Dell Optiplex Dell Optiplex 5040 Tower Gaming PC Desktop Review

A refurbished office PC with a good GPU and RAM, but a terribly old CPU. It's a budget hack for 1080p gaming only. Not worth it for most people.

Let's be real: this isn't a new gaming PC. It's a refurbished Dell office tower that's been stuffed with a GTX 1660 and a ton of RAM. That's its whole story. It's a budget Frankenstein machine, and for around $500, it's trying to punch above its weight.

On paper, you get a 1TB SSD, 32GB of DDR4, and a GTX 1660 Super. That's a decent setup for light gaming or a home office. But the heart of this PC, the 6th-gen Intel i5-6500 CPU, is ancient. It's from 2015. That's the big compromise you're making.

The GTX 1660 Super is a solid mid-range GPU from a few years back. It'll handle 1080p gaming in older titles and lighter modern games fine, but it's not a powerhouse. The 32GB of RAM is overkill for most games and a nice bonus for multitasking. The real bottleneck is that old CPU. In our database, its performance ranks near the bottom. It'll feel slow for anything CPU-intensive, and it's officially unsupported by Windows 11, which is a weird detail for a PC that comes with it pre-installed.

At $534, the value is entirely in the GPU, RAM, and SSD. You're paying for those parts, and the ancient CPU/chassis is basically free. If you need a cheap PC to play games like Fortnite or CS:GO, and you don't care about CPU performance, it's a deal. But if you need a balanced system for modern tasks, this isn't it. You're buying a component bundle disguised as a PC.

Compared to a new budget build, you'd struggle to match the 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD at this price, but the CPU would be much better. Against something like an HP Omen or Lenovo Legion Tower, those are proper, modern gaming PCs with balanced specs, but they start around $800-$1000. This Dell is for a different, more desperate budget. The MSI Aegis or Asus ROG NUC are more compact and modern, but again, far more expensive. This Optiplex exists in a 'cheapest possible gaming entry' niche.

If you need a CPU for anything remotely modern, skip this. The i5-6500 is a 9-year-old processor that lags behind most we test. For productivity, coding, or playing current AAA games, this CPU will bottleneck you hard. Look for a system with at least a 10th-gen Intel or a Ryzen 3000 series chip.

Buy this only if your budget is absolutely locked at $500 and you just need a machine to run 1080p games from the last few years. It's a stopgap. For anyone doing work that needs a decent CPU, like video editing, streaming, or even some modern games, the old i5 will drag everything down. Look for a modern Ryzen 3 or i3 system instead.