Historically, Dell has addressed the market for higher-end gaming desktops with their Alienware-branded machines, which are frequently built around unlocked CPUs as well as advanced graphics cards. Meanwhile, for those who wanted Dell-branded gaming PCs without the Alienware premium, the company has offered their custom-built Inspiron as well as XPS-branded machines; though there's a large gap between the premium XPS and basic Inspiron as well. So, looking to bridge the gap between their machines and produce a line of gaming-centric yet still reasonably affordable desktops, at this year's Gamescom the company is introducing its first ever Dell G-series desktops. Taking their name from Dell's popular G5 gaming laptops – which are intended to fill much the same role on the laptop side –  these new machines are intended to be Dell's gaming-focused desktops for the wider market.

The Dell G5 desktop (model 5090) is based on Intel’s 9th Generation Core processors and is paired with AMD’s Radeon RX 5700-series or NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1660 Ti or RTX 2000-series graphics cards. In its top-of-the-range configuration, the Dell G5 can pack Intel’s Core i9-9900K processor, NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 2080 GPU, 64 GB of DDR4-2666 memory, a 1 TB M.2 PCIe SSD, a 2 TB hard drive (or two of them), a Killer Wi-Fi 6 AX1650 network card, Gigabit Ethernet, and so on.

Dell emphasizes that its compact G5 desktop is completely user-upgradeable, so owners will be able to easily install a new graphics card or upgrade to more storage when they need to. Meanwhile, since the machine uses a motherboard based on Intel’s H370 chipset, it does not support CPU overclocking, unlike Alienware-branded computers. The lack of overclocking support also means that Dell can stick with a (relatively) conservative 480 Watt power supply for the system, as there's no need for a bunch of overclocking headroom in the power delivery design. Overall, this is enough for a 9900K CPU paired up with one of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2080 video cards, but is likely a factor in why we don't see an RTX 2080 Ti here.

Unlike many gaming desktops these days, Dell’s G5 will not come with liquid cooling, but will rely on proven air cooling systems with heat pipes. Keeping in mind that CPU overclocking is not supported by the platform, air cooling should be plenty sufficient. Meanwhile, those who would like CPU and GPU to at least hit their maximum boost clocks more often can set appropriate thermal profiles in the Alienware Command Center software.

Dell’s G5 desktops will be available starting August 19. Prices will start at $629, with more advanced configurations coming in at higher prices.

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Source: Dell

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  • imaheadcase - Tuesday, August 20, 2019 - link

    "cheap" is the word you are looking for, not decent.
  • alufan - Tuesday, August 20, 2019 - link

    "cheap"
    clearly you are a fool to believe that your getting better value by buying from intel, they have relentlessly driven up prices and margins for years at the cost of fools like yourself and not rewarded you by providing the best product available for the money, AMD with less than a third of the budget has come along and wiped the floor with intel, yes they may have a couple of slightly faster benchmarks on the intel side, but in the real world where most of us live AMD is very much the far superior processor both in terms of speed and options for the price not to mention the fact you have PCIe4, it seems the majority of folks agree with me as well as yet again AMD have topped the sales charts in pretty much most retailers and etailers, Dell of course are staunch intel supporters and I suspect have a very lucrative rebate as at this point they dont even list the worlds fastest consumer processors (note I never said games benchmark).
    As an obvious intel supporter even you should be applauding and perhaps buying an AMD system to ensure the pressure stays on intel AND AMD to keep pushing the envelope and each other to better products because lets face it we all benefit in that scenario.
  • AshlayW - Tuesday, August 20, 2019 - link

    Wish there was an comments Karma system here. You get my +1

    I'm so sick of the AMD is cheap mentality, Ryzen has conquered Intel Performance, efficiency, and value, all together.

    The real champion is the 3600, and I would love to have seen it offered in these PCs, it even allows entry level content creation and CAD, rendering and such, vastly better than the Intel price equavilant.
  • Cliff34 - Tuesday, August 20, 2019 - link

    AMD needs to be 'cheap' in order to compete w Intel. They may have better value chips but Intel still dominates the market. The key is whether AMD is making a healthy profit from their pricing. If they can cont to do so and be cheap and offer good cpus... Why not? Better for us consumers!
  • eek2121 - Tuesday, August 20, 2019 - link

    Current AMD CPUs are neither cheap nor are the latest gen motherboards, but they are selling just fine.
  • AlyxSharkBite - Tuesday, August 20, 2019 - link

    I wouldn’t call the $6k spent on my Threadripper Build cheap. Why would I buy a Skylake-X over a Threadripper? I went with the 2950X the Intel equivalent is the 9960X which is a thousand dollars more for 5-7% better performance. That’d be a stupid investment. Especially with less PCIe lanes, having to pay extra for the NVMe RAID. No thanks I’ll pass on that.
  • khanikun - Tuesday, August 20, 2019 - link

    Build for what you use it for. I game and the rest of it, I do light duty work. Watching videos or web browsing. Intel with it's less cores and higher speed simply work better in my situation.

    If I was doing more multi threaded work, I would have gone AMD. I'm on an 8086 and see no need to move to a 9th gen or Ryzen 3rd gen. Maybe one day I'll decide to build an AMD box for a VM host server, but it won't be happening this generation.

    For those that do lots of multi threaded work, this must be a great time. AMD has really nice pricing and is really pushing Intel to release higher core count procs. No matter which side of the boat you're on, there's something for those kind of users.
  • AshlayW - Tuesday, August 20, 2019 - link

    But ryzen 3000 has the same single threaded Performance as intel currently?

    Intel has maybe a single digits advantage in single, from pure clocks, at the expense of vastly inferior efficiency and features, upgradability and value.

    Sorry but your argument doesn't really work for same people.
  • blppt - Tuesday, August 20, 2019 - link

    The problem being that if you want the best gaming perfomance today, single core/thread performance still matters the most (assuming equivalent core count) and since it is very difficult to overclock a ryzen 3xxx to match the 4.7/4.8/5.0 clocks of the 9900K (soon to be 5 across the board for 9900KS, whenever they decide to actually release it), Intel still wins for gaming.

    The (equivalent, price-wise) Ryzen 3xxx pretty much wins everything else though, i'll agree there.
  • Korguz - Tuesday, August 20, 2019 - link

    blppt.
    you are forgetting one point. the ryzen cpus... use quite a bit less power then the 9900k, which it needs to use to get you that performance. cap an intel cpu at the power useage intel states.. and your performance.... goes down the toilet.

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