Pros & Cons
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- Highly customizable
- Potent review configuration
- Broad port selection
- Solidly built and reasonably sized
- Easy access to components
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- Lowest- and highest-end configurations aren't the best values
- Some quirky component combinations in Dell's prebuilt configs
- Proprietary motherboard and power supply design
Dell Tower Plus (EBT2250) Specs
| Boot Drive Capacity (as Tested) | 1 |
| Boot Drive Type | SSD |
| Desktop Class | Mainstream |
| Desktop Class | Tower |
| Graphics Card | Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 |
| Operating System | Windows 11 |
| Processor | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K |
| RAM (as Tested) | 32 |
Dell’s recent rebranding effort wasn’t limited to just its laptop lineup. It also included Dell's XPS desktops, such as the XPS Desktop 8950 and 8960. Today, the desktop version of the classic XPS is known as the Dell Tower Plus (starting at $949.99; $1,999.99 as tested), and it’s more than just a simple name change. Dell's EBT2250 model features a mid-tower chassis and reasonably fast components, designed to meet the needs of mainstream desktop PC buyers. The Tower Plus EBT2250 largely succeeds in this goal, thanks to its speedy graphics performance, reasonable midrange prices, and high configurability and expansion in its class. For how well it serves the middle-budget tier and leaves it room for growth, we give the Dell Tower Plus (EBT2250) our Editors' Choice award in the midrange desktop category.
Configurations: Almost Any Kind of Tower You Need
The Tower Plus EBT2250 can morph from a basic productivity workstation starting at $949.99 (seen as low as $749.99 on sale) all the way up to a high-end powerhouse suitable for demanding content creators (and moonlighting gamers) at $3,679.99. At the entry level, the system contains an Intel Core Ultra 5 225 processor, 16GB of DDR5 memory, a 512GB SSD, and integrated Intel UHD Graphics. At the high end, the components balloon in potency, featuring a Core Ultra 9 285K chip, 64GB of RAM, 4TB of SSD storage, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card.
Dell sells 15 prebuilt configurations of the Tower Plus and hosts a complete system configurator, though the latter precludes you from the deals. I tested the Tower Plus EBT2250 with an Intel Core Ultra 7 265K processor, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a 12GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 card. That configuration costs $1,999.99 ($1,799.99 on sale). It’s an attractive machine that will meet the needs of demanding productivity workers, creators, and mainstream gamers.
However, we'd be remiss not to note some unusual prebuilt configurations and varied pricing, such as an Intel Core Ultra 9 processor paired with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti GPU for $2,148.99, but only $1,739.99 at the time of publishing. Likewise, the entry-level prebuilt configuration, with an Intel Core Ultra 7 chip and an aged GeForce RTX 3050 graphics card, is not recommended, even when on sale for $999, as it was during this review period.
Design: Solidly Built and Easily Expandable
The Tower Plus EBT2250 is similar to the XPS desktop it replaces, but it incorporates more modern components and enhances airflow. It's a large and roomy tower case, measuring 6.8 inches wide, 16.8 inches deep, and 14.7 inches high. Best described as a mid-tower machine, with tool-less entry and a side panel that’s reasonably easy to remove. While the fans spin up under load, they never get overly loud or obtrusive. If the case is placed under a desk, you might not even notice they’re running. Note that it weighs a minimum of 19 pounds and a maximum of 28.5 pounds, so it’s staying wherever you put it for a while.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)You'll find room inside for up to four storage devices, including space for two 3.5-inch drives and two M.2 SSD slots on the motherboard, with the bog-standard two memory DIMM slots. These DIMMs max out at 32GB of DDR5 RAM each, totaling 64GB, and Dell even sells configurations with a single DIMM of memory installed. Except for the fans and power supply, which require a standard Philips screwdriver, no other tools are needed to swap out components. That said, in typical Dell fashion, the motherboard is a proprietary design, so you won't be able to simply swap in a standard ATX board down the line. The I/O cutout in the back panel is also particular to the Dell board design.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)On the board, you'll find three PCI Express (PCIe) slots, including one PCIe 3.0 x16 slot and two PCIe x4 slots. The slot used for the GPU provides solid anchoring to ensure that the motherboard isn’t overly stressed. You can choose between standard fans or more advanced air cooling for more power-hungry CPUs. The default power supply unit (PSU) is 460 watts (W), but you may need either the 750W or 1,000W upgrades, depending on your CPU and GPU choices. Power supply choices match the case color. Note that like the mainboard, the PSU is Dell-proprietary, too, not a standard ATX model, and doesn't use the typical 24-pin connector to the mainboard.
Overall, the Tower Plus EBT2250 is a reasonably upgradable desktop PC. You get a lot of choices when you first configure the machine, and it’s reasonably easy to upgrade later. You’ll just want to keep the minor limitations in mind, as this is a mainstream system—not a gaming desktop.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Aesthetically, the Tower Plus EBT2250 is conservatively designed and clearly intended to blend into any environment. It’s attractive enough in its choice of Graphite (dark gray) or Platinum (silverish) colors. The large front vents blend into the overall design, and while this desktop can game, you won’t find any space-age design elements or RGB lighting. The Tower Plus is more like a sedate sedan that can hide a powerful engine inside—a "sleeper PC," if you will.
The case is made of metal everywhere except on the front, where a plastic veneer is offset to provide space for additional venting. Dell's case feels solid enough as you move it around, with just a little bit of give from its easily removable side panel.
Ports: A Broad Enough Selection for Everything on Your Desk
As expected for a desktop PC, this one has a lot of connections. On the front, you’ll find three USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports, a single USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 connection, a headphone jack, and a full-size SD card reader. That makes it relatively easy to plug in most components.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)On the back, you'll notice four USB-A 2.0 ports, two USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 connections, one USB-C port with Thunderbolt 4 support, an HDMI 2.0 connection, an RJ45 2.5Gb Ethernet jack, stereo audio line in/out ports, and a S/PDIF optical connection. The video port selection can change depending on the graphics options. If you select the Intel UHD Graphics, you’re limited to two 4K monitors, while the Nvidia GPUs provide a lot more external monitor support.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Dell's wireless connectivity suite includes Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 radios. The antennas are inside the case.
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Performance Testing: A Workhorse Tour de Force
Because the Tower Plus EBT2250 is not a hard-core gaming machine, we selected a mix of less extreme gaming desktops, a mainstream desktop, and an all-in-one (AIO) PC for comparisons. The mainstream model is the Dell XPS Desktop 8960 ($2,099.99 as tested), this machine’s predecessor. The two gaming machines include the 2025 version of the Alienware Aurora ($1,549.99 as tested) and the Lenovo Legion Tower 5 Gen 10 ($1,879.99 as tested), both of which feature similar mid-tower designs and comparable performance configurations. The HP OmniStudio 31.5 AiO is the final general-purpose PC to offer up performance comparisons.
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
Our primary overall benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC's storage throughput.
Three more tests are CPU-centric or processor-intensive: Maxon's Cinebench 2024 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Creators rates a PC's image editing prowess with a variety of automated operations in Adobe Photoshop 25.
The Intel Core Ultra 7 265K "Arrow Lake" processor features eight performance cores and 12 efficient cores, operating at a maximum clock speed of up to 5.5GHz. That’s a fast CPU designed for demanding productivity tasks, creative work, and gaming. Depending on the specific benchmark, the Dell Tower Plus was at or near the top of the results. Whether it was single-core or multi-core performance, the Tower Plus EBT2250 was a sincerely competitive machine.
This translates to a desktop that will meet the needs of most users. You could choose the fastest Core Ultra 9 285K CPU if you wanted to spend the money, but you’d likely run into a point of diminishing returns fairly quickly. Note that the processor does not have a fast neural processor (NPU). For on-device AI tasks, you’ll have access to the Nvidia GPU.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
We challenge all desktops' graphics with a quintet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. The first two, Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K), rely on the Vulkan graphics API. The second pair, Steel Nomad's regular and Light subtests, focus on APIs more commonly used for game development, like Metal and DirectX 12, to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. Last, we turn to 3DMark's Solar Bay to measure ray tracing performance.
Our real-world gaming testing is based on in-game benchmarks from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and F1 2024. These three games—all benchmarked at full HD (1080p or 1200p), 2K (1440p or 1600p), and 4K (2160p) resolution—represent competitive shooter, open-world, and simulation games, respectively. Each game runs at high detail or the highest available settings.
We run the Call of Duty benchmark at the Extreme graphics preset on desktops. Because the test can produce triple-digit frame rates even on low-end PCs, this approach yields sensible results for evaluating high frame-rate performance. Our Cyberpunk 2077 test settings aim to push PCs to their limit, so we run it on the all-out Ray Tracing Overdrive preset without DLSS or FSR. Finally, F1 2024 measures GPUs’ ability to render high-polygon-count models and densely detailed environments at fast speeds.
This Dell Tower Plus configuration renders complex visuals using an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070, which is a midrange GPU in Nvidia’s latest ("Blackwell") generation of gaming silicon. It’s more than fast enough for mainstream gamers running modern titles at decent graphics settings at 1080p or 1440p resolution.
Interestingly, the Tower Plus EBT2250 did not perform exceptionally in the synthetic 3DMark benchmarks. Its Wild Life score was almost identical to the HP OmniStudio X 31.5 AIO with its RTX 5050 GPU. We conducted the test multiple times, receiving the same results. It performed as expected in the remaining 3DMark tests, so that one was an outlier. The new Dell Tower's RTX 5070 trailed the RTX 4080 Super inside the outgoing XPS desktop, but that's to be expected, thanks in no small part to the RTX 4080 Super's additional 4GB of video memory over the 5070's 12GB.
In the real-world gaming benchmarks, the Tower Plus EBT2250 performed well within its class. It was considerably slower than the faster RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5080 machines, which had significantly larger memory resources and upticked GPUs, but it was at least as fast as the Lenovo Legion Tower 5 with a similar RTX 5070 inside. It was considerably faster than the Legion in the Call of Duty benchmarks, where it performed closer to the RTX 5070 Ti.
Overall, these results were reassuring, indicating that the Tower Plus EBT2250 will work well for anyone who wants to run demanding games and applications that utilize the GPU to accelerate multithreaded tasks. Unlike with the CPU, it may be worth investing in a GPU upgrade for those who require even faster performance, up to the maximum of an RTX 5080.