Dell Pro Tower ECT1250, Core Ultra 7 265, 16GB, 1TB SSD

Great CPU, great ports, terrible upgrade path. Buy it for office work, not for tinkering.

The Core Ultra 7 265 is the star here. Twenty cores at 2.4GHz base clock means this thing chews through spreadsheets, browser tabs, and light development work without breaking a sweat. Our database puts the CPU in the 89th percentile, which is genuinely impressive for a business tower. The integrated Intel UHD Graphics are fine for driving monitors, and Dell says you can push four FHD displays or two 4K panels through the HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort combo. But don't expect any gaming magic, the gaming score of 15.9 out of 100 tells you everything. The 1TB NVMe SSD sits at the 69th percentile, which is solid but not exciting. What surprised us most is how much Dell nailed the connectivity while completely ignoring upgrade headroom.

Against the Apple Mac Studio M3 Ultra, the Dell gets absolutely demolished on GPU performance and raw compute, but it costs a fraction of the price and runs Windows natively. The Lenovo Legion Tower 5a Gen 10 and HP OMEN GT16-0364 are gaming machines with real GPUs, so they'll crush the Dell in anything graphical, but they're also bigger, louder, and overkill for office work. The MSI Aegis ZS2 sits in a similar gaming-focused lane. If you need a quiet, reliable office machine with great ports and a strong CPU, the Dell holds its own. If you want to game or do GPU-heavy work, every single competitor here beats it.

Pricing is all over the place. US listings range from $1,269 to $1,600, which is a $331 spread for what appears to be the same machine. That's frustrating. At the low end, you're getting a strong CPU and excellent connectivity for a reasonable business price. At $1,600, you're overpaying for integrated graphics and a power supply that can't handle a discrete GPU. Shop around and don't pay a penny over the low end of that range.

The Dell Pro Tower ECT1250 is a business workhorse that knows exactly what it is, and what it isn't. You're getting Intel's new Core Ultra 7 265 with 20 cores, 16GB of DDR5, and a 1TB NVMe SSD in a tool-less chassis that's genuinely easy to open up. The CPU is a standout, landing in the 89th percentile for this category, and the port selection is even better at 96th percentile. But that 180W power supply is a flashing neon sign that this machine was never meant to grow beyond its office cubicle roots.

If you're looking for a machine you can grow into, this isn't it. The 180W PSU and lack of GPU power connectors mean you're stuck with integrated graphics forever. Go get a Lenovo Legion Tower or HP OMEN instead if you want upgrade headroom. And if you need serious GPU compute, the Mac Studio M3 Ultra is in a completely different league, though you'll pay for it.

Buy this if you need a dependable office desktop with a genuinely fast CPU and tons of connectivity, and you're okay with never adding a graphics card. The Core Ultra 7 265 is excellent, the port selection is top-tier, and the tool-less design is a nice touch. But that 180W PSU is a dealbreaker for anyone who wants to upgrade later. Get the cheapest US listing you can find and treat this as a sealed appliance, not a project machine.