Dell Inspiron One 2320: Stuck in the Middle With You
by Dustin Sklavos on November 17, 2011 12:30 AM ESTGaming Performance
I can only hope I've contained my excitement enough for this part. As mentioned in the frequently referenced HP TouchSmart 610 review, these GPUs just aren't powerful enough to be driving these 1080p displays. The NVIDIA GeForce GT 525M is pretty heavily hamstrung, operating at even lower clocks than the already underpowered desktop GT 430. I can't believe this is the best Dell can offer in this all-in-one. We'll start with our "Medium" 1080p test suite. It'll be a little underwhelming with just the two all-in-ones tested here, but bear with me.
Medium is about as good as you're going to get for half of these games if you want to try and play them at native, but the Inspiron One 2320's GPU is sadly even weaker than the already mediocre AMD Radeon HD 5570 in the TouchSmart. It leads in DiRT 2 but trails everywhere else, and the "High" testing is only more depressing.
At our high settings the games are unplayable across the board. All-in-ones need something at least at the level of a Radeon HD 5750 to really support the resolutions they're shipping at. And keep in mind that our gaming test suite is mostly over a year old, so newer titles will likely struggle even more (e.g. Battlefield 3, Batman: Arkham City, Skyrim, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Rage, and the slew of additional games coming out this holiday season).
I asked a friend of mine who's a big fan of StarCraft II to give playing it on the touchscreen a try. As some of you have observed, I'm honestly too much of a moron to grok RTS games, but my buddy Benjamin is a big fan so I turned him loose on the Inspiron One 2320. His response was that the potential for a touch interface in the game was definitely there, but the game's not really designed for it and would need some changes to be playable that way. There are also the issues inherent with responsiveness in current touchscreen technology (misregistered clicks, etc.) that keep it from being a home run. I do feel like this genre of games is one of the places where a touchscreen might be viable on the desktop, but it seems to be a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation at present, and without decent graphics hardware I'm not sure it can ever really succeed.
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JarredWalton - Thursday, November 17, 2011 - link
Just to help avoid confusion, I've added a bit to the offending paragraph. Here's the updated version, so if you still have complaints with this wording please let me know what you disagree with and why:"When I spoke to HP's representative about the meager graphics hardware in the TouchSmart, she suggested that it was really meant to be more of a family computer and thus didn't need particularly aggressive graphics hardware. That may be the case, but it undermines the necessity of a dedicated GPU to begin with. If the integrated HD 2000/3000 graphics are inadequate, you probably plan on doing at least some gaming, so you'll want more. The fact is that these mobile graphics chips were designed for notebooks with 768p screens, and at that resolution they're fine. On an all-in-one, though, they're much harder to justify and really speak to a fundamental problem with the all-in-one ecosystem: we need an in-between point for graphics hardware. What we really need for "upscale" 1080p AIO systems is at least GT 555M or (preferably) GTX 560M level hardware; we've seen such chips in 14" and 15" notebooks; would it really be that hard to stuff something faster into a significantly larger AIO system? The GT 525M upgrade from the base model Inspiron One 2320 ends up costing over $200, and for that price it just doesn't add enough performance."
tzhu07 - Thursday, November 17, 2011 - link
This looks like the retarded younger brother of the iMac. Steve Jobs is fundamentally correct when he said that Dell makes boring beige boxes. Dell hasn't really done anything to prove him wrong.And God damnit those fucking stickers (lower right corner) keep appearing on Windows based machines. Stop, just stop already. I can't roll my eyes far back enough at this practice.
JarredWalton - Thursday, November 17, 2011 - link
NOTE: Sigmatu, personal attacks on people is not something we like to see in our comments, and they have been deleted. tzhu07 has expressed an opinion that this looks like a crappy knock-off of the iMac, and that's certainly a valid opinion. Complaining about the stickers on systems is also valid. Your attacks suggesting he... whatever... are uncalled for. Any more of that and I'll pull out the banhammer.sigmatau - Friday, November 18, 2011 - link
I guess when I was told to "stfu" when I was talking about my horrible 3gs in another one of your articles, that was ok because I was talking the truth about Apple? gotcha.JarredWalton - Friday, November 18, 2011 - link
I don't read through every comment on every thread, but your attacks were personal and I saw them. If someone makes unwarranted attacks on you, feel free to drop me an email. If it's in the forums, though, don't talk to me -- talk to one of the forum moderators. The bottom line is your comments here were out of line and I saw them. Instead of pointing the finger at a vague "other post", accept that your posts were inflammatory and personal attacks that contributed nothing, and move on with better posts. It's what helps separate the AT readership from, say, the DT readership (though there's obviously overlap); we like to hold our comments to a higher standard. :-)sigmatau - Friday, November 18, 2011 - link
Fine, next time I will just say how fucking stupid Macs are and go on a diatribe about that since that seems to be fine by you. Fuck Macs! I guess that's the higher standard you are looking for?In all honesty, both of our comments should have been deleted. By you posting about this instead of a personal message, then you should not be surprised by a response.
Anyways, I got it. I will not call people names, but apparently I can throw up all the profanity about products and that is fine. Sounds fairly hypocritical to me but whatever man.
Dustin Sklavos - Friday, November 18, 2011 - link
Or you could just behave yourself in the first place.That is also an option.
sigmatau - Friday, November 18, 2011 - link
Fuck Macs.sigmatau - Friday, November 18, 2011 - link
Macs are fucking grossly overpriced.I am expressing my opinion and "that's certainly a valid opinion".
niva - Thursday, November 17, 2011 - link
Right on about the stickers, they're so hard to remove... I wish companies would stop doing that. Their main logo is obtrusive enough.Same about bloatware sold with the machines. I want a clean windows install on it.
Agreed with the sentiment that this is a VERY cheap iMac. Hate Apple but props must be given in terms of design. Dell failed in execution of this AIO.