Dell Pro Max Tower T2 Desktop

This sturdy and understated workstation will deliver the goods in lightly threaded workloads

- TIM DANTON

Last month we praised the Dell Tower Plus Desktop (see issue 376, p62) for its versatility, with an upgrade here or there taking it from office workhorse to gaming juggernaut. The Dell Pro Max Tower T2 Desktop is a very different beast. You could still use it as an office workhorse, but as the “Pro Max” in its name indicates its power lies when you specify it to the extreme, at which point it becomes a ludicrously powerful creative workstation.

Not that this is obvious from Dell’s homepage for the Tower T2. The first system you'll see costs £776 inc VAT and packs a measly Core Ultra 5 235, integrated Intel Graphics, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. I've seen faster smartwatches. Now compare that to the beast I have before me, with its Core Ultra 9 285K processor, 128GB of RAM, 1TB of storage and an Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition GPU. A GPU that comes complete with 96GB of error- correcting code (ECC) RAM.

But what's particularly great about this system is that you can configure almost any professional graphics card you want. Click on the “customise your own” option on Dell's website and you'll be treated to a selection of the latest AMD Radeon Pro cards plus the full range of Nvidia's RTX Pro options, including dual-card setups for a few of the lesser GPUs. So there's nothing to stop you equipping a creative office with PCs that look the same but are tuned for different tasks.

Sticking with Intel

If you can spot a grey trunk swinging in the background then I agree: the lurking elephant is Dell’s choice of Intel's Core Ultra desktop CPUs. There are no Xeon options; it’s mainstream chips all the way. While it’s great to see that the full gamut of Intel Core Ultra desktop chips are on offer, including vPro support for easier remote management, if there's one thing our recent group test of creative workstations showed it’s that AMD’s Threadripper family remains king.