Inspiron One 2305

Hi all, I'm hoping to help out perspective buyers of the Inspiron One 2305. I recently had purchased a model through the Dell outlet that I would have thought from the specs listed would include the ATI HD5470 graphics card. Unfortunately it did not, but I had high hopes for the machine either way. I purchased this system as a replacement for my kids computer which was a custom build of mine from roughly 8 years back. Their previous machine ran an AMD Athlon XP-M Barton Core 2500+ overclocked to 2.4Ghz, 2 gb DDR 400 and an Nvidia 7800GS (The last of the AGP cards made). Now that some of you more tech savy individuals have an idea of where I am coming from performance wise, let me tell you that the 2305 was a HUGE let down. The AMD X4 610E felt only marginally faster than the single core 8 year old Athlon running on a much older architecture. Now granted we are taking laptop grade versus desktop grade, but my performance expectation was much higher considering the massive generation gap of the hardware.

Moving on to graphics, as I had said I unfortunately did not receive a unit with the ATI HD5470. And instead was stuck with the lowly integrated (Yes it is integrated) ATI HD4270. Again, we are talking about something that is generations newer than what I was replacing. I didn't have high expectations considering it was an integrated part. All the kids really wanted was to be able to play Spore, browse the web and do homework. Something not entirely too taxing on a system. Unfortunately the game was completely unplayable. I'm talking framerates as low as 5 fps, whereas the old system had no issues. The web experience was acceptable given that the flash based sites they frequent were playing much more smoothly.

In the long run I decided to return the system to Dell after a rather lengthy and unhelpful chat with Dell support. You see, I also managed to gleam a little hardware information about the machine while I had it in my possesion. All Inspiron 2305 models share the exact same motherboard, which is very likely taken from one of their other laptops models. The key point here is that any of the 2305 owners are able to put the HD5470 card in their model. All you need to do is buy it from Dell with the cooler and install it in the PCI-E slot located at the top of the motherboard. How do I know this you ask? Click here to see - 2305 without GPU on the left, with on the right. I mentioned the unhelpful chat above. Well I had started the chat session to see if I could send the system back, pay for the card and have them install it. Since at that point I had no idea how the cooler would install. As a matter of fact, the guy kept telling me there was no PCI-E slot on the motherboard, even after I told him I had seen it.

Anyway, I had tossed around the idea of just getting a regular tower system. For what I paid for the 2305, that would have been a decently powerful setup. The problem was that once the first one was gone the kids started to miss the touch screen feature. So once Dell had confirmed receipt of the first one, I went ahead and ordered the $999 deal that includes the graphics card. To be honest it is a little better with the graphics card. One of the biggest things I noticed was the apps in the Windows Touch Pack seem much more responsive now. For those of you looking for numbers and such, I ran 3DMark 06 on both machines. I realize they are only synthetic benchmarks, but they give a good enough indicator of performance when comparing two systems.

The first Inspiron 2305

The $999 model

The machine the Inspiron replaced

 And just because it's so funny. My E1705 from 2006.

And now for the major complaint.  Dell shows the Inspiron 2305 listed here to include 1333mhz DDR3 ram. But once you choose your system and checkout, the RAM changes to 1066mhz DDR3. I hadn't noticed this until I actually received the system and then went back to the site to double check. This is a huge issue that Dell needs to address immediately. It's false advertising and quite frankly feels like a bait and switch. Whether or not it is done intentionally is not the issue. While I know the difference between 1333 and 1066 is not that big of a deal because of the latency differences. A non-geek would not see it the same way.