For some tasks, especially sharing your photos or updating the family budget, a big-screen all-in-one desktop PC like the Dell Inspiron 27 7000 is far more useful than a laptop. It doesn’t offer a 4K display or a particularly powerful CPU, but this 27-inch AIO gets the basics right and comes in at a palatable price (starts at $949.99; $999.99 as tested). The Inspiron isn’t as well rounded as the far more expensive 27-inch Apple iMac, but it will serve home users who don’t need cutting-edge computing components just fine.
Monochromatic Style
Available in black or white with silver accents, the Inspiron 27 7000 (model 7790) has been significantly redesigned for 2019. It’s now sleeker and more modern, but it also takes a few cues from the blend-in-with-your-decor aesthetic of smart home devices like the Google Home Mini. With narrower borders around the screen and a smaller chassis overall, it also looks more like a monitor than a complete PC. A tape measure confirms the slimming effect: stand included, the Dell measures 14.3 by 24 by 1.7 inches (HWD), compared with 15.5 by 24.2 by 2.1 inches for its predecessor.
Due to a bulkier stand and thicker display bezels, the 27-inch iMac measures 20.3 by 25.6 by 8 inches (HWD). But the Apple AIO offers two vastly superior features—an internal power supply and enough cooling for a desktop- rather than notebook-class CPU and GPU—that help justify its size. With the Inspiron, you’ll have to find room for an external power brick that’s much larger than the one that comes with most mainstream laptops. That could be a problem if you intend to install the system on a kitchen counter or other tight spot with limited room to hide power cables.
The Inspiron 27 7000 configuration I’m reviewing features an Intel Core i5-10210U processor typically found in laptops, which means it’s not only less powerful than the Core i9-based iMac but also than a Core i5-class tower desktop. That’s fine for basic productivity and web browsing, but it means the Dell can’t serve as a multimedia content creation platform the way the iMac can.
The 1080p Ceiling
With the redesign, Dell discontinued the all-in-one’s 4K-resolution screen option. Your only choice is a full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) display available in either touch or non-touch varieties. The loss of 4K is disappointing, especially since Apple offers 4K and 5K displays on its iMacs. The extra pixels are more of a luxury than a necessity for most consumers, though, so value-seekers won’t mind. You will, however, almost certainly want to spring for the touch option, which is a modest additional expense and makes swiping and zooming through photo albums, maps, and calendars much easier. A screen this large practically begs to be touched, so it’s a shame my review unit lacked the capability.
Above the display, you’ll find a retractable webcam. When it’s not in use, you can push it down into the chassis, thwarting online snoops and preventing physical damage. The version I tested featured IR sensors for logging into Windows Hello using face recognition, which necessitates leaving the camera exposed most of the time.
At the bottom of the display is what appears to be a giant sound bar. Alas, it’s just for show—the actual speakers are two tiny stereo tweeters that offer laptop-quality sound. They’ll fill an average-size living room and work fine for Skype calls with the grandparents, but they offer very little bass for listening to music or watching movies. (It’s enough to make you miss Dell’s discontinued 10-speaker, window-rattling XPS 27.) Fortunately, external speakers can fill the void.
The Inspiron 27 7000’s power button is mounted in a convenient spot to the right of the faux speaker grille, but all of the ports are located around back, which is also true of the iMac’s ports. They include a power connector, a USB 3.1 Type-C port, a Gigabit Ethernet jack, three USB 3.1 Type-A ports, a USB 2.0 port, a headphone jack, an SD card reader, and an HDMI video output port. There’s also an HDMI video input to let you use the 27-inch screen as an external display for a laptop or game console, a nifty feature that the iMac lacks.
The keyboards and mice bundled with AIOs are too often afterthoughts, but my review unit came with a comfortable wired keyboard with number pad and a sturdy albeit smallish wired mouse, both coordinated with the system’s white color scheme. You can also opt for a cordless keyboard and mouse, using the USB 2.0 port as a receptacle for their receiver.
Tilt, But No Height
The well-designed stand meets the chassis at the bottom left and right edges, which means it offers excellent stability and stays out of your way when you’re trying to plug and unplug peripherals. The stand offers a generous amount of tilt, so much so that I found a comfortable viewing angle even for my 6-foot-2-inch height while standing and looking at the Inspiron 27 7000 placed on a waist-level lab bench.
The stand offers no height adjustments, however, and the Inspiron is incompatible with third-party VESA stands. The silver lining is that no ugly VESA mounting holes mar the sleek curved back of the AIO, which makes it suitable for placement in a public area of your home where guests might see it from all angles. In fact, if you take advantage of the 802.11ac Wi-Fi and use Bluetooth peripherals, you don’t need to mar the attractive rear view with anything other than the power cable.
Dell offers a standard one-year warranty for the Inspiron 27 7000, with additional support options and accidental damage service available at extra cost. Once you’re outside of warranty, you can attempt repairs and upgrades yourself, but the process isn’t easy. Replacing the solid-state drive, for example, involves removing the back cover, the bottom cover, the stand, the shield over the system board, and multiple screws.
Component Options
In addition to the quad-core, 1.6GHz (4.2GHz turbo) Core i5-10210U CPU in the version I tested, the Inspiron 27 7000 can be configured with a Core i7-10510U chip. Both are laptop-class parts from Intel’s latest 10th Generation “Comet Lake” processor family. My tester also featured Nvidia GeForce MX110 graphics with 2GB of dedicated video memory, an upgrade from the base model’s Intel UHD Graphics 620 integrated solution.
Other specs included 8GB of RAM, a 256GB NVMe solid-state drive, and a 1TB secondary hard drive. You can upgrade to a 512GB SSD and 12GB of memory. Those are the only configurable options, which is quite limited if you’re interested in future-proofing, but it helps keep costs down. A top-of-the-line config is currently $1,249, compared with the $1,799 price of the AMD-based previous-generation Inspiron 27 7000 we tested in December 2017.
As configured, the Inspiron proved adequate at everyday computing tasks, though it occasionally stuttered when I loaded multiple content-rich websites in separate browser tabs. I noticed no annoying noise from the cooling fan, which suggests that even when the CPU is working hard the machine won’t be a public nuisance.
For our objective performance benchmarks, I pitted the Inspiron 27 7000 against several other AIOs that we’ve tested this year. None came close to the Inspiron’s $999.99 price, however. Although the 27-inch iMac is the closest Apple competitor in size, it’s far more expensive, so I opted for the $1,499-as-tested 21.5-inch iMac. The Microsoft Surface Studio 2 joins the 27-inch iMac in showing what a truly powerful AIO can do, while the Dell OptiPlex 7070 Ultra is a more modular, business-focused hybrid of an AIO and a tiny desktop. Here are their configurations:
UL’s Windows-only PCMark 10 test simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet jockeying, web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8’s storage exercise measures the performance of the storage subsystem.
From the PCMark 10 scores, it’s immediately clear that the Inspiron 27 7000 has a slight performance deficiency compared to the better-equipped Surface Studio 2, even on basic tasks. By contrast, the system’s SSD boot drive kept up with its peers in PCMark 8’s storage test.
As a general-purpose AIO, the Inspiron 27 7000 doesn’t have the chops for gaming or multimedia content creation. It performed significantly worse than the 27-inch iMac in our Handbrake video encoding and Cinebench 3D rendering tests, both of which tax a system’s CPU cores and threads to the utmost.
This is to be expected since both the 27-inch and 21.5-inch iMac use far more capable desktop CPUs. It’s not a mark against the Inspiron 27 7000 that it can’t keep pace with a prosumer-class machine. On the positive side, the Inspiron actually performed quite well in our Adobe Photoshop benchmark, which puts a stopwatch on systems as they apply a series of filters and effects to a JPEG test image.
Our Windows-only 3DMark and Unigine Superposition gaming simulations show what a difference a high-powered graphics processor makes when it comes to rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting.
Even though the Inspiron 27 7000 has discrete graphics, Nvidia’s MX110 is not in the same class as a GeForce GTX- or RTX-class GPU like the one in the Surface Studio 2.
A Competent Home Hub
Some home computing tasks need more screen real estate than even the largest of laptops can offer. The Inspiron 27 7000 offers this vista at a palatable price, though it lacks the computing strength and high-resolution displays offered by Apple’s iMac line. You don’t need a lot of horsepower to surf the web, show a calendar, or look up recipes, however, so the affordable Dell suits such household tasks well.
The configuration I tested lacks a touch screen, but adding one lets you take advantage of Windows 10’s touch support to make everyday jobs a breeze, while still getting out the door for under $1,100. If you’ve got more room in your budget and need more processing power, we recommend stepping up to the 27-inch iMac, which starts at $1,799.
Dell Inspiron 27 7000 (7790) Specs
| Desktop Class | All-in-one |
| Processor | Intel Core i5-10210U |
| Processor Speed | 1.6 GHz |
| RAM (as Tested) | 8 GB |
| Boot Drive Type | SSD |
| Boot Drive Capacity (as Tested) | 256 GB |
| Secondary Drive Type | Hard Drive |
| Secondary Drive Capacity (as Tested) | 1 TB |
| All-in-One Screen Size | 27 inches |
| All-in-One Screen Native Resolution | 1920 by 1080 |
| All-in-One Screen Type | Non-Touch Screen |
| Graphics Card | Nvidia GeForce MX110 |
| Operating System | Windows 10 Home |
