Stay away from the 530S at all costs if you are looking to game with it.  The S stands for slim... as in slim chance you will find any decent graphics cards which will fit.:smileyvery-happy:

 

And Inspiron 530 would certainly be a good choice though.

 

If you get a quadcore processor with it when you purchase it, Dell will ship it to you with a 350W power supply (versus 300W otherwise).  The 350W power supply has been reported by other users to power a 8800GT card just fine (even though it is less than Nvidia's recommendation).

 

You may also want to look at the Dell reburished outlet for scratch and dent computers at discount prices:

http://www.dell.com/content/products/category.aspx/desktops?c=us&cs=22&l=en&s=dfh

I will second the advice to avoid the "S" models.  They are very limited on what you can add/change in them.  they require special "half height" cards and they are few and far between.

Third one to agree.

 

Too many complaints on this forum from those that made the purchase and boy are they are up in arms about not being able to play games or have a better upgrade path.  Just because the case looks nice does not translate into a system for many.  Only office and school work, not gaming

Sound advice. Cheers guys. I just didn't make the connection between small form and lack of space. Duh!

 

I can spec a 530 for decent money with the quad core so maybe that's the way to go, I have to lose a bit of RAM but I intend to go back to XP for a while anyway. I remember when I got the 8300 there was discussion that the Dell PSU wouldn't run a GeForce 5xxx but I never had any problems.

rich1068 I just got a Inspiron 530 two weeks ago. I installed 4gb of ram.  It also has an evga 8800gt 512mb. And a Corsair 520HX PSU.    All supplies for my computer I purchased from newegg.  I just wanted to get a decent low price computer to play my Call of Duty 4 on.  With stock settings I had a 3Dmark06 score of 11,386.