Dell Inspiron 620 MT Review

1. Introduction2. Dell Inspiron 620 MT (Bundle & External)3. Dell Inspiron 620 MT (Internal)4. Dell Inspiron 620 MT (Bios)5. Hardware Overview and Testing Methodology6. Synthetic: PCMark Vantage7. Synthetic: PCMark 78. Synthetic: 3DMark 119. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra 201110. Synthetic: CineBench R11.5 64 bit11. Synthetic: ATTO Disk Benchmark12. Synthetic: HD Tach13. Synthetic: CrystalDiskMark14. Real World: BluRay Playback with PowerDVD 1115. Real World: MKV Playback16. Real World: Flash HD Performance17. Real World: Media Encoding Performance18. Image Quality: HQV Benchmark 2.019. Gaming: Resident Evil 520. Gaming: Dirt 321. Technical: Acoustics Performance22. Technical: Thermal Dynamics23. Closing Thoughts24. View All Pages

Many of us build our own computers, but for those without the necessary skills, time, or interest there are a plethora of pre-built systems on the market to suit all demands. Today we are looking at the Dell Inspiron 620 MT desktop system which, on paper seems ideal for a general all round workhorse or office system.

The Dell Inspiron 620 MT certainly won't break the bank, with prices starting at £428.99. For the money you get an Intel Core i3 processor, 4GB of DDR3 memory, Nvidia discrete graphics and a DVD burner. Dell also bundle Windows 7 Home Premium, a keyboard and mouse with every purchase. Simply hook up to a monitor or TV and you are ready to start working.

As with some of Dell's recent system builds, they allow for a small amount of user customisation, with coloured front panels available via the configuration tool. These add £10 to the final price, so it isn't a huge outlay. Peacock Blue, Deep Purple, Formosa Red and Solid White are on offer.

Specifications of review system (1 year collect and return warranty):

Processor: Intel Core i3-2100 3.10ghz.
Chassis: Dell custom: Peacock Blue.
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit.
Software: DataSafe Online Backup 2GB (1 year license), Office 2010 Starter Edition, McAfee SecurityCenter (15 month subscription).
Memory: 4GB DDR3 (2×2048)
Optical: DVD +/- RW Drive (read/write CD & DVD)
Hard Drive: 1TB 7,200 rpm drive
Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GT 420 1GB GDDR3
Keyboard: Dell USB Entry Keyboard
Mouse: Dell MS111 USB Optical Mouse
Card Reader: Integrated 8-in-1 Media Card Reader

Total Cost: £438.99

The Dell Inspiron 620 MT arrives in a traditionally design brown box with the name of the company on all sides. The Intel logo is also visible.

The keyboard is supplied in a separate box. There is also a power cable, mouse and literature on the product.

The keyboard and mouse are Dell's entry level models, and perfectly usable for duties as a workstation. Gamers might want to spend a little extra, either via the Dell configuration options, or in a separate purchase.

The Dell Inspiron 620 MT is a reasonably attractive little computer, with the looks improved by the coloured front panels. We received the ‘Peacock Blue' version for review.

There is a power button on the front, and the third panel flips open to reveal the I/O panel. There is a card reader here, alongside a headphone and microphone port, and two USB 2.0 ports.

The side panel has the ‘Inspiron' product name embossed into it, with a vent on the side panel to improve air flow.

The top and bottom of the case have no ports or fans.

As we can see from the rear of the chassis, the power supply is positioned at the top. There is an exhaust fan positioned in the middle, with the I/O panel at the left. Underneath is the graphics card.

The I/O has a 1Gbit lan connector, six USB 2.0 ports, HDMI and VGA video out, and audio connectors. The Nvidia GT 420 video card underneath has a DVI, HDMI and VGA connector for digital and analog panel support.

Thankfully Dell have opted for a traditional case design which simply requires the removal of two screws to get inside.

The wiring job is fairly clean and much as we would expect from a huge corporation such as Dell. It isn't as good as a specialist, smaller dealer such as CryoPC or Yoyotech, but we doubt the target audience would care.

The 1TB hard drive is installed in a rack bottom left with the sata cable taped for added security during transit.

The power supply is a ‘Dell' branded model, tagged with the moniker ‘H300PM-00'.

The rear of the case has a 92mm exhaust fan in place, and the cooler is marked with ‘AVC' – which stands for Asia Vital Components. Those people expecting a Noctua NH D14 may be disappointed!

The bottom of the motherboard has all the USB 2.0 and audio headers correctly installed. The Nvidia GT 420 discrete graphics card is not branded.

Dell are using Hynix DDR3 memory, but it is rather embarrassing to see that they aren't using heatspeaders on these specific modules. They add so little cost to the overall build but can improve temperatures long term and in hotter running climates.

The Aptio bios supplied with the Inspiron 620 MT is a barebones affair, giving control over the basic options and nothing more. We can see that the hard drive is the ‘ST31000524AS' – better known as the 1TB Seagate Barracuda, which spins at 7,200 rpm.

No overclocking options, and not much in place for the ‘enthusiast' user. But again, for the target ‘mainstream' audience this is to be expected.

Today we are using a mixture of synthetic and real world tests to analyse the performance of the Dell Inspiron 620 MT. We won't be testing with a variety of high demand Direct X 11 games, because we already know that the Nvidia 420 GT just isn't capable of delivering good frame rates at semi high resolution.

System validation is available here.

The screenshots above highlight the Intel Core i3 2100 processor which is a two core/four threaded design running at 3.1ghz – it has 3MB of Level 3 cache and is built on the 32nm engineering process. Dell have configured the DDR3 memory to run at 1333mhz with timings of 9-9-9-24 @ 1T. The Geforce GT 420 runs at 400mhz core and 800mhz and is built on the 40nm process. It has 16 ROPs, 48 unifed shaders and 1 GB of GDDR3 memory connected via a 128 bit memory interface.

We are always glad to see a company using a 64 bit version of Windows 7 – Home Premium in this case.

Compared to some Dell installations we have seen in the past, this configuration is relatively clean. There are some programs such as McAfee and Bing Bar which we would de-install ourselves, but most of the software installed is useful for the target audience.

Dell don't supply an optical media backup with the Inspiron 620 MT, but when the system boots it does suggest that the system is backed up to blank discs. Dell include backup software as can be seen above.

Software:
3DMark Vantage
PCMark Vantage
PCMark 7
SiSoft Sandra 2011
Cinebench 11.5 64 bit
FRAPS Professional
CrystalDiskMark
HD Tach
ATTO Disk Benchmark
Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra 11
Cyberlink MediaEspresso
Resident Evil 5
Dirt 3

Technical Monitoring and Test Equipment:
Lacie 730 Monitor (Image Quality testing)
Thermal Diodes
Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp
Extech digital sound level meter & SkyTronic DSL 2 Digital Sound Level Meter
Nikon D3X SLR with R1C1 Kit (4 flashes)
Olympus Pen Camera

We use Futuremark’s PCMark Vantage in many of our system reviews and we felt that it was worth an inclusion in this review. It is still a synthetic suite, but it uses many real world characteristics to try and judge overall performance levels. We are using the 64 bit version of the HDD Suite for this testing. We also compare against a Samsung F1 1TB drive on this page.

A PCMark score is a measure of your computer’s performance across a variety of common tasks such as viewing and editing photos, video, music and other media, gaming, communications, productivity and security. From desktops and laptops to workstations and gaming rigs, by comparing your PCMark Vantage score with other similar systems you can find the hardware and software bottlenecks that stop you getting more from your PC.

An overall score of 6903 is quite healthy for a general workstation system. The mechanical hard drive lowers the overall score.

PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use.

The Core i3 performance score is good, although the overall score is lowered by the graphics and hard drive performance.

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista. The benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.  We used performance settings for this benchmark.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

Using the entry level setting, gives a final score just under 1,000 points. This indicates the overall weakness of the graphics solution, especially when tasked with a demanding synthetic test such as this.

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.

Sandra is a (girl’s) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
• Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
• Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
• Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

• SMP – Multi-Processor
• MC – Multi-Core
• SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
• GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
• NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
• AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
• IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

Overall results are what we would expect from the Intel Core i3 2100 processor. Solid results in all the tests. The reasonably high clocked memory scores well, around 16.5GB/s.

CINEBENCH is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more.

CINEBENCH is the perfect tool to compare CPU and graphics performance across various systems and platforms (Windows and Mac OS X). And best of all: It’s completely free.

A score of 2.92 represents a decent score for a system which could be used for light rendering duties. For more serious duties a higher cost processor would be advised (such as Core i7).

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

The Seagate Barracuda delivers slightly low results, as we have seen similar 7,200 rpm mechanical drives scoring around 140MB/s in this specific benchmark. The Barracuda struggles to maintain 100MB/s> transfer rates between 1,024 and 8,192.

I have been using HDTach for many years now and always find it is an invaluable benchmark to ascertain potential levels of performance. HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device possible.

Similar results to the previous ATTO Disk tests, with the drive struggling to maintain an average of 100 MB/s. This is rather disappointing for a 3.5 inch 7,200 rpm mechanical drive.

Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0 x64.

Not a great showing from the Seagate drive, scoring an average sequential rate of 109.8 MB/s read and 106.9 MB/s write. 512k performance is considerably worse.

Our good friends at Cyberlink kindly supplied the software for our BluRay and conversion tests.

Cyberlink PowerDVD 11 is one of the finest solutions for the BluRay experience on Windows and we found this software to work perfectly with this chipset. We tested with the Blu-Ray Disc of 2012.

We are using the hardware acceleration of the discrete solution to help reduce overall processor load.

The average utilisation time was 10 percent, with a peak up to 19 percent. This means there is plenty of processor time free to handle other duties, if needed.

Many people who have media systems will be familiar with the Matroska (.mkv) file format which is often used for high definition video.  In this test we will be using VLC Media Player to play a 1080P MKV file of Lord Of The Rings (ripped from our BluRay disc) while recording CPU usage.

The MKV container places a more demanding load on the system, than the native Bluray disc. Still there are plenty of free CPU cycles for other duties.

Many people using this system will be enjoying Flash related content so we feel it is important to test with some of the more demanding material available freely online. Full hardware acceleration is enabled.

Strong results, averaging 15 percent CPU time to play back the 1080p movie file.

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

• Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
• Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
• Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
• Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
• Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
• Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

We are using a 3.3gb MKV file today at 2 hours and 12 minutes in length. We are converting to a final output for an Apple Media Player, a real world situation facing many people.

A final time of 18 minutes and 27 seconds to complete the encode for Apple playback. This compares well to the Intel Atom processor, which can take well over 1 hour and 15 minutes to complete the same task. On the other side of the performance ballpark an overclocked Core i7 2600k can complete the same encode process in just over 8 minutes.

HQV Benchmark 2.0 is an updated version of the original tool and it consists of various video clips and test patterns which are designed to evaluate motion correction, de-interlacing, decoding, noise reduction, detail enhancement and film cadence detection.

There are two versions of the program, standard definition on DVD and high definition on BluRay. As our audience will be concentrating on HD content, so will we.

This has a total of 39 video tests which is increased from 23 in the original and the scoring is also up from a total of 130 to 210. As hardware and software gets more complicated, the software has been tuned to make sure we can thoroughly maximise our analysis.

Read our initial analysis over here.

	Nvidia GT 420
Dial	4
Dial with static pattern	5
Gray Bars	5
Violin	5
Stadium 2:2	5
Stadium 3:2	5
Horizontal Text Scroll	5
Vertical Text Scroll	5
Transition to 3:2 Lock	5
Transition to 2:2 Lock	0
2:2:2:4 24 FPS DVCAM Video	5
2:3:3:2 24 FPS DVCam Video	5
3:2:3:2:2 24 FOS Vari-Speed	5
5:5 FPS Animation	5
6:4 12 FPS Animation	5
8:7 8 FPS Animation	5
Interlace Chroma Problem (ICP)	5
Chroma Upsampling Error (CUE)	5
Random Noise: Sailboat	5
Random Noise: Flower	5
Random Noise: Sunrise	5
Random Noise: Harbour Night	5
Scrolling Text	3
Roller Coaster	3
Ferris Wheel	3
Bridge Traffic	3
Text Pattern/ Scrolling Text	3
Roller Coaster	3
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Luminance Frequency Bands	5
Chrominance Frequency Bands	5
Vanishing Text	5
Resolution Enhancement	15
Theme Park	5
Driftwood	2
Ferris Wheel	3
Skin Tones	7
Total	179

This system achieves a total score of around 180 points which is good, delivering a high level of image quality. The GT 420 however isn't the best discrete card for image quality and a move to a higher model within the Nvidia range would improve this further.

Resident Evil 5, known in Japan as Biohazard 5, is a survival horror third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is the seventh installment in the Resident Evil survival horror series, and was released on March 5, 2009 in Japan and on March 13, 2009 in North America and Europe for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. A Windows version of the game was released on September 15, 2009 in North America, September 17 in Japan and September 18 in Europe. Resident Evil 5 revolves around Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar as they investigate a terrorist threat in Kijuju, a fictional town in Africa.

Within its first three weeks of release, the game sold over 2 million units worldwide and became the best-selling game of the franchise in the United Kingdom. As of December, 2009, Resident Evil 5 has sold 5.3 million copies worldwide since launch, becoming the best selling Resident Evil game ever made.

We tested the game at 720p in DX 10 mode with the following settings:

An average frame rate of 32 fps at 720p isn't going to set the performance world alight, but at least it is playable and smooth througout.

Dirt 3 is a rallying videogame and the third in the Dirt series of the Colin McRae Rally series, developed and published by Codemasters, although the “Colin McRae” tag has been completely removed from this iteration (having been previously been removed from American versions of previous games in the series).

We tested at 720p with ultra low settings @ 2AA as seen in the screenshots below:

At ultra low settings, the game is playable, maintaining a 30>fps rate at all times.

We have changed our method of measuring noise levels. We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. We are using a heatpipe based passive power supply and an Intel SSD to keep noise levels to a minimum. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests. Ambient noise in the room is around 20-25dBa. We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation.

Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.

KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refridgerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum

The system is generally emitting around 29-32 dBa of noise, but when pushed hard it reaches a maximum of 34.8 dBa.

The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 24c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this.

Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes. Load measurements were acquired by running Furmark with Cinebench.

The Core i3 processor isn't a hot running design, so the simple cooler has no problems maintaining a sub 70c dynamic under load.

Many enthusiast users reading Kitguru will build their own system, using a carefully sourced list of parts and components within their price range. Building a customised, home brew system like this can give satisfaction and long term pleasure, especially when used as a high resolution gaming rig.

However, with the main system out of the way there can often be a demand for a secondary system, perhaps for the whole family to use, or to fulfill office and design criteria within a different environment.

The Dell Inspiron 620 MT is targeted as a ‘jack of all trades' computer, with a relatively balanced list of internal components, including a Core i3 processor, 4GB of DDR3 memory, DVD burner, Nvidia discrete graphics and a large 1TB hard drive running the 64 bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium.

The chassis design is pleasant enough, with Dell keen to offer some personalised customisation options. For an extra £10 you can ditch the plain black appearance and add a coloured fascia to the front of the case. It seems somewhat superfluous and a slightly superficial decision, but in reality it does add a little zest to the overall appearance.

The Core i3 2100 is a capable processor design, and it powers through all the tasks that an end user targeting this market would reasonably require. It goes without saying that if your demands are less ‘office' and more ‘3D rendering' then budgeting for a Core i7 system would be a wise decision. Just be prepared to dig deeper into your wallet.

Graphically, with the low cost Nvidia GT 420 installed, this system will never set the performance world alight, but it is capable of hardware acceleration with high definition media playback, alleviating CPU load.

Internally, we are slightly disappointed with some of Dells build decisions. They are using Hynix memory without heatspreaders, and a low cost ‘AVC' CPU cooler. While working to such a strict budget will always force compromises, we find it unacceptable in 2011 to be using memory without headspreaders. Long term it makes for a more stable system and will add virtually nothing to the system build cost. In fairness, the CPU cooler performed fairly well, aided by the cool running Core i3 processor design.

The Dell Inspiron 620 MT is a competitively priced workhorse system, ideal for office use, high definition multimedia playback and very light, lower resolution gaming duties.

You can specify your own system, over here.

Pros:

• Price point is very good
• Core i3 processor is very capable
• external appearance is attractive
• connectivity is strong
• Runs fairly quiet
• physical footprint is small

Cons:

• not much graphics grunt
• some compromises made internally

Kitguru says: A decent all round system which is ideal when used as a machine for the family, or within an office environment.

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