A 3-Year Review of the Dell Inspiron 5675
I have been building PCs for myself and others for the last 8 years, so I never imagined I would have a Dell pre-built desktop in my home. Especially an Inspiron of all things! After three years of daily driving one, here’s how it came to be and what I think of it as I get ready to replace it.
I was on the AMD Ryzen hype train and could not wait to get my hands on one. But due to price gauging of graphics cards caused by crypto mining, building your own PC at the time was not cost effective.
I was searching for a new PC. I was running a 6 core Intel Xeon Lenovo Thinkstation with a GTX 970 and was craving something with the new 6 core or 8 core Ryzen processors in it.
Around the same time, my systems administrator at work asked me to find him a new Dell desktop to replace his now-ancient 9 year old XPS.
Hence when I found the Inspiron Gaming 5675 at Costco. It was equipped with an AMD Ryzen 7 1700X 8 Core, 32GB DDR4 2400Mhz memory, 256GB M.2 SSD & a 2TB HDD. The thing that got me super excited was it had an AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB in it!
All this horsepower in early 2018 for only $1,100.
The Dell Inspiron Gaming 5675 was released in January, 2018. It was one of the very first AMD Ryzen pre-built desktops by an OEM Manufacturer
I bought his first and when it arrived I checked it out. I was surprised to find it had a standard 24pin PowerSupply. Which means that I could upgrade the stock Dell 460W in the future.
It also has another M.2 NVMe SSD slot, 3.5" HDD bay, 2.5" drive bay, and an additional PCIe X8 slot that supported Crossfire if I wanted to add an additional graphics card.
I was impressed with the upgradability and ordered mine the same night.
Within a couple months I would come home from work and it would be off. One day my sysadmin asked me if I was noticing the same behavior. So to test if the power supply was not enough for the machine I ran a good couple hours of Heaven benchmark in loop — lo and behold it turned off mid run.
The first big upgrade my machine received was a new power supply.
I found a pair of Corsair CX750M’s at a local computer shop and upgraded them. Only issue we found is we had to dremel a portion of the back plastic off to fit the powerplug. No big deal though.
I proceeded to run the machine for just over two years, only adding storage and a third power supply due to a failing fan on the Corsair PSU.
By June 2020, the RX 580 was feeling underpowered for my needs, and I came across a Gamers Nexus video touting the workstation performance of the new EVGA RTX 2060 KO.
The 2060 KO shipped with a cutdown RTX 2080 die, due to using my computer for workstation tasks more than gaming I picked one up.
Performance and stability have been absolutely amazing.
In November, 2020 I was hearing a lot of bearing noise from the CPU cooler fan and decided to replace the “knock off” Dell Wraith with a genuine Wraith cooler I had left over from my Ryzen 7 3700X PC I built for myself at work.
3 Years, 3 Minor Gripes
The only regrets I have is the Dell X370 Motherboard only had a few BIOS updates and was never patched for the Ryzen memory troubles at launch. I have been stuck with 2400Mhz memory.
Additionally, the X370 motherboard was never updated for Ryzen 2nd generation. Dell released an Inspiron 5676 the next year with Ryzen 2nd gen. I found that Dell used the same exact X370 motherboard but with a different BIOS. Some owners online were able to flash the 5675 motherboard to the 5676 BIOS and use 2nd gen Ryzen, but I never wanted to risk it.
Dust is also a major issue with this case due to the open sides and front. I live across a country road from a dairy farm so cleaning is a nightmare. But thermals have always been excellent with the stock rear exhaust fan.
Conclusion
Now here at the end of 2020, 3 years later and only the original case and motherboard remain. I was hoping for long term upgradability and I definitely got my money out of it.
My three year upgrade list: Four SSDs, 4TB HDD, two power supplies, EVGA RTX 2060 KO, and replaced the Dell cooler with a genuine AMD Wraith. This machine has more than held up to my expectations. I have also dual booted Windows 10 and System76’s POP!_OS since 2018 with no issues whatsoever.
I would love to see a new release of this style and design. I give a big thumbs up to the engineers who designed this machine. It is way more upgradable than the new Dell Inspiron Gaming G5 Desktop.
As I look to move onto a new machine here in the next couple weeks I am still going to keep it around.
And in the future when prices come down I will be buying more Inspiron 5675’s to replace my home lab Dell Optiplex’s. I really do enjoy this machine and would recommend it when prices come down as an excellent, upgradable, budget desktop.
Thank you for your time to read my review! More reviews and content coming soon.
