Hey guys. I hope you can give me some feedback on my plan for a midrange gaming PC. Starting with this Inspiron 620 MT for $599.99 (near the bottom of that page) I plan on upgrading the PSU to 550W and adding a Radeon HD 6870 and another 4GB of RAM.

The reason I chose the i3 rather than a better processor is that I will probably end up being bottlenecked by the video card regardless and I don`t use many processor intensive programs. The only downside I see is that I can`t upgrade past a 20 inch monitor, but I could always get a second down the road.

Any thoughts? Am I missing something significant here?

Any reason why you're not building it from the bottom up?

Yeah same here, why not build it all yourself?

the last experience of this kind I had with a Dell PC wasn't at all good because I bought a better PSU only to find out that the Dell chassis was incompatible with it, the plug holes were different meaning I could only replace it with another Dell branded PSU which of course they charged a lot for, but that was a long time ago so things might have changed I dunno.

Putting a PC together is so easy, plus you can choose all of the components that go in it to better suit your tastes/needs, like a kick ass chassis for example, instead of the bland dell one, you can learn everything you need to do it yourself on youtube I'd wager.

I did this with an old Inspiron I had.  It will probably work (I think Dell mostly sticks to ATX/mATX standards now) , but I don't really recommend it.  Their cases really aren't designed with modularity in mind.  Your components will be cramped and probably not cooled very efficiently.  I recommend starting from scratch.
 
Start here.
 
EDIT:  Also, I seem to recall an issue where the 24 pin connectors for Dell power supplies/motherboards have pins in different locations, but aren't keyed differently than ATX stuff.  This means that you could plug the power supply into the motherboard, but not have the pins properly aligned, resulting in a fried bored.

You could probably build a comparable or better machine from scratch and for less money if you were thrifty. It would have what you want in it and not the shitty cheapass parts that will come come with, plus it would simply be easier to work with.

Oh, and I'd recommend going for a 650W power supply. 550W is a little too low when you have such a graphics card in there.

Why can't you go any higher than a 20" monitor? At this very moment my laptop, which has similar specs and no graphics card, is plugged into a 26" TV and it works with no issues.

As everyone here have said. Just start from scratch.

@mordukai said:

As everyone here have said. Just start from scratch.

Sometimes the convenience of just having someone else put the computer together plus the benefits of a warranty is greater than going through the trouble of building your own for a relatively small amount of savings.

Seriously, shopping for computer parts is the worst. There is nothing intuitive about it unless you really know computers. A stock dell computer with some simple parts is guaranteed to get the job done. Maybe it won't run crysis or be able to chew through video editing, but if you wanted to do that you'd be deep enough into computers to not be bothering with a brand name computer.

If you have the time and patience to learn about pc building and to create your own computer do it. Otherwise just get something basic and upgrade piece by piece as you need it.

Yeah, I'm kind of tired of building PCs. Plus I'm tired of pirating Windows and being careful about what updates I download haha. This comes with Windows 7 installed, which significantly less money I would have to spend otherwise.

Do you really think 500W is too little for the 6870?