The Inspiron 620 was Dell’s conventional PC submission this month and in some ways, it’s passable value for $1,299, including Intel’s Core i5-2300 processor, 6GB of DDR3-1333 RAM, a 500GB hard drive and Blu-ray/DVD combo under the hood, with an 18.5in widescreen LCD panel for the display. That’s not going to worry local builders for value, but for a name brand at this price, we’ve seen worse. The GeForce GT 420 graphics card is a surprise — it’s not that quick, so we’d have used the integrated Intel graphics inside the Core i5 chip instead and saved the cash for a larger hard drive rather than waste it on this graphics card. It’ll run DiRT 2 to 32fps at 1,024 x 768 pixels, but it couldn’t get AvP to more than 13fps at the same resolution. Frankly, a 500GB hard drive isn’t exactly generous. Our test unit was also lacking Service Pack 1, so hopefully this’ll appear in the retail version. But it’s certainly not all doom and gloom — in terms of raw application performance per dollar, its 82.84 score on our UserBench Encode benchmark isn’t bad. It’s just missing a few extras.
