Dell Tower Plus EBT2250 Black

A CPU beast with a mid-range heart. Get it for all-core crunching, but look elsewhere if you need a GPU that can keep up.

The Dell Tower Plus EBT2250 is a strange beast. It's packing one of the fastest workstation CPUs we've ever tested, 64GB of DDR5, and a brand new RTX 5060, then slaps it all into a plain black box with a surprisingly modest 460W power supply. If you spend your days compiling code, running VMs, or chewing through CPU-bound renders, this thing is an absolute monster. But that GPU and PSU combo tells me Dell is aiming squarely at a very specific buyer: someone who needs all the threads and memory but only occasional graphics horsepower. For everyone else, there are some real trade-offs.

The Core Ultra 7-265 rips. With 20 cores and a boost up to 5.3GHz, it lands in the top tier of our database, easily outpacing most consumer desktop chips. 64GB of RAM is equally excessive in the best way. What surprised me was the RTX 5060. It's no slouch, but paired with that nuclear reactor of a CPU, it feels like putting economy tires on a sports car. It'll handle 1080p gaming and moderate content creation fine, but you're leaving a lot of potential on the table with that 460W PSU, which is the real bottleneck if you ever want to swap in a beefier card.

At $2,321, you're paying a premium for that CPU and RAM. If your workload genuinely leverages all those cores and you need 64GB today, the price isn't outrageous. But for the same money, several competitors offer far more balanced gaming and GPU compute performance. This is a purpose-built machine, and you're paying for that focus.

Most towers in this price range, like the HP OMEN 45L or Lenovo Legion Tower 5i Gen 10, will stick an RTX 4070 or better inside with a 750W+ PSU, giving you true all-around power. The ASUS ROG GM700TZ and MSI EdgeXpert similarly lean toward gaming. The Dell's CPU smokes all of them, but those other rigs will absolutely destroy it in GPU-bound tasks. Even the compact Corsair ONE i600 squeezes in a higher-wattage PSU and more GPU muscle. Choose based on whether you render video or crunch spreadsheets.

If you want a compact desktop or anything resembling a balanced gaming PC, this isn't it. The case is huge and the PSU is weak. Go grab an HP OMEN or Lenovo Legion for the same money and you'll get a much better GPU and easier upgrades.

Buy this if your day is dominated by CPU-heavy, parallel workloads, compile times, or running docker containers for fun, and you have no intention of a major GPU upgrade down the line. It's a quiet, capable workstation that eats code for breakfast. Just don't mistake it for a balanced gaming or rendering rig.