Dell Inspiron Gaming Desktop 5680 Review: Attractive, Affordable PC Gaming

Even though is primarily a gaming desktop, we are also interested in how it performs in work chores. So, we'll start off our benchmarks with some standard productivity and content creation metrics before jumping into the fun stuff.

Cinebench R11.5 64-bit Content Creation Performance

Based on Maxon Cinema 4D software, this test uses a 3D scene and polygon and texture manipulation to assess GPU and CPU performance. We ran the Main Processor Performance (CPU) test, which builds a still scene containing about 2,000 objects, for a total polygon count above the 300,000 mark. Here we're focusing strictly on software rendering on the CPU and it's heavily taxing on this one aspect of system performance, both with multi-threaded and single-threaded rendering. 

Intel's Core i7-8700 processor is based on the company's 8th generation Coffee Lake architecture. It's a 6-core/12-thread chip with a 3.2GHz base clock and 4.6GHz boost clock, with 12MB of L3 cache. While technically a mainstream processor (as opposed to one of Intel's High End Desktop, or HEDT, processors), it packs some serious muscle to throw at compute workloads, In Cinebench R11.5, it scored 2.22 points in the singe-core portion of the benchmark and 14.37 points in the multi-core section, the latter of which is about a point lower than the XPS Tower with the same processor. That's probably at least partially attributable to the Spectre and Meltdown updates that have come out since we tested the XPS Tower.

These are still strong scores (and the single-core score is actually slightly higher than the XPS Tower). Note that the Inspiron Gaming Desktop scored more than two points higher than the Maingear Vybe Z270 with a previous generation Core i7-7700K processor, in the multi-threaded test.

Futuremark PCMark 8 Simulated Application Performance

PCMark 8 simulates the workloads computers face in several different settings, including home, office and content creation. The benchmark also has a test that simulates a creative professional’s usage, as well as battery and storage tests. We ran the tests with OpenCL acceleration enabled to leverage the power of the system's GPU, CPU and storage subsystem combined.

Switching our focus to PCMark, the Inspiron Gaming Desktop manages to sneak ahead of the XPS Tower in both the Home Accelerated and Work Accelerated tests. This came as a bit of a surprise, for a couple of reasons. The first is that PCMark 8 tends to favor faster storage schemes, and the Inspiron Gaming Desktop is only using a SATA-based SSD instead of an NVMe drive. And secondly, it only has 8GB of RAM running in single-channel mode.

What this shows is that even though Dell made some compromises to separate the Inspiron Gaming Desktop from its more enthusiast-oriented XPS Tower, it's more than capable of handling productivity chores.

Let's have a look at graphics performance...