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

Performance Summary: The old adage is you get what you pay for, and more often than not, that's true. The question is, what kind of performance do you get for $1,100, or less if you factor in street pricing and frequently available coupon codes? Dell's answer is, a capable 1080p gaming PC. We don't review many mainstream gaming boxes, so in comparing against higher priced systems (many of which are premium boutique builds), the Inspiron Gaming Desktop 5680 trailed behind in our collection of gaming benchmarks. However, it never struggled to produce playable framerates at 1080p. In Shadow of Mordor, for example, it averaged right around 90 frames per second, and it hit triple digits in Grand Theft Auto V (just shy of 134 fps). In many cases, the Inspiron Gaming Desktop was able to play games at 1440p too, and occasionally 4K, though that was more rare.

Most people dream of owning a Ferrari or some other high priced sports car, then look at their bank account and settle on a sensible sedan. The trick is finding one that suits your style while fitting within your budget, and of course it has to reliably get you from point A to point B, because that's ultimately a car's job. See where we're going here? The Inspiron Gaming Desktop 5680 is a sensible choice for gamers, one that does what it was built to do without ravaging your bank account. Sure, that decked out Alienware rig rips up the asphalt, but you're not driving one off the lot for a grand.

You can, however, bring home an Inspiron Gaming Desktop for a reasonable price. Configurations start at $599 and never spiral out of control, even when shopping at the top of the spectrum. The system we received is the least expensive version to rock a Core i7-8700 CPU inside, making it one of the more affordable gaming PCs out there. There's plenty of room for expansion inside it's chassis as well. 

The flip side to this is that sensible is not always sexy. In this case, though the Inspiron Gaming Desktop 5680 we tested is a sleek looking machine, you're also looking at a single-channel RAM configuration and the lower end version of the GeForce GTX 1060, one with 3GB of GDDR5 memory instead of 6GB. To be fair, though, the toned down component selection in this SKU is really only a concern if you're obsessing over specs rather than focusing on what this machine is capable of, which is playing games smoothly at 1080p (or higher in some cases).

What's more constricting, however, is the storage arrangement here. Dell doesn't provide any custom storage options, so you're stuck with a 128GB M.2 SATA SSD + 1TB HDD out of the box. Looking at the SSD, we're not too concerned with it being SATA—there's little difference in gaming performance, save for load times, between SATA and NVMe/PCIe—but the low capacity is a bummer. Some games are data pigs and won't even fit on a 128GB SSD (after accounting for a Windows OS footprint). We ran into that with Grand Theft Auto V, as there just wasn't enough room to install it. Instead, we had to plop it on the hard drive, which we'd rather reserve as strictly bulk storage or back-up.

So, there are some concessions with the configuration and SKU we tested, which is to be expected in the mainstream category. At the same time, there are a couple of higher end configurations available, with the top SKU offering twice as much RAM at 16GB, double the SSD storage at 256GB (while retaining the 1TB HDD), and a faster GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card. Pricing on that model runs $1,449.99 before any discounts.

As for this specific setup, it's not one that's going to set any benchmarking records. Regardless, as configured here, the Inspiron Gaming Desktop 5680 is an affordable 1080p gaming desktop that also looks great and performs quietly, which is exactly what it sets out to be.

Handles 1080p gaming just fine Attractive design User upgradeable Runs quiet Affordable	Single-channel RAM configuration Not much space for games on the OS drive GeForce GTX 1060 is the 3GB model, not the 6GB version