Any Dell's more reliable than others these days?

[mathog]

Are any Dell desktop's more reliable than others these days?

A group at work want to buy a new Dell, not for anything heavier than a bit of light image processing. I have not opened a Dell more recent than about 5 years old, so have no idea what the new ones are like inside.

If it must be a Dell (and that seems to be the only brand they want to consider), what model should they go with? It is far more important that the thing run reliably a long time than that it be fast.

[Topcat]

Re: Any Dell's more reliable than others these days?

Dell Precision is their top-notch line..... Look at that if you want a long life....but on that note, they're probably not a whole lot more reliable than anything else they make these days.

[ratdude747]

Re: Any Dell's more reliable than others these days?

I haven't seen thier desktops in a while, but I can speak for thier laptops:

IIRC dell doesn't use quanta for assembly; every one I've seen appears to have been made by foxconn. Whether foxconn counts as prison is another question (in some ways it looks that way, at least the quality is good).

Let's see... I own (laptop wise) a bunch of dell latitudes and a single precision. All have been top notch build quality, with one exception. My latitude E5530 was a turd. Easy to repair most of the time, but the build quality was a notch above meh and the zinc upper hinges/plastic hinge mounts (on the lid) were always breaking and a PITA to fix. I swapped the guts to an E6430, which is by far the best latitude I've ever seen (the E6xxx and E7xxx are very well made and very easy to work on).

I would hope that their business (optiplex) desktops would be of comparable quality. Steer clear of vostro though, IIRC they're a meh version of the inspiron (which is shit).

[Compgeke]

Re: Any Dell's more reliable than others these days?

Precisions and Optiplexes are still fine. There are some issues with the HD6450s but they quit using those particular ones, just something to watch out for used.

[c_hegge]

Re: Any Dell's more reliable than others these days?

I don't like any brand name desktops. The Dementia (erm, sorry. Dimension) and Inspiron lines aren't all that reliable IMO, and the Precisions and Optiplexes, although better built than some, usually use BTX motherboards and/or non-standard PSUs, so they are nearly impossible to get parts for if they do fail. It's a very similar story with HP, Acer and Lenovo too. Custom-builds FTW.

[ratdude747]

Re: Any Dell's more reliable than others these days?

I don't like any brand name desktops. The Dementia (erm, sorry. Dimension) and Inspiron lines aren't all that reliable IMO, and the Precisions and Optiplexes, although better built than some, usually use BTX motherboards and/or non-standard PSUs, so they are nearly impossible to get parts for if they do fail. It's a very similar story with HP, Acer and Lenovo too. Custom-builds FTW.

If he wasn't forced to buy dell, I'd agree (if done with good parts, we all know that). But since he is...

[c_hegge]

Re: Any Dell's more reliable than others these days?

Yah. If you absolutely must buy a Doesn't Ever Last Long, then get an Optiplex, Precision or (if you can fine and affords one) PowerEdge.

Another thing which I don't particularly like about modern Dells is that they don't put chipset heatsinks on the motherboards. There's a precision T1700 right next to me now which lacks one.

[shovenose]

Re: Any Dell's more reliable than others these days?

They tend to be more reliable than any other pre-made desktop.

[ratdude747]

Re: Any Dell's more reliable than others these days?

Yah. If you absolutely must buy a Doesn't Ever Last Long, then get an Optiplex, Precision or (if you can fine and affords one) PowerEdge.

Another thing which I don't particularly like about modern Dells is that they don't put chipset heatsinks on the motherboards. There's a precision T1700 right next to me now which lacks one.

Probably because the deemed it not nessasary (not enough heat output) and that BTX systems cool a lot better (why intel designed it in the first place, thanks to netburst).

IIRC powerEdge is servers only... not good if you're not headless (or near-headless). Still well made though (I rebuilt one for my parent's file server, they are legitimately nice).

[c_hegge]

Re: Any Dell's more reliable than others these days?

Ah, yes I forgot about the weak graphics in them. I use a HP ProLiant ML150 server as my office/workshop PC. It is also meant to be used headless, but it works really well with a few modifications, the hardest of which was cutting an extra notch into a spare 8400GS Graphics card so that it would fit in to the PCIE x4 slot.

[Uranium-235]

Re: Any Dell's more reliable than others these days?

Ah, yes I forgot about the weak graphics in them. I use a HP ProLiant ML150 server as my office/workshop PC. It is also meant to be used headless, but it works really well with a few modifications, the hardest of which was cutting an extra notch into a spare 8400GS Graphics card so that it would fit in to the PCIE x4 slot.

hah I did the opposite, I cut a 8400GS slot down to x8 to fit in a PE 1800. did boot, but would freeze when loading drivers

some models were not built to use PCI-E video cards

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: Any Dell's more reliable than others these days?

i'm gonna take a shot at it and make a wild guess that the board and its mosfets were not designed to take a large power load via the pci-e slot. that would explain why the system freezes when the driver loads as i believe the driver runs a brief stress test on the video card when it loads, causing power draw to briefly spike to its max and the mosfet design cant take it, so the video card hangs.

[ratdude747]

Re: Any Dell's more reliable than others these days?

i'm gonna take a shot at it and make a wild guess that the board and its mosfets were not designed to take a large power load via the pci-e slot. that would explain why the system freezes when the driver loads as i believe the driver runs a brief stress test on the video card when it loads, causing power draw to briefly spike to its max and the mosfet design cant take it, so the video card hangs.

Agreed, if it's not using external power, don't run it anything other than a designeted PCI-E graphics slot as the ones for GPUs have up to 75W of power available. Other slots, IDK what the power is but it's nowhere close to 75W. And trust me, a lot of those type cards run pretty close to that limit.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Any Dell's more reliable than others these days?

every one I've seen appears to have been made by foxconn.

The Vostro 200 and Inspiron 530 S are made by Foxconn. (desktops) (They both appear to be the same thing) The Vostro 200 I had was black. The Inspiron 530 S is a later one and gray with white.
Same chassis.

[Compgeke]

Re: Any Dell's more reliable than others these days?

They are the same - just a different case and model in BIOS.

Another case of same system, different case is the Vostro 430 and Precision T1500. Both are the same, sans case and BIOS (half way). Precision T1500 BIOS does have a few 430s left in it.

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: Any Dell's more reliable than others these days?

if u want a very low power video card for use in those kind of headless server boards, i would personally recommend amd video cards instead. nvidia isnt very good in the green energy department. their lowest power gpus still take up 25W of tdp. the 8400gs has a tdp of between 25-40W depending on which revision it is. there are 3 different revisions of the 8400gs.

amd on the other hand has the radeon hd 2400 pro, 5450 and 6350 which have 20W and 19W of tdp respectively. these are the lowest power discrete gpus i could find. some are available in pci-e x1, x16 and conventional pci versions. some of them are also low profile.

however, i leave it to ratdude to judge if 19W of power is still too much power draw for server board mosfet designs to take. i think most server board mosfet designs simply just need to supply enough juice to power a high-end power hungry HBA card which are often used on server boards.

[Compgeke]

Re: Any Dell's more reliable than others these days?

Those are all ancient cards - there's far better choices in the low end market like the R7-240 with a 30W TDP or the GeForce GT720 with a 19W TDP. Either of those two are better than old high end cards from the GeForce 8/9 series or Radeon 4000 series.

For the most part, modern servers should be able to provide power for a GPU. Unlike desktop systems, servers almost always have 650W+ PSUs. A lot of modern servers are also designed with the ability to run a dedicated GPU(s) to use for virtual machines and such (think RemoteFX on Hyper-V).

[ratdude747]

Re: Any Dell's more reliable than others these days?

however, i leave it to ratdude to judge if 19W of power is still too much power draw for server board mosfet designs to take. i think most server board mosfet designs simply just need to supply enough juice to power a high-end power hungry HBA card which are often used on server boards.

I wasn't aware such low power cards existed. As I said, I don't know what the power supplied per slot is in the PCIe spec. I do know that for slots intended for GPUs it's 75W (not all x16 sized slots are this, often the board will designate if there is a mixed setup).

Still, it feels like a unnessasary kludge when if one is going to spend that kind of $ on a server, one might as well get a workstation for not much more and have the ability to run real GPUs. Heck, my nicest isn't anything new, but it runs well (Tyan S2895, twin 2.6GHZ Opteron x2 2.6GHz, twin geforce 250 SLI'd)... and all in all it wasn't too expensive as far as workstations go (the biggest expense was the EATX case and PSU ($160 Plus $40 for a different PSU), and the mobo cost a bit ($100, but I missed an oppertunity to get a free one)... but otherwise it was low cost; less than $30 for CPUs (I had the coolers as a hodge-podge of freebies), RAM was $20 (4 2GB DDR-400 ECC modules), $10 for the RAID card (3ware 9550sx-4lp with BBU), $15 a pop for the 4 WD raptors (74GB), maybe $40 for the other drives (2 SATA opticals, one a lightscribe BD-ROM even, and a AFT card reader), $20 for the sound card (creative X-FI from an ailienware that I swapped the dell audio conenctor for an intel HDA header), and the best of all, $20ish a pop for each GPU, NOS OEM on ebay (sold as 9800GTs, Nice surprise!). It runs in practice almost as fast as my laptop (which has a 2.2GHz ivy bridge i7, 8GB DDR3, intel 4000 graphics, and a 120GB SSD), which for a system 7 or 8 years older, isn't too shabby. Yeah, I could have built a faster non-workstation rig for less, but I do workstations (and to a lesser degree, servers) as a hobby and this was the sort of rig I wanted to build.

Sure, one probably could have gotten a similar server board cheaper (dual socket 940), but even if it was free, $100 IMHO isn't worth kludging for a slower slot (which in itself will bottleneck anything other than a low end GPU). For a newer system the cost difference may be more, but relative to the system cost, is still not all that much certainly not enough to be worth settling for less and/or voiding warranties.

[ratdude747]

Re: Any Dell's more reliable than others these days?

Back on topic:

I talked to my best friend who works IT for Purdue's college of Education... They pretty much use dell for everything. Regarding Optiplexes, he says the tiny ones have no upgradeability but are well built; the bigger ones are nice but $$$.

[SteveNielsen]

Re: Any Dell's more reliable than others these days?

I've ok luck with Dells in general. Their servers are pretty good to eh, not so good. Desktops go from good to bad, laptops from ok to horrible. As always you get what you pay for.