Dell Inspiron 531 review

Gallery

Verdict:

Plenty of everything in a big shiny box. A great all-round desktop for an impressively low price.

Review Date: 14 Aug 2008

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Reviewed By: Matthew Sparkes

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

The 531, also supplied by Europc, shares the same styling as the Dell 530s, but is much chunkier. It still looks great, with the white and silver chassis set off by blue LEDs.

There are bigger differences inside. The Intel chip has been replaced with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+, not quite such a powerful processor but clocked at a fast 3GHz. This is accompanied by a reasonable 2GB of RAM, rather than 530s' 3GB. The slight drop in specification was reflected in our tests, with the 531 scoring slightly lower in both the 2D (general) and 3D (gaming) benchmarks - but only very slightly. Costing the same as the 530s, the 531 is still great value, and it offers some benefits over its slimmer and faster cousin.

For one, the graphics card, though basically the same 256MB ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT, provides two proper DVI outputs, giving you a simple way to create a dual monitor setup with no compromise on picture quality. With a 3D score of 69%, this card won't let you play the very latest and most demanding titles, such as Crysis, but popular games like Call of Duty 2 will run fine if you turn down the video quality settings a bit.

The 531 also offers eight USB ports, compared to the six provided in the other Dell, giving plenty of room to plug in all your peripherals and still have room to connect your digital camera, phone and so on without needing a hub. Two PCI slots are free inside, allowing further upgrading. The best feature of all is the pair of 320GB hard disks, giving the most storage space in our group.

The Inspiron ships in a new Dell box, along with a pack containing all the necessary power cables as well as a keyboard and mouse. Under the one year warranty, Dell will pick up a faulty PC and replace components as necessary.

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