The new Dell Inspiron 530s is new notebook PC comes with integrated card reader. You can quickly transfer data to your memory card. The DVE-RW drive lacks light screen. It has ability to burn pictures on the surface of disc. Getting media rated to burn at such high speeds is another story though, so a 16x drive in actual fact is not that bad. A big flaw is the lack of a Gigabit network adapter. With files growing ever larger, and Gigabit switches dropping in price, it’s sad that Dell did not include this as standard. The low profile case means that you can’t just plug in any adapter. You’ll have to get one designed for this type of case.



The 2GB of Dual-Channel RAM, a 320GB SATA HDD, an ATI Radeon X1300 with 128MB of RAM, and an Intel Core 2 Duo E4400 at 2.0 Ghz: These specs are quite impressive. Windows Vista Home Premium paired with lots of RAM makes for a snappy machine. The benchmark results were expectedly high.

A score of 85 in the World Bench 6 Beta 2 test is nothing to be sneezed at. In fact, this is towards the high end of the spectrum. It breezed through all the individual tests. PC Mark 2005 showed similar high performance, with a score of 4711 PC Marks.



And for once, the game tests did not bring a branded system to its knees. Doom 3 raced to 47 frames / second at a resolution of 1024x768 with graphics set to low. Setting the graphics to high at the same resolution only managed to pull it down to 33 fps, which is very playable. F.E.A.R was playable at 1024x768 and low graphics, returning a score of 47 fps. Setting it to medium finally managed to slow it down, with only 19 fps. This is quite commendable, and while the X1300 is no speed demon, it is certainly able to play less demanding games well.

Newer games are a mixed bag. Clive Barker’s Jericho was basically unplayable, even at a low resolution of 640x480. Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 on the other hand was quite smooth at 1024x768 with the graphics set to medium. If the game is not too graphically intensive, the Dell has a good chance of playing it.