Dell Inspiron 531s

The slim Dell Inspiron 531s is a small-form-factor desktop that doesn't exact a price penalty for its size. It comes with a fairly powerful processor, 2GB of system memory (important in these Vista-oriented days) and discrete graphics. Oh, yeah, and it does all this for $499 (direct, with e-value code DDPMGX1). This is the system I would steer people toward if they are looking for a well-equipped, stylish budget desktop.

The "s" in 531s stands for small or slim. This means that the system is a lot thinner than the average mini tower desktop, at about 14 by 4 by 17 inches (HWD). Does this mean there is less expansion room in the system? Whereas that may have been true for older systems, the motherboard in the 531s has all the usual internal connectors, including two PCI card slots, a PCIe x1 and a PCIe x16 graphics card slot (occupied by an ATI Radeon HD 2400 card). The card slots are only half-height because of the slim desktop form factor, which limits some choices—but if you're buying a $500 PC, you're not likely to be looking to equip it with a $700 full-size graphics card, anyway. There's space for two additional system memory DIMMs, though most people will find the 2GB the system comes with to be plenty. (Many systems in the sub-$500 price range have only 1GB). The 531s includes a 160GB hard drive, which is average for systems at this price. But it comes with eight USB ports, which is exemplary for any system and exceptional in the category of small-form-factor PCs.

Dell took a couple of shortcuts, however, to get the 531s down to the low price it lists for. The most notable example is its choice to go with a Windows Vista Home Basic OS, which shaved off $30. (It did this $30 shave so that it could qualify as a sub-$500 PC for the purposes of this story.) If you can spare the cash, I recommend the upgrade to Home Premium later on, especially since Premium includes the MCE interface. As much as I hate to say it, I'd rather have the 2GB of RAM and the discrete graphics card over Vista Home Premium as a trade-off at the start.

The other $30 in cost savings was achieved by omitting a DVD burner in favor of a cheaper DVD/CD-RW combo drive. These days, with a lot of homebrew video and music going directly to the Web (for example, MySpace and YouTube), burned DVDs are becoming a relic of sorts. Using DVDs for backup is becoming as outdated as using floppy disks. Though DVDs are cheap, they are now unwieldy (40 DVD-Rs to back up this system if it's full), and hand-printed DVDs can easily get lost. I'm now recommending using external hard drives for backup. Searching and retrieving files is easier on external hard drives than hunting down "DVD 10/02/04-Disc 15." Still, these two omissions together do take some points away from the system, although I do think that this is a very good system in its class—it gets the Editors' Choice.

I applaud Dell's recent willingness to remove bloatware from its system builds. You can enjoy this option by checking the "No Productivity Software" and "No Security Software" check boxes while you configure your new Dell. Though there is utility in some of these programs, most people will want to choose their own software to install instead of having trialware and ISP offers foisted on them. I hope the other system manufacturers follow suit. Boutique and other smaller system builders already provide that service (you can ask them to leave just about anything off the PC, down to the operating system, if you so choose).

The 531s was a decent performer on the Windows Media Encoder test, finishing in 1 minute 44 seconds. That's only 3 seconds behind the Systemax Venture E21, our leader on this test among sub-$500 PCs. This score shows that the 531s is well suited to video tasks such as transcoding home videos for posting on the Internet. The 531s also did reasonably well on the Photoshop test (2:14). That lagged the Systemax (1:08), but trounces other sub-$500 PCs that took 4 to 5 minutes to do the same tasks. The 531s' discrete ATI Radeon HD 2400 graphics card helped the system win the 3DMark06 race with a score of 1,222 (compared with scores in the 217to-265 point range for systems with integrated graphics). You won't be able to play the latest first-person shooter opuses such as BioShock at 2,560-by-1,600 resolution, but such games should be doable at a much lower (1,024-by-768) resolution.

Editor's note: Please note that the ATI Radeon HD 2400 option will not be available on dell.com until after November 1, 2007. Please use the evalue code OC: DDPMGX1 at that time to ensure you get the configuration reviewed here.

The 531s comes across as more powerful and sleeker than similar systems such as the eMachines T5234 and Compaq Presario SR5130NX. The 531s lacks the others' DVD burner, but it has discrete graphics and more system memory, hence better performance. It's less likely to seem slow a year or two down the road.

A very good choice for the budget-conscious PC buyer, the Dell Inspiron 531s proves that you don't need a big, honking tower to get a decent computer. It will even do 3D, which is a stumbling block for systems in this price range. Budget an extra $60 if DVD burning and Vista Premium are must-haves, but as is, the Inspiron 531s I tested is worthy of our Editors' Choice.

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