Dell 7040 MICRO 2016, Core i5-6500, 4GB, 1TB SSD, Black

The Dell 7040 Micro scores 6 out of 100 for gaming and ranks dead last in RAM with just 4GB. The 1TB SSD is the one bright spot in an otherwise aging package. It's a tiny office box for light tasks, nothing more.

The Core i5-6500 lands in the 9th percentile for CPUs in our database. That's not just old, it's one of the weakest processors we've tracked in this category. Four cores at 2.5GHz with no turbo headroom to speak of means everyday tasks will work, but anything heavier than a browser with a dozen tabs is going to feel sluggish. The integrated graphics are even worse, sitting in the 14th percentile. You're not playing anything made after 2012 on this, and even then, don't expect much.

The real problem is the 4GB of RAM. That's the 1st percentile, literally the bottom of our entire database. Windows 10 Pro alone will eat most of that before you open a single app. The 1TB SSD is the saving grace here, landing in the 57th percentile. It's not blazing fast by modern NVMe standards, but it's a full terabyte, which means you won't be juggling files like you would on a 256GB drive. For a machine this old, the storage is the most modern thing about it.

Stacked against the Apple Mac Studio M3 Ultra, this thing looks like a calculator next to a supercomputer, but that's not a fair fight. The Mac Studio costs several times more and targets a completely different user. A more honest comparison is the HP OmniDesk M02-0234, another budget-oriented desktop. The OmniDesk typically ships with newer CPUs and more RAM, which puts it ahead for everyday responsiveness, though the Dell's 1TB SSD is a point in its favor if storage matters more than speed. The Lenovo Legion and iBUYPOWER Slate are gaming machines, and the Dell's 6 out of 100 gaming score tells you everything about how that matchup goes. If you want any kind of 3D performance, those are the obvious choices. The Dell only wins if your entire priority list is size, storage, and price.

Pricing runs between 530 and 548 CAD across two Canadian listings. For that money, you're getting a 1TB SSD and a Windows 10 Pro license in a very small package. But you're also getting a CPU from 2015 and 4GB of RAM that will need an upgrade almost immediately if you plan to do anything beyond basic office work. A RAM upgrade to 8GB or 16GB would add real cost, and at that point you're creeping toward the price of a newer refurbished mini PC with a much better processor. The value here depends entirely on whether you need the 1TB SSD and the tiny footprint more than you need actual performance.

The Dell 7040 Micro is a tiny desktop that makes one thing very clear: it's built for spreadsheets, not shooters. The gaming score of 6 out of 100 is the headline here, and it's not a typo. This little box sits in the bottom 10% for CPU performance and dead last for RAM, with just 4GB of DDR4. But it does have a 1TB SSD, which is a genuinely useful amount of storage for a machine this size.

We're looking at a refurbished unit running an Intel Core i5-6500, a 4-core chip from 2015. That's ancient in PC years. The 4.8 out of 5 customer rating from a handful of buyers suggests people who bought it knew exactly what they were getting. And that's the thing, this isn't a bad product, it's a very specific one.

Skip this if you need to do anything beyond basic office work. The CPU's 9th percentile ranking and the 4GB of RAM, which is the lowest we've recorded in this category, mean multitasking will be painful. If you want to edit photos, run virtual machines, or do any kind of gaming, look elsewhere. The integrated graphics score of 6 out of 100 should be all the warning you need. Even for a home office setup, the RAM limitation will frustrate you within the first week unless you're willing to crack it open and upgrade immediately.

The Dell 7040 Micro is a one-trick pony, and the trick is being small with a big SSD. If you need a cheap Windows box for email, web browsing, and light document work, and you specifically need it to disappear behind a monitor, this will do the job. The 4.8 out of 5 rating from existing buyers backs that up. But the 4GB of RAM is a genuine problem, and the CPU's 9th percentile ranking means this machine has no headroom for the future. Buy it for what it is, not what you hope it could be.