Most companies that make gaming PCs and laptops are trying to snag the attentions of new "casual" gamers. These customers either can't afford to spend thousands of dollars on a high-end gaming device—or they don't want to. However, they still want a machine that can handle their regular bouts of gaming.

Dell's current answer for these customers has been its Inspiron 15 gaming laptop, but now it's adding its first desktop PC to the Inspiron Gaming line. Today, the company announced the Inspiron Gaming Desktop, which it hopes will attract casual gamers who don't need to bring their gaming endeavors outside their home.

Dell's Inspiron Gaming Desktop looks like a standard tower, but with a cross-hatched, semi-open design on its bottom-left side. This design has practical and aesthetic purposes: it provides better ventilation for the PC's internals while also giving the tower an edgy look that most customers associate with gaming devices. The center Dell logo and the inside of the PC emit an electric-blue light, which also fits with the gaming-device style (if you're not into the blue light, there's also a model with basic white light).

Mark Walton

Mark Walton







Also on the tower's front are a portion of its ports, including two USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.1 ports, an audio combo jack, and a media card reader. Hidden on the back of the tower are two more USB 2.0 ports, another two USB 3.1 ports, an HDMI port, one P/S 2 port, and a mic jack. The Inspiron Gaming Desktop supports seventh-generation AMD and AMD Ryzen processors, and the Ryzen models will have an additional USB Type-C port on the front of the tower.

Like Dell's other towers, you can build the Inspiron Gaming Desktop to be as powerful as you like. The seventh-gen AMD models have AMD A10 or A12 APUs with Radeon R7 graphics, while the Ryzen models support Ryzen 5 1400, 5 1600X, and 7 1700X processors. If you opt for one of the Ryzen processors, you'll get SenseMi technology that's built to optimize power consumption, task routing, and clock speeds for better performance and responsiveness, whether you're gaming or not.

You can outfit the Inspiron Gaming Desktop with up to 32GB of DDR4 RAM and up to a 2TB hard drive or up to 256GB SSD with an additional 2TB HDD. It also supports optional discrete graphics from Radeon and Nvidia: up to an 8GB Radeon RX 580 GPU or a 6GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 GPU. Five additional bays provide more storage options if you want to expand in the future.

The addition of the Inspiron Gaming Laptop makes sense after the success of its laptop counterpart. Not everyone wants or needs a portable gaming machine, so providing a desktop option to those customers could encourage them to invest in a casual gaming device. Not everyone wants or needs the flair and high price that comes with Alienware devices either, so this device will likely attract more of those kinds of gamers. Since Dell designed the Inspiron Gaming Desktop to be built how the user wants it, customers can spend as much or as little as they please. The extra storage bays inside the desktop will undoubtably please casual and serious gamers alike as well, since it gives the desktop more storage flexibility over time. The Inspiron Gaming Desktop is available to order now and starts at $599.