Shopping for a business desktop PC? Here are some key questions to ask: Will it handle mostly basic business tasks, rather than graphics- or processor-intensive work? Does it fit where you need it to? Can you roll it out in multiple configurations across the enterprise?
The Dell OptiPlex 5090 Tower (starts at $949, as tested) certainly checks most of those boxes, apart from the space-saving one—and to that point, you can order the same configuration in a compact Small Form Factor version at close to the same price. In fact, the OptiPlex 5090 Tower is one of the most versatile business desktops you can buy, available in a dizzying array of configurations. The pedestrian specs of the base model reviewed here notwithstanding, if you can’t find a OptiPlex configuration that works for your business’ productivity needs, you’re probably not searching and hitting the Dell configurators hard enough. That said, we opted for an Editors’ Choice award for its smaller sibling, the OptiPlex 3090 Small Form Factor, given that many businesses are strapped for space and less in need of the expandability and drive expansion that a larger chassis enables.
What Is the Right OptiPlex Configuration?
Since the ideal setup depends on your company’s specific needs, the base configuration, for this or any review, is just a jumping-off place for your analysis. Factors like price, footprint, and processing speed join the equation, along with possible extras such as the type of integrated graphics, or even an added discrete GPU. Other add-ins might include an optical drive, Bluetooth, or Wi-Fi.
Of course, cost and durability also come into play, along with warranty and security capabilities. After considering all those factors, only then can a business select the configurations that meet their needs. Sometimes that means sticking with a basic model.
In fact, that’s what business buyers often do: An IT manager may purchase multiple PCs in a bare-bones configuration, knowing the company is already well supplied with the keyboards, mice, and monitors they will add. The IT department may even have memory modules or hard drives in stock to bulk up the RAM or secondary storage to whatever level will be required.
With this in mind, we requested a base-model OptiPlex 5090 for testing. It is well-optimized for the basics: It offers an 11th Generation “Rocket Lake” Intel Core i5 running at 2.7GHz base clock (4.6GHz turbo), coupled with Intel’s advanced UHD 750 integrated graphics. The only item missing from a general wish list might be 16GB rather than the included 8GB of RAM. Still, that’s just a configurator click away.
Competition being what it is, the 5090 is available at some resellers for less than Dell’s suggested retail price of $949, though business buyers are generally less enticed by one-off discounts than most. They want reliability and consistency in a reseller, and PCs that provide robust security options and longevity.
OptiPlex Warranty and Support Options
The 5090 certainly meets both of those requirements. Its base warranty includes basic on-site service for 36 months. That’s on-site service for repairs, when reached by phone during business hours. Dell also offers two levels of extended service: ProSupport, adding 24/7 on-site service, access to in-region engineers, and automated issue detection and notification. ProSupport Plus offers all that, plus accidental damage repair, predictive issue detection, malware removal, and PC optimization.
For comparison, the consumer-oriented Dell Inspiron 3891’s base coverage is one year of hardware service with in-home service after remote diagnosis. Most competing systems, like the Asus ExpertCenter D500, offer a one-year warranty. The Apple iMac 24-inch includes one year of hardware repair coverage through its limited warranty and up to 90 days of technical support.
The OptiPlex 5090 also includes security features such as Intel vPro, which is integrated with Intel processors such as the 5090’s Core i5-11500. The result is improved performance, hardware-enhanced security, remote management, and platform stability. With more employees working from home, vPro aids off-site PCs with security and helps the IT team remotely discover, repair, and protect PCs across an entire organization.
All the Business Basics
Overall, the OptiPlex 5090 is a solid desktop, only slightly more expensive than the OptiPlex 3090, which we tested in Dell’s Small Form Factor (SFF) guise, though it’s available in a Tower or Micro format as well. Competitors include the inexpensive Asus ExpertCenter D500 business computer mentioned above, at $649.99. In terms of performance, the Asus is closer to the less-powerful OptiPlex 3090, but more than $100 cheaper. However, the Asus model’s Intel Core i5-11400 does not support vPro, a decided disadvantage for a business-level PC in a managed environment. Both the OptiPlex 5090’s CPU and the 3090’s Intel Core i5 do support this critical feature. Like the 3090, the Asus’ integrated graphics is based on Intel’s UHD Graphics 630, rather than the more advanced Intel UHD Graphics 730 on the OptiPlex 5090’s Core i5 chip.
Last up for competition (to illustrate what the Apple M1 chip can do) is the iMac 24-inch, running the M1 processor, which incorporates both CPU and graphics functions. It’s not strictly a business machine, but you’ll have to admit the iMac is a very slick-looking one, to some degree putting the others to shame: their boxy shapes, whether towers or SFF desktops, are just a tad too familiar. Still, performance is the bottom line in business, and the iMac seems to have it there, too.
I say “seems,” because the iMac couldn’t run either the PCMark productivity or storage tests or the 3DMark graphics test. Neither of these software suites have Mac versions. Where it did score, though, it did well. That’s especially true on two gaming tests, where the iMac soared past the others, achieving results more like those you’d expect from an add-in graphics card. More on the testing later.
A Desktop With Room to Grow
The Dell OptiPlex Desktop 5090 is a full tower that offers interior space for four add-in cards and two additional hard drives. The front panel has two legacy USB 2.0 ports that sit above two USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports (one Type-A and one Type-C), an audio jack, a tiny activity light for the SSD, and the power button.
The 5090’s rear panel has a full complement of USB, DisplayPort and Ethernet ports, four knock-outs for add-in cards, and a grate for the exhaust fan. Just below the two DisplayPort connectors are four USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports (Type-A), two legacy USB 2.0 ports, and one Ethernet port.
On the rear panel at the bottom left is the three-prong 110-volt receptacle. That receptacle feeds the 260-watt power supply.
Interior Access and Components
In a straightforward build like this, you can open the case quickly for maintenance or upgrades by loosening two thumbscrews in the rear with a Phillips-head screwdriver, then pushing the side panel toward the rear to remove it.
With the panel removed, the most prominent feature is the black air funnel covering the Core i5-11500 and heat sink. A fan above them directs air through the funnel and out the back, where an exhaust fan at the rear panel completes the process.
The interior layout is straightforward and functional, with four memory slots (two filled with 4GB RAM modules), four PCI Express add-in slots, and space for two 3.5-inch hard drives. The 256GB solid-state boot drive, an M.2 module, is screwed down to the motherboard. The funnel enclosing the processor can be removed by pinching two blue clips and pulling, revealing the fan above the heat sink and processor.
The 260-watt power supply sits in a metal case at the bottom, taking up most of the length, front to back. That power supply has capacity enough for add-in cards and the additional hard drives, as well as a modest graphics card like the Nvidia GeForce MX330. (Don’t expect to stuff a high-powered GeForce RTX or Radeon RX card in here.)
With the funnel removed, the rectangular M.2 SSD on the motherboard is just below the down-pointing corner of the fan. The SSD is above the blue PCI Express x16 slot and to the right of one of the two PCI Express x1 slots.
The OptiPlex 5090 measures 11.5 by 6.1 by 12.75 inches (HWD), and weighs up to 16 pounds depending on the configuration you choose.
Performance Down the Middle: Testing the OptiPlex Desktop 5090
The 11th Generation Core i5 in the 5090 performs better than the otherwise-comparable OptiPlex 3090, with its 10th Generation Core i5. That’s despite the 5090 having only 8GB of RAM versus the 3090’s 16GB in their base models. Both processors run at 65 watts. Though the 5090 generally performs better, having only 8GB of RAM, it can slow down when multitasking. If you need to upgrade later, there are two open memory slots to accommodate 4GB each, for a full complement of 16GB RAM if you wanted to supplement our base configuration of two 4GB DIMMs with two more of the same DIMM. Alternately, the system can take up to four 32GB DIMMs for a peak capacity of 128GB, or other combinations of 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, or 32GB DIMMs.
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
Our first test is UL’s PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance; it also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive. We consider 4,000 points in the main test a sign of strong performance for everyday productivity, and the OptiPlex Desktop 5090 shot past that with a score of 5,017. It scored a respectable 1,488 on the storage test, a typical result for a 256GB SSD paired with a midrange Intel Core i5 CPU.
Three other benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 converts a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
The Dell OptiPlex 5090 performed best on the two PCMark tests and came in second on the HandBrake transcoder, with the iMac converting the test video nearly a minute faster, at 8 minutes to the 5090’s 8 minutes and 57 seconds. On Cinebench R23, the OptiPlex 5090 scored 7,991, while the OptiPlex 3090 landed a practical-tie 7,868. Fastest, however, was the Asus ExpertCenter D500, with 8,178. On Geekbench 5.4 Pro, Apple’s iMac 24-inch, with its M1 processor, was best with 7,443, though the OptiPlex 5090 came in second at 6,754.
Our final productivity test, Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Photoshop, uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s seminal image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
The OptiPlex 5090 again came in first, with 546 for PugetBench, above the OptiPlex 3090 by 41 points and far above the Asus’ 314 points.
Graphics Tests
For Windows PCs, we run two synthetic graphics tests. UL’s 3DMark contributes two DirectX 12 gaming simulations, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for systems with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Another test is the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which we use to gauge OpenGL performance.
If you want to know what a good graphics card can do for a PC, consider one not part of our head-to-head comparisons here: The Lenovo Legion, with its powerful Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Super, scored an astronomical 41,489 on Night Raid and 6,005 on Time Spy, while the OptiPlex 5090 (the fastest of our four comparison units) scored 9,683 and 727, respectively. Other than the Nvidia graphics card, the Legion was modestly specced with only 8GB RAM (same as the 5090) and an Intel Core i5-10400 processor running at about the same speed as the 5090 (2.6GHz for the Legion to 2.7GHz for the 5090). On the productivity and content creation tests, the Legion won some and lost some, but never showed the brilliance it did with games and graphics.
On Night Raid and Time Spy, the Asus ExpertCenter did come in second at 5,261 on Night Raid and 434 on Time Spy. Results were similar for the Aztec Ruins 1440p and Car Chase 1080p tests. The Lenovo Legion was first (268 on Night Raid, 125 on Time Spy, followed by the iMac, then OptiPlex 5090 (48.3 and 17.6), Asus ExpertCenter and, finally, the OptiPlex 3090.
Of course, you probably shouldn’t be playing games akin to the Aztec Ruins or Car Chase scenes in the office—even if you work at home.
A Superior Business PC
The Dell OptiPlex 5090 Tower is just what it is supposed to be: a solid, highly configurable computer with an up-to-date processor, offering the capability to handle general business tasks as well as modest graphics-intensive demands. Most important, it burnishes its business reputation with powerful security delivered by Intel vPro, and warranty and support far beyond what’s expected in consumer or gaming computers.
If the 5090 is going to spend its days as a light-duty kiosk (though the 3090 might be better in that role), its modest 8GB RAM would do fine. Where space is an issue—say, in a classroom or in a doctor’s office—the OptiPlex 5090 in SFF configuration would be appropriate. For a general business environment, the 5090 as configured would do fine, especially if boosted to 16GB RAM. In short, the OptiPlex 5090 is crafted to excel in a wide range of roles and do so for some time to come, given the strong standard warranty. All you have to do is your due diligence in the Dell configurator.
