Review: Dell Tower Plus

With the price and quality of laptops these days, it can be difficult to recommend prebuilt desktop PCs—especially when they aren’t focused on gaming. The Dell Tower Plus straddles the line, offering strong performance in a more modern, office-friendly aesthetic. It’s ideal as a mixed-use computer that can act as a work-from-home PC by day and a secret gaming rig by night.

The off-white color of the case makes this a handsome machine (it also comes in graphite), paired with the dual-tone silver front plate. The bottom half of the front plate has a grid of holes, adding both airflow and a touch of design. It’s not flashy, but tasteful compared to competition like the Lenovo IdeaCentre Tower. The removable side panel also has perforations, giving you a subtle peek at the glowing light from the GPU—no RGB needed here. The Dell Tower Plus keeps it classy, despite being a fairly conventional, mid-sized tower.

Sturdy Build

Photograph: Luke Larsen

I’ve always liked Dell’s simple latch system for removing the panel and getting into your system. There’s a single screw to loosen on the back, and that lets you pop off the side panel. Inside, you’ll find a fairly roomy setup. There are removable plastic brackets on either side of the GPU. The slim, 750-watt power supply is held in place by a metal bracket with two screws, but the graphics card is simple to swap. There's a metal latch to pop down and a tiny, single screw. Once I unscrewed that, I was able to remove the graphics card without much trouble.

The Nvidia RTX 5070 is one of the top-of-the-line GPUs available to configure in the Dell Tower Plus, and while you can technically upgrade to the RTX 5080 to get some more VRAM (as the RTX 5070 only has 12 GB), you’ll be bottlenecked by the power supply by getting anything faster. The real benefit is being able to swap it out in future generations of Nvidia graphics cards. For future-proofing purposes, you can always configure it with a 1,000-watt power supply, which Dell charges an extra $50 for.

The CPU cooler is a passive, tower heat sink. Once you get the GPU out of the way, this would be fairly simple to swap out for something more powerful, but it certainly keeps things quiet. The PC has two 120-millimeter fans: one for exhaust in the back of the case and one behind the front panel for intake. CPU temperatures are decent, averaging 83 degrees Celsius under full load, only spiking up to a max of 96 degrees in bursts. It can get loud, but even during gaming, I didn’t find it distracting. The balance here is weighted more toward quieter operation, which is important in a system designed for work.

Photograph: Luke Larsen

I love the I/O on the front panel. You get three USB-A ports (5 Gbps), as well as a 10-Gbps USB-C port. The inclusion of a headphone jack and an SD card slot is also super convenient. On the back, you’ll find your usual assortment of ports, including one more USB-C port. That should cover all the bases, depending on what peripherals and accessories you use.

In addition to the video ports on the back of the GPU, you're getting upgraded port selection in the rear of the PC. For versions of the PC without discrete graphics, you now get HDMI 2.0 and a USB-C Thunderbolt 4 port, which lets you connect up to two 4K displays. You also have the usual assortment of four USB-A ports, an Ethernet jack, stereo audio ports, and a Kensington lock.

The Dell Tower Plus doesn’t exactly use off-the-shelf parts, but it does give you fairly good upgradability, which is one of the main reasons for buying a desktop in the first place. As for extra expansion, there are two overhead empty storage bays for 3.5-inch SATA hard drives, as well as an extra M.2 for an additional SSD. There are two DIMM slots, which will allow you to pack up to 64 GB of DDR5 memory, if your heart so desires. My review unit came with two sticks of DDR5 RAM, 16 GB each, as well as a single-terabyte M.2 SSD.

Adding or replacing these components is fairly straightforward, and there are even some instructions printed on the inside of the side panel. No, it’s not the Framework Desktop in terms of ease of use, but there’s a lot more space for your hands when tinkering with components or troubleshooting something. This isn’t a system inherently made for true DIYers. The custom motherboard makes upgrading the motherboard or CPU more difficult, but for the basics, Dell has done a good job of giving you a foundation you can build on.

Performance for Pros

Photograph: Luke Larsen

My review unit is one of the more powerful configurations, with both the unlocked Intel Core Ultra 7 265K and RTX 5070. (You can upgrade to the Core Ultra 9 285K and RTX 5080.) The value for this desktop drops as you move down the configurations. The cheapest is $800 for Intel graphics, but it doesn’t make much sense to buy that when you can get a Dell 14 Plus laptop with better specs for less money, especially given the added benefit of the display and portability.

I've seen discounts dropping the RTX 5070 configuration down to $1,050. If you can nab it at that price, that's a really strong value for an RTX 5070 desktop. The GPU alone costs over half the price of the PC at that price. Although the 5070 only has 12 GB of VRAM, this will get you well over twice the performance of the Framework Desktop, as compared in the 3DMark Steel Nomad benchmark.

This isn’t our favorite GPU in the RTX 50 series, and if you aren’t using any upscaling, you’ll get the best frame rates if you stick to 1080p or possibly 1440p, depending on the type of game. 4K is possible, but only once you start tweaking settings and using some upscaling. For example, in Cyberpunk 2077, you can get 74 frames per second in 4K resolution at Ultra settings, but only if you set the DLSS upscaling to the “Balanced” preset. You can even crank it up to the path-traced RT Overdrive setting, so long as you drop the resolution to 1080p and keep DLSS at Balanced.

Photograph: Luke Larsen

In a lighter game like Marvel Rivals, I was able to average around 75 frames per second in 4K without upscaling at all at High settings, or in 1440p at Ultra. But if you really want those fast frame rates (over 100 frames per second) for twitchy competitive games, you’ll be playing either in 1080p or using upscaling. Neither of those is a bad solution necessarily, but I could see it being disappointing performance for your brand-new, fairly large desktop.

Either way, performance in the Dell Tower Plus feels within the ballpark of what you'd get in a gaming desktop at this price, so you're not making a substantial sacrifice by sticking with something more work-friendly. Gaming is not this PC's primary use case, but it's a good example of just what the Dell Tower Plus can do. A designer, video editor, music producer, or anyone who runs fairly heavy software for work will appreciate the combination of the RTX 5070 and Core Ultra 265K.

There's a lot to like about the Dell Tower Plus. (Even though there's not much new here over the previous Dell XPS Tower, outside of a name change.) The updated Intel CPU and Nvidia graphics are both appreciated, especially since some manufacturers are slow to keep these lower-profile systems up to date. It's a particularly good deal if you can snatch it up on sale.