DESIGN
The charcoal-grey OptiPlex 9030 looks as muted and businesslike as you'd expect a business AIO desktop to look. Dell branding is discreet, and there was only one sticker (the inevitable 'Intel inside') on the front of our review unit.
The 9030 is compact and slim for a 23-inch system, measuring 56.75cm wide by 38.07cm high by 6cm deep (22.34in.x14.99in.x2.36in.) and weighing 12.5kg (27.56lbs) without the stand. We had the 'basic' (neither height-adjustable nor pivotable) stand, which measures 20.cm (8.07in.) deep and weighs 1.91kg (4.2lbs); an optional height-adjustable stand was mentioned at Dell's briefing in June, but as yet there's no sign of this on the UK website.

FEATURES
The OptiPlex 9030 range includes models powered by 4th-generation Intel Core i3, i5 and i7 processors. Our review unit had the vPro-enabled 3.0/3.7GHz quad-core Core i5-4590S with 8GB of RAM. Graphics are handled by the integrated HD Graphics 4600 GPU - although Dell documentation talks about an optional discrete GPU (AMD's Radeon R7 A265), this does not currently seem to be available either in the UK or the US. The OptiPlex 9030 is available with Windows 7 Professional or, as on our review unit, Windows 8.1 Pro.

PERFORMANCE
For a broad-brush characterisation of the Core i5-based OptiPlex 9030's performance, we did the digging that's now required to get Microsoft's Windows Experience Index (WEI) under Windows 8.1. Component scores, out of 9.9, were as follows:

CPU score 7.9
D3D score 5.5
Disk score 5.9
Graphics score 5.8
Memory score 7.9

As you might expect from the specification, the weakest subsystems are the integrated graphics and the 5,400rpm hard drive, while the CPU and memory scores are very respectable. If you have workloads that require faster disk speed, opt for a model with SSD storage; if you need faster 2D or 3D graphics, look out for the availability of OptiPlex 9030 models with a discrete GPU.