Dell Pro Tower NRWT8 2024, Core Ultra 5 235, 16GB, 512GB SSD, Black

The Core Ultra 5 235 CPU is the real deal, landing in the 78th percentile and handling office workloads with ease. But the integrated graphics score 14 out of 100 for gaming, and the 512GB SSD sits in the 42nd percentile, which is stingy for the price. Shop the USD 1,339 listing, not the USD 1,600 one, and only if you never plan to game or upgrade.

The Core Ultra 5 235 is the one part of this machine that punches above its weight. At 3.4GHz with 14 cores, it lands in the 78th percentile for CPUs, which means it outperforms roughly three out of four processors in comparable desktops. For everyday office tasks, browser tab hoarding, and even some light virtualization, this chip will keep up without breaking a sweat. The 16GB of 5600 MT/s DDR5 RAM is fine, sitting right at the 55th percentile. It's enough for most business users, though power users who run multiple VMs or heavy Excel models will want to upgrade.

Storage is where things start to sag. The 512GB M.2 NVMe SSD lands in the 42nd percentile, which is below average for a machine at this price point. It's fast enough for boot times and app launches, but 512GB fills up quickly once you start piling on Outlook archives, Teams caches, and whatever else corporate IT throws at you. And the integrated Intel Graphics? They're in the 51st percentile for GPUs, which sounds okay until you realize that's a participation trophy. This is not a graphics solution, it's a display adapter. The 14 out of 100 gaming score confirms it.

Stacked against the competition, the Dell Pro Tower NRWT8 occupies an awkward middle ground. The Apple Mac Studio M3 Ultra absolutely demolishes it on GPU performance and storage speed, but that's a different class of machine at a different price point. The Lenovo Legion Tower 5a Gen 10 and HP OMEN GT16-0364 both offer discrete graphics and gaming scores that make the Dell's 14 out of 100 look embarrassing, though they're aimed at gamers rather than office workers. The ASUS ROG GM700 similarly runs circles around this thing on graphics. Where the Dell holds its own is the CPU: the Core Ultra 5 235 at the 78th percentile beats what you'd typically find in budget gaming towers, and the reliability score in the 70th percentile suggests this machine will outlast the flashier options. But when a desktop's best argument is "the processor is good and it probably won't break," you're not exactly setting the world on fire.

Here's where things get tricky. The Dell Pro Tower NRWT8 lists between USD 1,339 and USD 1,600 across two US retailers, a spread of USD 261 for what appears to be the same configuration. That's a meaningful gap, and it means the value proposition swings wildly depending on where you buy. At the low end, you're getting a solid business CPU and Windows 11 Pro for a reasonable price. At the high end, you're paying workstation money for a machine with integrated graphics and a 512GB drive. The CAD 2,177 listing in Canada is a single data point, but it suggests international buyers aren't getting any favors either. If you're shopping this, the lower-priced US listing is the only one worth considering, and even then, you should ask whether 512GB of storage and no GPU upgrade path is really what you want for that money.

The Dell Pro Tower NRWT8 lands at 65.5 out of 100 in our database, which puts it firmly in "fine for spreadsheets, forget about fun" territory. The Intel Core Ultra 5 235 is the star here, a 14-core chip running at 3.4GHz that scores in the 78th percentile for CPUs. That's a genuinely strong processor for office work, multitasking, and the AI workloads Dell keeps mentioning in the marketing copy. But the rest of the build feels like an afterthought. 16GB of DDR5 RAM is about average for this class, and the 512GB NVMe SSD sits in the 42nd percentile, which is underwhelming when you're paying over a grand.

The integrated Intel Graphics are the elephant in the room. This thing scores 14 out of 100 for gaming, and that's not a typo. If you need a machine for Excel, Outlook, and maybe some light photo editing, it'll chug along fine. But the moment you ask it to render anything more demanding than a YouTube video, you'll feel the ceiling. The 180W power supply tells you everything about Dell's ambitions here: this is a business box, not a workstation in disguise.

Anyone who wants to do more than office work should look elsewhere. The gaming score of 14 out of 100 is a dealbreaker for even casual gamers, and the 180W power supply means you can't fix that with a GPU upgrade later. If you work with video, 3D modeling, or any GPU-accelerated software, the integrated Intel Graphics will bottleneck you constantly. And if you're a storage hoarder, the 512GB SSD in the 42nd percentile will have you juggling external drives within months. This is a machine for spreadsheets, email, and web apps, nothing more.

The Dell Pro Tower NRWT8 is a competent office machine with a genuinely good CPU and a frustratingly mediocre everything else. The Core Ultra 5 235 at the 78th percentile is the reason to buy this, and for business users who live in Excel, Outlook, and browser tabs, it'll serve you well. But the 512GB SSD in the 42nd percentile, the integrated graphics that score 14 out of 100 for gaming, and the 180W power supply that kills any upgrade dreams make this a hard sell at the higher end of its price range. If you can find it at the USD 1,339 end of the spread, it's a reasonable business purchase. At USD 1,600, you're paying too much for too little.