With a reasonable price tag of around $900, the new Dell Inspiron 545 is one of the best budget desktops to ever come out of the Texas-based company’s kitchen. This device has enough power to be able to serve as a home’s primary computer system. Here’s an in-depth look at the Inspiron 545.
The Look
The Inspiron 545 pretty much looks like any other standard desktop computer, with a sleek and shiny mini tower on board. However, customers will be glad to know that they can choose from eight different and wonderful color schemes to fully customize the Inspiron 545 – Formula Red, Flamingo Pink, Plum Purple, Tangerine Orange, Spring Green, True Blue, Pure White, and Piano Black. Inside its massive mini tower is an Intel-powered Quad Core Q9400 processor combined with an amazing 8GB of memory. The Inspiron 545 will also be equipped with several PCI card slots for upgrades on a variety of peripherals, from graphics cards to TV tuners. Already built-in on the device is a DVD burner, as well as an additional slot for a secondary optical drive.
Feature-Packed
Expect the Inspiron 545 to be bundled with a monitor that will be up to par with its impressive features. Take for instance the S2309 widescreen monitor (from Dell as well) that has a 23-inch screen and a ratio of 16:9. This amazing monitor will be compatible with HD videos of up to 1920 x 1080 pixels in resolution which means that users will be able to watch 1080p-quality videos on their Inspiron 545. However, some notable absences include an HDTV tuner as well as a Blu-ray player. Nonetheless, users can easily upgrade the Inspiron 545 with these add-ons either through a third-party vendor or from the Dell website itself. The Inspiron 545′s 300W power supply is more than enough to ensure that these upgrades will work without a hitch.
The Inspiron 545 will also come with a 750GB SATA hard drive that is more than enough space to store those HD movies.
The Performance
As mentioned earlier, the Inspiron 545 will be sporting an excellent combination of 8GB of memory and a Q9400 processor. This is top of the line stuff which ensures that the Inspiron 545 will be able to meet the multitasking demands of today’s PC users. This powerful combo will also allow the Inspiron 545 to work smoothly when it comes to the more complex tasks such as video transcoding or photo editing. Based on a few tests, the Inspiron 545 was actually able to outperform other systems with dual core processors such as the famed Apple iMac.
Some critics are claiming that one of the weakest elements of the Inspiron 545 is its Intel GMA 3100 graphics processor. Although it is more than capable of handling simpler 3D tasks such as Vista’s Aero effects, problems arise when it comes to graphic-intensive 3D games. Nonetheless, the PCIe x16 card slot will provide ample space for users to add a more capable 3D graphics card on the Inspiron 545.