Dell Inspiron 530
Dell Inspiron 530
1:59

Dell Inspiron 530

Desktops
[ Music ] ^M00:00:02 >> Hi, I'm Rich Brown, Senior Editor for CNET.com. Today we're gonna take a look at the Dell Inspiron 530. So this system is a straight forward midtower PC. It's a budget system that cost right around 500 and 600 dollars. It's really not too expensive for what you get. We're pretty happy with this performance. It has a fast Intel Dual Core CPU and also a giant hard drive. About the only thing this thing lacks is a discrete graphics card. If it had that, it would probably be an Editors' Choice. Otherwise this thing is very solid, computes well against others in its class and we definitely recommend it as long as you don't mind making a few upgrades here or there or if you keep your expectations limited. Behind the door in the front panel here, you find a mini card reader. Behind the door on top there is the DVD player. That's really about it. As you can see it's pretty simple back here. All you get is a VGA video output. There's no DVI or HDMI. A graphics card would have come in handy here because it would have given you an alternative output. Down here you can see four USB ports, standard networking adapter, as well as your typical array of audio jacks. Nothing too fancy, pretty standard and it's not really living room friendly or digital output friendly for that matter. So inside, it's pretty typical and you could see it's nice and roomy too. It's got plenty room for expansion. There's a full size graphics card port here and you can put a full sized card in. The only limitation is the power supply which is a 300-watt model. So you kind of are limited to the mid range of graphics card. Dell has kind of a unique Dell hard drive base system on this PC. It's just a flat wall that you shred the drives into or swell enough you know, hold two drives, which is really I wouldn't expect from a standard midtower. So it's different, but there's nothing really negative about it. Behind the cables here you can see the memory. There's 4 gigs total and because this is the Vista 64-bit system that means that memory and the operating system are working well together, so you get plenty of RAM for switching between applications. So we really find the system relatively good value. It's missing maybe a few features here and there, but for its price it's really not too bad especially when you consider its performance. You can also make a few upgrades if you want. So I'm Rich Brown, this is the Dell Inspiron 530. ^M00:01:57 [ Music ]

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