Dell Optiplex Ultra AIO
Dell takes on Apple for the most expensive monitor stand, except this one has a desktop PC inside.
Dell has taken the All-in-One PC concept a step further with a new Dell Optiplex 7070, a PC that takes the shape of a monitor stand. Offering the option to pair the computer with whatever monitor you want without increasing the overall footprint, this PC is an awesome solution for the space conscious amongst us. But while it’s conveniently compact, is it actually too small to be broadly useful as a desktop PC?
Before we get into the guts of it, it’s worth taking a quick look at how it all fits together. Basically you have a 26 x 10 x 2.6 centimetre PC brick that can either be slotted into an accompanying VESA compatible monitor stand or attached to the back of an existing display using a seperate, included mount. This compact PC has a DC power socket, a few USB Type-A sockets, a USB Type-C DisplayPort and a headphone jack to connect to devices like you would expect.
This compact PC manages to fit either an Intel Core i5-8265U or a Core i7-8565U CPU and eight or 16GB of RAM. These processors may not be part of Intel’s most recently announced chips, but the efficient quad-core CPUs boost all the way up to 3.9 and 4.6GHz respectively. Paired with the decent RAM allocation the setup isn’t too shabby considering it all fits in a monitor stand. In fact, it’ll probably stand up to a number of professional ultrabooks from the last couple of years. The Core i5/ 8GB RAM model we tested achieved a Cinebench R15 multi-core score of 628 which is only around 8% behind the Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 13-inch running a 10th-gen chip. This equates to more than enough power for simple home and work tasks.
Since the overall footprint of the PC itself isn’t dramatically bigger than some of today’s phablets, we’re not that surprised that the Optiplex 7070 Ultra only offers 256 or 512 GB storage options. What is there however is sufficiently speedy with the Toshiba NVMe SSD offering 1,263MB/s write speeds and over 2,000MB/s read speeds.
For anyone that was hoping to do light gaming or any graphically intensive work the Intel UHD Graphics 620 is one of the more dated elements of this setup. While the CPU often scores within 10% of ultrabooks with comparable 10th gen chips, the GPU was between 32 and 54% behind the latest Intel Iris Plus integrated graphics processors.
When your pitch is a PC that fits into a monitor stand to save space, it makes sense that your customers would also be interested in clever ways to minimise cable clutter, so we’d recommend budgeting for a nice wireless mouse and keyboard with this unit.
At the time of writing Dell had its Optiplex 7070 range on a 50% sale (something we’ve come to expect from Dell’s online store) and so while these PCs are great for the sale price, they’re not really competitive if you’re paying top dollar.
“While it’s conveniently compact, is it actually too small to be broadly useful as a desktop PC? “