Review: Dell Inspiron 27 All-in-One PC

When it comes to gaming, no one thinks of an All-in-one (or AIO for short) system. They’re mostly thought of as office equipment meant for regular use like documents, emails, web browsing etc. Well, that’s about to change, cause the new Dell Inspiron 27 takes it up a notch, and shows you that a high-end AIO can handle gaming as easily as any other task.

Tech Specs

The Dell Inspiron 27 AIO packs the latest 8-core Ryzen 7 1700 processor, accompanied by a Radeon RX580 8GB. There’s also 16 gigs of DDR4 RAM in the mix. For storage, you have a 256 GB SSD along with a secondary 1TB HDD to make sure you have enough space for all your needs. The display is an incredible 4K UHD IPS Panel which does an amazing job of bringing your games to life.

Going by looks alone, you can tell that AIO is a high-end device. It favours a bold metallic grey finish on the back and the bottom grill, with minimal bezels around the screen. The build quality is impressive and it weighs quite a bit too. One thing that I found weird was that the webcam is present at the bottom instead of the top, which makes positioning it a little cumbersome, but the device is overall incredible. Along the top edge, you can also find the vent to facilitate heat dissipation.

There’s no shortage of connectivity options either. On the back, there are three USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, one USB Type-C port and two HDMI ports. There’s one more USB 3.0 port on the left side along with an audio port and an SD Card Reader, while the charging port and the LAN are on bottom towards the back. The downwards LAN port did give me a little trouble getting set up as it’s not the easiest to reach if you already have the AIO in place beforehand, but once done, it’s smooth sailing thereafter. In the box are also included a wireless membrane keyboard and mouse combo, though these are the typical office use accessories.

Performance and Benchmarks

Never having played games on an AIO system before, the Dell Inspiron 27 sure seemed like an interesting device from a gaming standpoint. But the Ryzen 7 1700 in combination with the RX 580 is a pretty solid machine, and it shows in the tests. We tested the in-game performance for both 1080p and 4K resolutions, because duh, who wouldn’t? Suffice it to say, the PC doesn’t fail to impress, as you can see by the benchmarks. Note that AA and VSync were turned off for the in-game benchmarks.

Starting up with Rise of the Tomb Raider, we obtained an average of 65.33 FPS while running the game on the Very High preset on DX11 at 1080p.  Upon switching to DX12, there was a slight increase and the average framerate went up to 72 FPS. Now, obviously we wouldn’t expect the card to be able to run the game on the highest settings at 4K, so we brought it down to the Medium preset, and weren’t disappointed at all. The game ran at an average of 32.53 FPS on DX11 and 33.87 FPS on DX 12.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided gives the best of graphics cards a hard time, so seeing the numbers drop here wasn’t a surprise. Running at 1080p on the Ultra preset, we obtained an average framerate of 43 FPS on DX11 which increased a little after switching to DX12, to 43.5. At 4K resolution, the system struggled in this title, only managing an average 22.9 FPS on DX11 and 23.4 FPS on DX12. running on the Medium preset.

Testing Ashes of the Singularity on the Crazy preset, the system gave an average of 30.5 FPS on DX11 and 34.5 FPS on DX12 at 1080p. Bringing the settings down to the Standard preset, the system performed well at 4K too, with an average framerate of 35 on DX11 and 39.4 FPS on DX12.

The most impressive results according to us were the GTA V benchmarks, where even with most settings on Very High, we were able to obtain an average framerate of 38.6 FPS on 4K. All this goes to show that with some compromise on the graphics settings, you can obtain a playable. 30+ FPS gaming experience even with an RX 580.

Outside of gaming as well, the Inspiron 27 is an amazing device. The 4K IPS panel shows crisp, vibrant shades with great contrast and colour reproduction. The Ryzen 7 1700 is more than sufficient to handle tasks like video editing and rendering, and working on the AIO is an incredible experience. I had a hell of a time playing around in Blender, and even though it’s more attuned towards NVIDIA GPUs, the RX 580 on board the system doesn’t offer any opportunity to complain.

Another impressive factor about the Inspiron 27 is the sound. It features powerful speakers with an internal subwoofer, capable of taking care of all your multimedia needs, whether it’s music, or movies, even games. The explosions are loud and the footsteps of your enemies can be heard clearly, and though gamers prefer to use headsets, I didn’t have any problems without them. Apart from that, the system also comes with some nifty features including Face recognition.

When you fit the amount of power you have in this system in such a compact body, the thermals are always bound to be an issue. Fortunately, we did not observe any overheatingd or throttling during the benchmarks, and the max temperature that we observed was close to 85 C. Though the system definitely could have benefited from more vents to let the hot air out, as most of it dissipates from the top.

The Verdict

At a price point of INR 1.5 lakhs (Dell Website), the Dell Inspiron 27 AIO PC may seem a little heavy on the wallet, but it give you a complete package in a highly compact body. It takes a minimal amount of space and you can set it up without any hassles. Whether you use it for games or other work, the performance is equally impressive in all tasks. The 4K display is a marvel and so are the speakers. With this, gaming AIO desktops are actually a viable option.

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