A vast improvement

I recently negotiated a good discount on what is the fastest DELL system that I have ever bought. The Vostro 270 mini-tower comes with a Intel i5-3470 quad core processor. Though not considered a high-end CPU, this 3.2GHz (turbo boost up to 3.6GHz) appears in responsiveness and benchmarks (PCmark7 4,811) to be much faster than the dual core 3.3GHz Intel i3-3220 model (PCmark7 2,792), which is considered to be a good budget gaming processor. The £50 price difference is probably well worth it.

There are two flies in the ointment:

• Intel has just released its latest 'Haswell' successor to the 'Ivy Bridge' i5-3470. The i5-4570 3.2GHz offers slightly better performance with lower energy usage. DELL has already introduced these into its premier XPS 8700 and Optiplex 9020 lines but with a hefty price premium over the £25 that just the CPU price difference would indicate. Presumably these processors will migrate to the mid-range Vostro models in the course of time.
• The 'balance' of the gaming system is probably affected. If you spend and extra £50 on the CPU you should also spend £50 extra or more on the graphics card. But the DELL supplied 300W PSU is then proably too weak and doesn't have the extra PCI-EX graphics card power connection that would be required.

All things considered, this is a very good bang-for-the-buck upgrade.