Dell Inspiron Gaming Desktop 5680 Review: Attractive, Affordable PC Gaming
Dell Inspiron Gaming Desktop (5680): Power Consumption And Noise
Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a couple of final data points— namely, power consumption and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored acoustics and tracked how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter.
The main reason it stays quiet is because there aren't a lot of fans—it just has a single 120mm exhaust fan in the rear. Cooling doesn't seem to suffer, as beneath the stylish exterior is a functional design with plenty of ventilation, both on the front and side of the case. This allows the case to breathe rather than trap hot air inside. We didn't run into any thermal issues, and again, noise was never bothersome either. That said, there is a spot to add a 120mm intake fan in the front if you want more active cooling.
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Our goal was to give you an idea of how much power each configuration used while idling and also while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet.
This PC is running on a 460W power supply. If you wanted to upgrade the GPU at some point, there should be enough headroom to run a GeForce GTX 1070 or GeForce GTX 1070 Ti. Yes, NVIDIA recommends having a 500W PSU for either of those cards, but that's probably being a little conservative. After all, Dell does sell a version of this PC with a GeForce GTX 1070 using the same PSU. Dell also uses a 460W PSU in its XPS Tower, with a GeForce GTX 1070 inside that as well, and we never ran into any power issues on that machine.
This PC is running on a 460W power supply. If you wanted to upgrade the GPU at some point, there should be enough headroom to run a GeForce GTX 1070 or GeForce GTX 1070 Ti. Yes, NVIDIA recommends having a 500W PSU for either of those cards, but that's probably being a little conservative. After all, Dell does sell a version of this PC with a GeForce GTX 1070 using the same PSU. Dell also uses a 460W PSU in its XPS Tower, with a GeForce GTX 1070 inside that as well, and we never ran into any power issues on that machine.
Inspiron Gaming Desktop 5680 Noise Profile
This is an incredibly polite machine in terms of noise output. Like the XPS Tower, you don't hear much coming from the chassis when surfing the web or doing other lightweight tasks. However, it's also fairly quiet when gaming or otherwise stressing the PC, whereas the XPS Tower had a tendency to get loud under load.The main reason it stays quiet is because there aren't a lot of fans—it just has a single 120mm exhaust fan in the rear. Cooling doesn't seem to suffer, as beneath the stylish exterior is a functional design with plenty of ventilation, both on the front and side of the case. This allows the case to breathe rather than trap hot air inside. We didn't run into any thermal issues, and again, noise was never bothersome either. That said, there is a spot to add a 120mm intake fan in the front if you want more active cooling.
