’t see the difference in many games, which are typically optimised for the low-end, eight-core AMD processors found in the Sony PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Xbox One, although some PC strategy games will put those extra cores to good use. Given time, we expect more games to make effective use of them.
You can, however, see the impact right now in our 2D application benchmarks. The Dell pulled away from all our £799 machines by some margin, bar the overclocked Palicomp Ryzen 5 1600 system in a close second.
Would we pony up the extra £500 for the Inspiron Gaming? Probably not, but Dell is selling systems with a Ryzen 5 1400 and an 8GB Radeon RX 580 for £999, which we’d find a lot more tempting. Unless you go gonzo on a hardcore gaming system, £799 to £999 is arguably the sweet spot when you’re buying a new PC.
“Those vents also dish out a cool blue glow... adding to the impression that you’re looking at a high-end system”