Dell Tower Plus EBT2250 Silver 2025

A beast of a CPU trapped in a body with a mid-range GPU. Buy it for work, not for play.

The Core Ultra 9 285 is the star here. With 24 cores and a boost clock up to 5.6 GHz, it sits in the 93rd percentile for CPUs, which means it's one of the best on the market right now. Our benchmarks show it tearing through multi-core workloads without breaking a sweat. The 64GB of DDR5 RAM is also a standout, landing in the 94th percentile, so you can run a dozen Chrome tabs, a couple of VMs, and Premiere Pro all at once without a hiccup. Storage is solid too, with a 2TB NVMe SSD in the 92nd percentile. But that RTX 4060 is the bottleneck. It's a 70th percentile GPU, which is fine for light creative work but underwhelming for a machine at this price. The 15.88kg weight also surprised us, this thing is a tank.

Stacked against the HP OMEN GT22-3080 and Lenovo Legion Tower 7i Gen 10, the Dell Tower Plus loses the gaming battle badly. Those machines pair similar or better CPUs with much stronger GPUs, making them far more balanced for mixed use. The Apple Mac Studio M5 Max is a different beast entirely, it'll crush this Dell in creative workflows and efficiency, but you're locked into macOS. The ASUS ROG GM700 is another gaming-focused option that makes the Dell's RTX 4060 look silly. If you need raw CPU power and don't care about gaming, the Dell is competitive. If you want a do-everything machine, the OMEN or Legion are better picks.

Here's the thing: prices for this exact config range from USD 2,049 to USD 2,699 across four listings, and that spread is wild. At the low end, you're getting a lot of CPU and RAM for the money. At the high end, you're overpaying for a GPU that can't keep up. If you're buying, hunt for the USD 2,049 listing and don't pay a cent more. Even then, the weak gaming score and mediocre reliability percentile (69th) make this a tough sell unless your work is purely CPU-bound.

The Dell Tower Plus EBT2250 is a weird one. You've got a genuinely impressive Intel Core Ultra 9 285 with 24 cores and 64GB of DDR5, which puts it in the top tier for raw CPU and memory muscle. But then Dell pairs that with an RTX 4060, a mid-range GPU that's fine for everyday work but nowhere near what you'd expect in a machine this expensive. It's like putting a race car engine in a commuter sedan. The result is a desktop that crushes productivity and workstation tasks but falls flat for gaming, scoring a dismal 20.6 out of 100 in that category. If you're editing video, running VMs, or doing heavy data work, this thing will fly. If you want to game, look elsewhere.

If you're looking for a gaming rig or a balanced machine for both work and play, this isn't it. The RTX 4060 will leave you frustrated, and the gaming score is one of the worst we've seen in this price range. Go get an HP OMEN GT22-3080 or Lenovo Legion Tower 7i Gen 10 instead. They'll give you a much better GPU without sacrificing much CPU performance.

The Dell Tower Plus EBT2250 is a niche machine. It's a productivity powerhouse with a top-tier CPU and tons of RAM, but the weak GPU and poor gaming performance make it a bad choice for anyone who wants to play games or do heavy 3D work. If your workflow is all about CPU-bound tasks like video encoding, data analysis, or running multiple VMs, and you can find it at the USD 2,049 price, it's worth considering. Otherwise, spend your money on a more balanced machine.