Dell Inspiron 660 review

Dell has been selling mass-produced desktop PCs for years, so you’d think some of this experience might rub off on its low-cost PCs. Alas, with flimsy build quality and a tacky-looking reflective plastic frontage, its Inspiron 660 feels cheap and poorly made.

Open it up, though, and your opinion may begin to change. At first, you’ll be struck by the amount of internal space there is, which is particularly impressive considering how small the case is. This spaciousness is achieved by a small, two-bay drive cage, which houses a 1TB WD hard disk, that sits at the bottom right of the interior, leaving enough space for easy access to the system’s main components.

You may also be impressed with the upgrade capacity. With one free RAM, a pair of SATA/300 spare, and three available PCI x1 ports, the Inspiron’s board is very upgrade-friendly for its price.

Unfortunately, this PC comes unstuck when it comes to performance. Its Ivy Bridge, Core i5-3340 CPU and 4GB of RAM looks plenty; however, since Dell supplies the memory as a single stick of DDR3, the controller is forced to run in single-channel mode, resulting in sluggish performance. The Inspiron 660 gained an Overall score of 0.76 in our Real World Benchmarks, significantly lower than the CCL Elite Kestrel IV, which also has a Core i5 CPU.

Graphics performance is even less notable: it has a discrete card – an Nvidia GeForce GT 620 – but don’t imagine you’ll achieve high frame rates when gaming. It managed a sputtering 21fps at Medium quality and a risible 9fps at High quality in our Crysis test, results barely quicker than systems relying solely on the most recent version of Intel’s integrated graphics.

Despite decent upgradability, then, the Dell’s all-round lack of performance knocks down its scores significantly. It may be cheap, but the PC Specialist Infinity X offers superior performance and even better upgradability for a premium of only £20.

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