The Dell Inspiron Desktop model 3880 (starts at $470.39; $509.59 as tested) is a modest general-purpose budget desktop that will blend into any home-office setup. You’ll find few frills—see the simple, super-compact design and the lack of USB Type-C ports—but the system does the job for everyday multitasking with its Core i5 processor and built-in Wi-Fi. If you like the design, it’s a safe buy, but the Acer Aspire TC-895-UA91 remains our top pick in the category, for delivering USB-C support, double the storage, and similar performance at a lower price.
A Simple Space-Saver
If you don’t have much desk space, the Inspiron’s small footprint might be enough of a draw on its own. The tower, such as it is, measures 12.8 by 6.1 by 11.5 inches (HWD) and weighs 10.8 pounds. That’s not very tall or wide. It won’t go back very far on your desk (or take up much floor space, if that’s your preference), and it’s easy to move with one arm.
The visual design is very simple, but not totally devoid of stylization. It’s an all-black rectangle, with a pleasant enough striped pattern on the front panel. The whole look and size befit the machine’s price and purpose as a no-fuss, plug-and-play desktop.
There’s plenty of functionality to be had, though. The front panel offers four USB Type-A ports (two USB 3.1 and two 2.0), as well as an SD card slot. There’s a slot where an optical drive could be, but our test unit didn’t have one.
The rest of the ports are located around back, including two more USB 3.1 Type-A ports and two more USB 2.0 ports, HDMI and VGA video outputs, and an Ethernet jack. By now, you’ve noticed that you get no USB Type-C ports, the only major missing link.
USB-C is not essential, exactly, but it some forms it can offer increased data transfer speeds and lets you use USB-C peripherals without any adapters. Since it’s increasingly the standard, even among cheap PCs (especially laptops), the exclusion could be an inconvenience. On the connectivity plus side, the system is rounded out with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, which isn’t a given for budget desktops.
Interior Access and Components
A build like this is extremely simple, but it’s important to be able to easily open the case for maintenance or upgrades. Fortunately, loosening two thumbscrews in the rear (they may be tight enough that you’ll have an easier time with a screwdriver) allows you to remove the left side panel.
The interior is far from the flashiest you’ll ever see, but this is a function-first, affordable system—leave the fancy component layouts to pricey gaming PCs. Inside, you’ll find a metal shroud enclosing the power supply down below, and a black plastic ventilation funnel over the CPU that creates a direct route to the rear fan. This is easily removed by pinching two blue clips and pulling, revealing the simple air-cooling block and processor beneath.
With that shield out of the way, you can get a look at the whole setup. Our model is outfitted with an Intel Core i5-10400 processor, 8GB of memory, and a 256GB solid-state drive. There are two memory slots, with one free and one occupied by a single 8GB DIMM stick in our configuration.
The power supply in our model is a Dell-specific (not ATX) 200-watt unit, though Dell offers higher options (up to 260 watts) with some models to allow better components. Your options for a discrete GPU are pretty limited: The most powerful graphics card offered by Dell in configurations of the Inspiron 3880 is an Nvidia GeForce GT 1030, good for low-end gaming at most. Replacing the power supply yourself to install and juice up a more powerful video card looks like a no-go, given the small form factor and nonstandard power connections to the board.
Testing the Inspiron Desktop 3880: Respectable Core i5 Speed
To get a sense of what this humble desktop can do, we ran our normal suite of benchmark tests and compared the results against those of like-priced competitors. You’ll find the names and basic specs of the Dell’s rivals in the table below. (See more about how we test desktops.)
Productivity and Media Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run 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, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system’s boot drive. Both tests yield a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better. Note that the Mac mini is absent from these and the following Windows-based tests.
The Inspiron led the way in PCMark 10, technically making it the most efficient machine here for everyday multitasking. It didn’t lead the Core i3-based Acer Aspire by much, but both are a marked step up from the processors of the other two Windows PCs. The Aspire’s snappy SSD, meanwhile, is as quick as its peers’, which means on-par boot and load times.
Next is Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video editing trial, another tough, threaded workout that’s highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads. In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video (the open-source Blender demo movie Tears of SteelTears of Steel) to a 1080p MP4 file. Lower times are better.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image, timing each operation and adding up the total. The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost.
It’s important to say up front that none of these desktops is a specialized media-creation or -editing machine. Doing that on a professional level, or even as a hobbyist, requires a system with more RAM and processors with more cores and threads. That said, the Core i5 Inspiron is the best suited in this group and acquits itself moderately well. It’s far from a workstation, but capable of handling content-creation tasks without huge wait times, which is more than you can say for some of the alternatives.
Synthetic Graphics Tests
UL’s 3DMark suite measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff. The results are proprietary scores.
Like content creation, 3D rendering is beyond the capabilities of these desktop PCs and their integrated Intel UHD or AMD Radeon graphics. (Generally, Radeon integrated-graphics numbers tend to be pretty good relative to those of Intel UHD solutions, but in the two budget-minded Athlon implementations here, the Radeons underperform.)The Inspiron again took a slight lead, but it proved far from a gaming or animation powerhouse.
We normally post a second graphics test, Unigine’s Superposition, but on the Inspiron, the benchmark failed to run at the 720p Low setting, and at the 1080p High preset, it managed only 3 frames per second. Suffice it to say, you should look elsewhere for all but the simplest gaming needs.
Verdict: Just Keep It to the Basics
There clearly isn’t anything flashy or out of the ordinary about this Inspiron desktop, but it does its job well. The performance is solid for this price tier, it’s compact, and the price point goes down easy. On the minus side, the lack of USB-C is unfortunate, the graphics-upgrade upside is near nil, and more storage would be nice. While the Dell avoids any major blunders and represents decent value, the Acer Aspire TC-895-UA91 is a better deal considering that it offers similar performance, USB-C, and double the storage for about $50 less.
