If you want to see the modern competition for the Dell Vostro 400, we have an entire playlist of prebuilt system reviews here: th-cam.com/play/PLsuVSmND84QuM2HKzG7ipbIbE_R5EnCLM.html Grab a GN Tear-Down Toolkit on back-order now to guarantee you get one in the next run! We have arrival dates on the store now. These have been in production a long time and have been in constant demand, so to make sure you get one, pick up a back-order here: store.gamersnexus.net/products/gamersnexus-tear-down-toolkit We compared the Vostro 400 to the Dell G5 5000, a system so bad that it needed two videos. Part one is here: th-cam.com/video/4DMg6hUudHE/w-d-xo.html
I have a Dell XPS 630i and I would love to see you review one of them. Standard power supply, fairly standard case (other than mounting opposite side / upside down). I’ve had the case through many other boards (running an Asus Rampage board in it now) on the original PSU and internals. That might be as close as they have been to following standards.
@Gamers Nexus are you guys going to get more coasters.. I would like to buy the set with four glasses if you do. I already have the volt mod mat and the large wire frame mouse pad.. it's all great items.. thanks for all the hard work
What an honor to get a (relatively favorable) review 14 years after launching the Vostro 400! A big thanks from the team at (the former) Dell China Design Center that launched this PC. The real sad story about the first-gen Vostro was that we worked on an AMD (when K8 was still competitive) version right till the end, but the product was cancelled at the 11th hour.
You guys built a solid product. I bought my Studio 540 (basically the same machine but with a different CPU, RAM and graphics and Vista) in early 2009 after my Dimension 2350 had its power supply take out the motherboard. It still lives on today as my HTPC, I replaced the power supply about 10 years ago, and its been through a couple of DVD drives, but otherwise it hasn't skipped a beat.
Dell towers have NEVER been worth a crap. Paper-thin aluminum cases that flex, proprietary hardware/power-supplies. Horrible stuff. You're interpreting "tolerable" with "favorable" (and neither of those is "good". The only decent product dell makes is rackmount servers, and occasionally they produce a passable laptop.
The funniest thing to me watching this is before he even opened the damn case I was immediately going "no it's definitely better" because I actually had an old Dell PC from right before around the time Dell went completely to shit circa the 2012-2014 era. All my shit was standardized from back in the Ivy Bridge/Sandy Bridge era, including the power supply, board, basically everything wrong with the new Dells wasn't wrong back then, in fact I don't even think my old system was loaded with nearly as much bloatware (it didn't come with the good old software packages either though just like windows media player, notepad, mspaint). The funny thing is Dell actually wouldn't be a bad power company if they stuck with making power supplies. Somehow my filth encrusted PSU from nearly a decade ago kept working right up until getting a new system. Its power supplies are beyond just "it's fine." It's like the one last component they didn't fuck up for some reason. They did indeed use to be quite shit with boards however. My old board had NO heatsink over the southbridge and NO sinks over the paltry VRMs, which is exactly why shitty old Dells are locked at the BIOS level, which is meaning if you get an ancient Dell even you can't just swap out the crappy i5 or whatever and stuck an unlocked i7 in there and overclock it because there's no real way around the locked down BIOS. Which is just as well I suppose because those shite VRMs are going to cause a fire if you overclock on them anyway.
@@pandemicneetbux2110 They locked the BIOS down because they didn't want you buying the cheapest model and tweaking a few settings to make it perform as well as a model several hundred dollars more expensive.
It’s amazing how much standardized parts mean in a prebuilt. My first ever desktop was a Dell XPS 8100 circa 2010. Over the years I swapped out the GPU for an AMD 7870, the power supply for a Corsair CX650, the CPU cooler for a Cooler Master, the mechanical HDD for an SSD, and even swapped all of the components into a Rosewill case with better air flow. I eventually gifted that computer to family members and it lived on until early 2021. All of this was made possible by standardized components.
@@johnbamber7374 It still worked. But by that point, a lot of the core components were just very dated (the CPU for example was a circa 2009 Core i7 860), so its owner moved onto something a bit newer.
I do not recall when it was but at one point dell was using a standard 24pin header with a custom pint out, really fun to watch the board smoke when you replace the psu
they did that for quite awhile and it lead to many dead systems or psu's back in the day iirc. I never understood why either, it would have cost them MORE to have a normal psu custom wired and an otherwise say cookie cutter Intel 440BX motherboard with the only difference with it being wired for that specific psu.
The 'non standard' components are clearly used to drive down cost - they sell way more servers than desktops so economically makes sense to use the same PSU etc. Server components tend to be fairly reliable also. I haven't done it, but would be interesting to see overall cost comparison of pre built Vs a budget custom built with same specs for all these pre builds you have done (sorry if this has been done already!). The ewaste point is fair, I gradually replace bits of my system over the years. I still have a backup system that uses a 10yr old intel mobo/CPU and it works fine. It's just not in their interest I guess
nah its just that the Vostro he is looking at was $2k+ and his new machine is $900. Considering the value of the dollar has fallen greatly from 2008 to 2021 the $900 machine would have been like $500 and the $2000 machine would have been like $3800.
The late 2021 Alienware desktop is actually the current G5 / XPS / Inspiron / Vostro chassis dolled up in plastic with a higher watt psu. Impressive that they essentially sell the same case with different hardware (and same software).
I feel like at the very least Dell could put their own weird motherboards and PSUs in there but still make the case compatible with standard ATX and mATX by providing the requisite screw holes and mounting points. There are plenty of aftermarket enthusiast cases that expand upon the basic ATX spec and do it without breaking compatibility.
My sister had brought in a IBM PC with Pentium 4 so she can work at home and it it got a empty AGP slot! I placed a GeForce4 card and I had a blast playing Half Life 2 with it.
Thats how I built my 1st gaming rig. Slapped a 9800GT, 2GB RAM, and a new PSU into an HP Pavillion desktop. 1000s hrs on gmod, tf2, and guild wars on that thing! Also, yes, it did run Crysis. On low settings lol
My story was with a prebuilt Lenovo HS250 slim, so I bought a new case and a 1060 (this was back 2017) then just to end up that the mobo need bios update but sadly the manufacturer site doesn't had a lest bios lol
In the late 90s and early 2000's I always recommended dell to my clients because their products were always tested well and they would use descent components. They also had great on site support for my larger clients that could afford it. Its sad to see the crap their dishing out now. Thanks for the video.
I thought Dell were supposed to be pretty good computers too (having been told that in the early 2000s). I've always had Dell computers/laptops and they've been fine, but i'm not much of a gamer.
There was actually a time when buying a Dell would get you a reasonably good system and a GPU upgrade could turn it into a really decent gaming rig. It was a fairly short time but it existed....I guess when big profits came in the company moved to making more profits with cheaper parts and spending the money on marketing instead of offering the good system deals that gained them profits.
Yep I was lucky to get mine during that period. Windows 98 SE period, it also came with Altec Lansing speakers/subwoofer thing was a beast. (Could shake the house) System was able to handle Half-life when it first came out (yes at one point half-life was demanding lol) *Very early Dell had ridiculous parts surprised they actually made money lol. Kind of like Alienware back in the day.
@@First-Name_Last-Name Id trust Mick Foley building a case over dell, and most likely Foley has been hit with it, fallen on it, or been blown up with it
Didn't they switch caps and mosfets during the old pc production? There was a lawsuit of them blowing up. So it's built great but ruined it by switching out the good stuff with crappy stuff midway of making it.
Uhhhh... I disagree. I have a Dell from 2004 sitting here somewhere and it’s built the same way the modern example is built. Actually, even more proprietary parts bc the fan on that ting is also proprietary.
Remember when Dell was originally formed in the '80s and they targeted enthusiasts (in addition to businesses)? I wasn't even born then so I wouldn't know if they sold *good* computers, but they certainly sound like they used to be a top-tier prebuilt manufacturer.
I remember hacksawing a Classic "blowhole" into the sidepanel, so it doesn't overheat after upgrading one of them with a better GPU. Was a pretty popular upgrade for the forner family computer/hand-me-down: bigger PSU, new GPU, a side mounted fan with a metal mesh.
@@mortenee88 every little bit helps for the broke student, some had to make do with the original PSU, leaving the side panel open and putting a deskfan next to it. This and similar models stayed around for quite some time.
@@timhartherz5652 yeah back then it was basic setup to take side panel off and put a 10" fan blowing in or play with laptop on "no-mouse" servers with touchpad or thinkpad nipple.
witnessing the downfall of Dell is actually quite sad. I remember blindingly recommending everybody to buy Dell computers because it was a guarantee that everything would be fine. That was such a long time ago tho... My first laptop was actually a Dell Vostro 1510 from like 2008 which still works to this day. It was so good.
"dell is the best friend money can buy" is indeed a quote from Intel. From internal emails at the time when they were bribing companies like Dell to not use better amd cpus. I'm surprised amd survived what Intel and Nvidia have put them through.
@@ZudeXbox360 Intel didn't just go after AMD, they went after AMD's partners and vendors too, locking them into exclusivity deals specifically to break AMD's supply chain. For their behavior, Intel got sanctioned by multiple arms of the U.S. government. Which is unheard of even for horrid companies like Monsanto.
I'm an AMD investor so I may be biased, but this is why I get frustrated how people are quickly declaring Intel the underdog that we should throw our support behind because AMD raised prices by a hundred bucks (even though their motherboards are cheaper). If it it wasn't for AMD we'd still be paying 1000 bucks for a 6 core. Intel has pulled so much pigfuckery in the past it's insane.
@@marcogenovesi8570 There's a difference between being anti-consumer, and cost cutting. Also devising a way to make your customers always buy new products because fixing the old one is impossible through cost or obscurity, is anti-consumer. I can assure you, Dell isn't engineering their motherboards and cases purely for "cost-optimization" they can do that in the parts choices they have for the primary PC components, then make it all back by over-charging you for it. The engineering department is being instructed to make the motherboard and cases easier to assemble on a factory line and non-standard so they can force the customer to buy new hardware every 5-6 years after something fails outside warranty.
I have a Dell Studio XPS with an i7 970 and it is almost 100% standard parts. Dell didnt always suck and in fact the XPS used to be the hidden gem in the lineup. They were often as good or even better than the Alienware ones for much less. You dint get the cool "gamer" case but you got performance....and standard parts.
Same, but with an i7-920. The PSU did die after about 5 years, but because it was a standard ATX, it was easy to replace. Airflow sucked, but this was before GN existed. Also the custom wiring for the front panel was a pain to move into a new case.
This was true even as late as 2012, 2013. I think it was round about 2014 that they started sticking things like non-standard motherboard power and such in there. Pretty sure you could still get a working XPS system with a like i7 4770 in it and it'd be functional for gaming even to today for the most part. Its main problem always was the same as today which is few people outside what might as well be called boutique SIs actually bothered to not put trash boards in there, in fact I just saw some video where I was impressed by the SI using a Tuf x570 which I thought was unfairly glossed over by the reviewer because over time like 80% of your problems are going to come down to the board. Bad CPU? Check the socket. Slow RAM? Need to overclock? Want an SLI rig? Need more storage? It almost always comes down to the cheapness of the board and its generation. In the case of an old XPS, yes, you often could just swap out the highest end CPU on that socket, get something like a new cooler say a 92mm Arctic which will fit inside the case, throw in some extra RAM, swap out the graphics card, and presto you've still get a modern gaming system which can in theory play the newest demanding titles.
@@pandemicneetbux2110 You should be able to do such, but Dell, HP and Sony were dicks about it and made proprietary BIOS which limited options on most of their motherboards. You can build a PC with all consumer parts but have a BIOS chip on the MB which limits functionality; that is the old game of Dell, HP and Sony.
I'm still using mine, since I've been able to continue upgrading it. I put it in a better case, better power supply, added a new graphics card, and replaced the i7 920 with an i7 990X. It's awesome how standardized this PC is.
As kinda trash as their cases were back in the day, I still love their 2000's computer vibe. It's always fun to see people who are dedicated to the cause heavily modify them in order to build super sleeper PCs.
Doing that now with an OptiPlex 780. It currently has an Intel e7500 Core2 Duo OC'd to 3.65Ghz using the BSEL electrical tape mod to circumvent the locked down BIOS. 1TB Samsung Evo 870 SSD, 16GB dual rank, dual channel DDR3 RAM running at 7-7-7-20 clocks. Running Windows 10 Pro and a plethora of Linux Distros without so much as a hiccup. Waiting for an EVGA GTX 1650 4GB DDR6 GPU that's currently on it's way and about to order an Intel Q9650 Core2 Quad just to max everything out possible. Oh and an upgraded cpu cooler just for shits and giggles. Tinkering is fun, especially on older stuff. Funny how such an old Dell can still keep up.
The Q6600 was Intel's second "glued together" processor. That was two Core 2 Duo chips on the same package. Only without any actual glue - they had to communicate solely through the front side bus, which means any signals from one die to the other would have to go down the socket pins, onto the front side bus, then back up the socket pins. Their first was the Pentium D, which was two single-core Pentium 4 dies on a single package. Same lack of logical glue. In both cases, multi-threaded performance suffered due to the lack of proper communication between cores. Something you could easily see when comparing to the genuine multi-core CPU's from AMD in that time period. That aside, at least the Q6600 had decent performance on the whole, being an evolution of the Pentium 3, unlike the absolutely atrocious Pentium 4.
I vividly remember when the C2D and C2Q were introduced. Heck, it almost feels like yesterday even though it was 15 years ago. They were such a a leap in performance and efficiency over Netburst that it stunned a lot of people. Along with the Pentium M's in mobile, Intel was setup to ride high for years.
VIA had (well, has) x86 license for all x86 designs up to Pentium 3. I remember tech journalists making fun of VIA for not even trying to acquire one Pentium 4 design. And lo and behold, it lived on up until Nehalem. In the mean time Via turned P3 into multi-threaded, multicore low power CPU - it was just better material.
@@OnTheRocks71 1.86 GHz launch core 2 could match the performance of the pentium d 965 emergency edition, running at 3.73 ghz and pulling roughly 1.83 jigawatts of power. Jaw dropping, and those were spanked by the e8000 series just 20 months later.
A few years ago I replaced two overclocked q6600 systems with sff hp i5-3470 systems. The q6600 systems used $12 ebay CPUs that ran at about 4 ghz with air cooling (old coolermaster hyper 212s with AS5 paste). I used them for multiboxing games and they were still holding up surprisingly well despite being on 24/7 running at 100% in the deep southern Texas heat. Despite using hd5770s they pulled almost 300 watts EACH from the wall and were space heaters.. Could almost keep my living room warm in winter almost purely by folding on those machines. It kind of blows my mind that my current setup can run games full screen full load and use 300 watts or less TOTAL. The setups being a ryzen 5 3600 system with 32gb ram 1tb nvme ssd 3x 1tb spinner with a GTX 970. A HP/compaq SFF business machine with an i7-3770 16gb with 2x 1tb drives and a gt1030 2gb gddr5. another HP/compaq SFF with i5-3470 8gb ram hd7570 1tb and 2tb spinners. It's amazing how much more efficient modern CPUs are. EDIT : If you were wondering you can see the screen of one of the q6600 machines in the three eve videos I posted that showed all the screens while I was boxing (the top screen). OBS was NOT kind to the q6600 machines or my primary machine which was a fx6300 based system. Those Q6600s were damned good performance for the price on the used market +8 years ago.
Same as HP I just custom built a haunted Halloween house party off the floor style desktop computer with those hockey puck 1st GEN i3-530 cpu coolered motherboard HP SFF th-cam.com/video/JC1uOp-7huQ/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/enveRWAwrxg/w-d-xo.html
For something like a 65W chip they sure do, at least bigger than the Intel boxed fans they put on the 65W class back then. Obviously that only works if the chip really only draws 65W and not 130
They're using cases they mass produced in the 90's still, never mind the type of things they do to make sure you have as much trouble as possible upgrading or fixing one. E-waste champs, 3 decades running.
Used to think that Dell made pretty solid computers until I began watching your videos. That's because I was last updated on Dell back in about 2008, which to me, being an older guy, actually isn't that long ago. 😄
@@somerandomvertebrate9262 Yes. I think if you get a more basic dell computer you'll be fine. I'm using a dell computer right now and its lasted a good 3 years. It's just a basic dell desktop though. Costed around $750
@@somerandomvertebrate9262 Sorry to reply again but if you're looking for a powerful computer such as a gaming computer or a powerful office computer stay away.
@@Warp2090 750 bux is gaming territory for me as i just built a pretty good PC out of pastgen parts for that (Z390 with 8700k and 1080ti, i could go for lower tier stuff and cut cost even more but i wanted those CPU and GPU). There could be an arguement for commercial desktops as i just spent a year overhauling (among other things) a fleet (100+) of 7th gen HP 290s that could be cannibalized in case anything failed in them (but nothing did, they were all champs and just needed ram and storage upgrades) but for personal use? No. Fucking. Way.
Hey I had that old Dell as my first computer, well mine was from 2007 and silver. I loved that thing, it and the dell monitor I got with it lasted me almost a decade and it still sits in my room because I can't bring myself to get rid of it. Despite my fond memories though I'll never buy a Dell again, it's insane how much they've regressed since the late 2000s.
Something wrong with the poor thing? If so those machines are so easy to repair it is amazing but they just get outdated, a lot of times when they are thrown out it is just due to being old sadly.
@@potatoes5829 Annoying how the people that know what they are want ridiculous prices for them and most of the time people that have no clue what it is they just end up getting thrown out. : (
Back in early 2000's this was how my friends and I gamed. We bought these premade PC's because they were a decent price for teens on a budget. All you had to do through the years was upgrade your gpu or ram.
You can actually still do this with some brands, here in europe we got that ALDI brand Medion. All normal Parts , i bought one with a 5600g in it 16gb ram and slapped a 1650 super in it for a friends. Runs perfect
@@tomweyts i bought one and send it back this october, since it was literally garbage, first it came with a kink in the watercooling tube because the cooler was mounted wrongly then the OS was installed on the HDD storage instead of the SSD and it basically didnt run, i had to remove the HDD to install windows on the SSD because there was some kind of software that made it so you could only install it on the HDD. Also for a highend gaming pc that it supposedly is, its performance is crap, not to mention that if you let it run under heavy load for over 2hrs that it shuts itself off, was the first time buying an aldi pc and i will never buy a pc there again.
@@empi2597 weird ... The one that my friends is now Running doesn't have any issues.... I gave it a full night of benching & stresstesting. Stabilty test of Aida 64 ran for 10 hours with no crashes or issues
@@tomweyts nothing weird about it, if you look and research a little, the type of aldi pc that i bought has had massive sendbacks. not to mention that with a 11900k i9 and a 3080 geforce a 750W powersupply is a joke, that whole pc is ridiculous if i think about it more carefully shouldnt have been blinded by its cheapness, that machine was a hot pile of garbage, not to mention the benchmarks with both those components performed over 20% below average.. that thing was a disaster.
It's good to see a channel advocate responsible repairability rather then advocate replacing perfectly good, working power supplies just because their sponsor is a power supply manufacturer.
The rubberized fan mounts are a great upgrade though, removes a lot of vibration noise. I scavenge them from old systems like this whenever I can to re-use them.
My moms boyfriend bought 2 of these. One for her and one for his mom. Within a few years the MB in both were dead from the same problem. The ram slots stopped working one by one. There ended up being a class action he was a part of where Dell knowingly used faulty capacitors to save a few bucks. So I wouldn't say dell was any better back then tbh.
Yeah but at least you could swap the motherboard in this one. And when the class action ends you might have gotten 40% of the cost back. Now imagine a class action on the G5 you get 20$ and maybe a cpu and gpu
At least that board is easily replaceable and the fact that it lasted a few years. You bet now they use the same shitty caps and make things non-standard so that you can't fix it.
Yeah, no clue how many GX270's I had to repair. Yep, caps ain't supposed to look like that...or leak. Boot the computer up - see a black screen with "thermal event" on it, no need to even look - caps are toast.
Great video! Only criticism may be that you're not comparing oranges to oranges. The Vostro is the "small business" line (step up from consumer grade Dimension at the time, or Inspiron tower now, but below the real business line, OptiPlex). I'd be interested to see a comparison to a current day Vostro or OptiPlex. The G series is just a consumer grade machine and I wouldn't expect it to be much more than disposable. I also feel the quality of Dell ProSupport vs. consumer support is vastly better. But totally agree with the disappointing direction Dell and other OEMs are headed, seems no one makes good consumer grade pre-builts and they're all spiraling toward the bottom.
I had a vostro 400, it was a great starter system at the time for someone who needed an initial rig to build from. I threw in a GPU and it worked great! Ended up replacing other components until eventually the original dell was no more, and so in a way, that system is still with me today.
I also had a dell vostro 200 the slim version, still have it actually. Keeping it to do a sleeper build in it, but it was clear this was a real Personal Computer from an OEM, all industry standard parts even if the TFX psu was a bit uncommon it could be replaced with an off the shelf part, the case even came with thumb screws so it was obviously built with the idea of being user serviceable and upgradable.
IIRC, this was a point in time when Dell had specifically stepped up the quality of their builds, shifted towards more standardized components, etc specifically because of the blowback they were getting in the late 90s/early 2000s.
I'm so old I remember this. They probably think people are not looking anymore, or haven't been paying attention for enough time they would give it a go again.
@@IncertusetNescio Consumer desktop makes up such a small part of Dell sales that the answer is probably "never". The overwhelming majority of desktop sales at the major OEMs are corporate desktops with service contracts.
Here are some of my thoughts on working on Dells over the years: The Pentium II and III XPS and L-series were standard ATX with the exception of 20-pin ATX connector on the PSU having a different pinout, and therefore only compatible with those Dell boards. Reusing the case with a different brand board required a new PSU. The clamshell-opening Dimension 8xxx, 4400, 4500, and 4550 used standard ATX power supplies, but would not fit if a power switch was present on the PSU. They were otherwise proprietary designs. The Dimension 2xxx, 4600, 4700, 3000, and B110/1100 were standard ATX except for the front panel audio header. They used a thermal-controlled 92mm fan mounted with isolation mounts to a plastic mount that slid on from the inside rear of the case. It used a duct to pull air from the heatsink out of the case. The heatsink bracket was load-bearing, but the mounts could be removed by unscrewing them, allowing for different brand boards (and non-stock coolers) to be used. The Dimension E310/3100, E510/5150, E520, and E521 were BTX-based. ATX power supplies work with little or no modification. The Inspiron 530/531 is a white colored version of the Vostro 400. Dell would use this case design for a few more years. However, on an Inspiron 570, the BIOS will complain at boot if the case's card reader and USB ports aren't connected. As far as I know, the Dell Inspiron machines were standard ATX-based designs up through at least the 4th-gen Intel chips (such as the Inspiron 3847). However, depending on model, the cases don't have a swappable I/O panel out back.
While my pc started out as a prebuilt, it thankfully didn't use anything proprietary and I quickly learned how to upgrade and build them myself. This has allowed me to keep my pc in nearly constant everyday operational usage for 7 years now. Best of all, as I accumulate older parts, I've been slowly building a complete second pc to either repurpose, sell, or give to my friend who wants to get into pc gaming. With my latest upgrades, all I need for the second one is a decent PSU and storage.
Steve: "Has any anyone ever done a film peel shot with film that's been on a system for like 13 years?" 4:47 Clint@LGR: "You mean 30 or 40 years, right?"
As strange as it is, I'm still running 4 of those Vostro 400s in my office. They've been relegated all the way down to the systems for the interns, but with some minor upgrades that we made over the years (SSD+8GB RAM) they are serviceable. The newer Dell systems that we have in service have had constant and consistent issues with power supply failures which have led many of them to go to the eWaste pile.
When you said "Timeless" I picture a guy in a black and white film moving at a slightly faster rate than normal, smoking a cigarette while he's putting together the new Dells. I can imagine a narrator in the background with a classy voice saying "Since before the turn of the century, Dell has been a pioneer and innovator of high quality portable computers at affordable prices." 🤣🤣🤣
And then a fast-forward narration showing a landfill topped with tons of Dell G5 5000-series computers thrown as e-waste, with a new, younger narrator saying “Unfortunately, times have changed, and Dell has fallen far from its pinnacle of invention.”
My mind read all the quotes in this thread in old timey news reel narrator voice 😅. Couldn’t help but add my own timeless contribution. 😂 [grainy news reel begin…] “Yes it’s a hay day at Dell, with rapid fire sales and a decent reputation in hand. Here we see Dell’s crack team of innovators busy with new technology and standardized form factors. Over here we see actual customer service taking place… optimism abounds here! what a time to be alive folks.” [news reel ends]
I saw a tool kit similar to the GN one on Amazon the other day and tried to find it again since I'm building my first scratch build right now. I couldn't find it nor do I really need it with a vast garage full of tools. One of your videos popped up and as I was watching it I decided I would much rather give GN my money over Amazon- so I purchased your tool kit like I should have a month ago. You guys are a talented crew and deserve my money and I watch your channel like a hawk. Keep fighting the good fight!
I'm a serial Dell buyer since the days when he assembled them in his basement under the PCs Limited brand. My first one had a bent #1 pin on the parallel ribbon cable that attached to the (5-1/4") floppy readers. As a result it would never read a disk change. I didn't discover it until I scrapped it years later. They advertised that every box was burned in before shipping so I've never trusted them since then. Why did I stick with him, then? The competition has always been worse, and the components usually had a quality differential, things like gold plated contacts and metal instead of plastic and so forth. My last box was a Dimension E510 that lasted 14 years with a power supply replacement at year 10. My current box is an XPS 8120 from 2017 upgraded last year with a bigger ssd, a third HD and topped up RAM. I also swapped out the power supply with the one I had bought for the Dimension. The case and motherboard on the XPS are nearly identical to the Vostro you tore down here. The two complaints I have about the XPS are that : - the power supply, which was a standard Silverstone Tek 600W Silver 80+ ATX/EPS, required an adapter for the motherboard wireset which is because Dell went proprietary on the plug; - there is one, and only one, M2 slot so when I upgraded the SSD I had to shelve the old one. The Dimension was still going strong when I replaced it. The problem was that Windows XP was obsolete! I'm pretty sure that Microsoft will also be the reason that this XPS will need to be replaced when the time comes, rather than any hardware component failure. My point here is that it looks like you are comparing apples and crabapples in this video. I'd like to see you do a side-by-side against a current XPS. I'm also hoping that you assemble a playlist of recommended standard components and maybe even some recommended custom builds. Thanks for these most excellent videos!
Actually I prefer the rubber grommets for the rear exhaust fan, especially on Dells. Yeah, it makes replacement a bit harder but their exhaust fan tend to have high RPM and airflow, and the grommets do help prevent vibration and noise.
The rubber pegs holding the fans to the case break down pretty bad with age. I've had to replace several that broke off and left the fan to spin free inside of the case.
I tough they are to isolate vibration and noise suppress the fan a bit? My Noctua case fan came with 4 of these and also 4 screws if you don't have the space to plug them.
@SteelRodent Even if the fans just have a minimum of vibration, which can never be completely eliminated, those can help minimizing them further. I wonder if the ones Noctua or BeQuiet offer last longer. Maybe it's just the cheap ones that age so badly? The ones Noctua offers are made out of silicone, perhaps the cheaper ones are made from bad rubber that becomes brittle.
You can treat the silicone standoffs with cooking oils, makeup oils and well just about any skin safe oil with a good degree of success. However silicone washers or o-rings are much easier to find replacements for given they are sold at hardware stores for a variety of uses.
that older dell is more solid of a system than people realize, even now still. they are able to take up to the highest end core 2 quad cpus, support up to 8, and sometimes 16gb of ram, and have a pcie slot, sometimes 2. so during a shortage they are still a compelling cheap option for emulation and mid range games. 4 solid cores, enough ram to get by, etc.
Dont buy one of these for games. The core 2 quad sounds appealing, but has no inter logic communication. Heavily threaded tasks choke on the bus bandwidth. The Q9650 performs worse then dual core pentiums today. If you go used, go no lower then 1st gen i series, those can still hold their own, albeit barely, in modern games.
10:00 actually Steve the new fan fastener is much better. Because it's elastic, it helps isolate the fan from the chassis so it should make the system overall more silent. The screws couple the fan to the chassis acoustically.
Exactly, I bought them extra from noctua for all my case fans so I hope that's an upgrade and not downgrade...I think Steve is the best person to actually test them if they work as intended, would be nice if he did a video on these...although I think their main advantage will show up after longer use, like if it's also better for bearing longetivity over the years...
@@Djuntas Well, they were released before the I series. I got mine just after the I series was released. The I7 CPU's were ungodly expensive at the time.
Same here man, the Core2Quad series had some really great and iconic CPUs. Great overclock possibilities, if you managed to tune it properly you could achieve something like +15% of performance.
@@cddll24 Yeah, now i wanna look this vs I7 860 or something hehe..And I did :P yup the I7 860 is way better, but could had been in 08/09 it was not the price king. Apparently q6600 was a 800 dollar cpu on launch, but quickly dropped to 250.
I remember some of the older Dell computers used a power supply that had a couple of wires in a different order than a standard power supply, but used the same motherboard connector, so if you put an off the shelf power supply in without swapping those wires to match the Dell wiring pattern you would release the magic blue smoke.
XPS 8000 series did not have that problem at least. You're talking at the board connector right? OH wait nvm wtf am I talking about like Dell would've ever had a modular power supply
@@pandemicneetbux2110 I found an article that indicates that from 1996 to 2000 Dell used power supplies with a 20 pin connector and another with a 6 pin connector to the motherboard. The ones I remember did not use the 6 pin connector because I remember being able to swap 2 wires on a standard power supply to match the Dell pattern and having it work with the Dell motherboard.
@@pandemicneetbux2110 i had two computers(no dell) with liteon psu and both worked more than a decade and would still work if those other components didnt die.
The lite-on PSU featured actually is good HP used this platform of PSU as well. These have OST caps, better than Capxon but below Teapo quality. Had Passive PFC. Good circuit topology/design
Probably around the late 2010s I bought a couple of Precision T7400 workstations that had been retired from my state's department of transportation and I had a lot of respect for just how effective they were for cable management and tool-free modifications. I think the only thing I needed a screwdriver for was installing the cooler when I added a 2nd CPU. Expansion cards had toolless retention clips, hard drives had the Dell blue drive trays, 5.25" bay accessories were held in with a spring-loaded sliding latch mechanism. Of course, the case weighed a ton and it wasn't that fast, but for testing old PC parts and learning how to configure and modify computers, they were awesome.
Those Dell Vostro’s are amazing computers. I used a Vostro 200 from 2008 for nearly 5 years as a main server in my house, AFTER it was decommissioned as a home pc when it was 8 years old. That computer would run 24/7 with its ORIGIONAL hard drive and ran server 2012 R2 like a champ.
I have a workstation class system from 2007/2008, a Precision T5400. It uses a proprietary PSU with proprietary connectors, CPU heatsinks that screw directly into the chassis, proprietary front panel connectors for USB, audio, power button, and status lights (the pinout for this is still unavailable to this day), the chassis fans use proprietary connectors, and the rear IO cutouts are part of the case. They have been at this for a long time. I am currently modding the chassis to take generic consumer components, (not through necessity thankfully, just a personal project), and the dremel has been required several times already.
9:49 Dude, that's a vibration absorbing mount. Noctua has been shipping them with their fans for decades. That's not a cost saving measure by any stretch - compared to screws, they're a pain to install.
I have recently built a PC with all of the fan screws replaced with these silicon variants - 24 of them to be exact. Some of them were a pain to install because of their crammed position (as PC CORN have said), but in the end they look unique and keep the cheap Deepcool CF120 fans from possibly rattling the whole case. I wonder if they are going to get stiff and brittle in the coming years.
@@92kosta i think they might be fine. I came across some of the pins i purchased 15 years ago recently and they're still alright. It's probably TPU/TPE so it can degrade but it doesn't have to.
He isn't actually saying anything bad about it but the way he speaks he sure makes it seem like its way worse. Dunno if hes acting stupid for some more "fun" in the video. But he comes across as an idiot just trying to flame them as much as possible even when there is no reason.
Dell: “We’ve always been this way! We’ve never changed!” GN: **reviews a 2008-model and finds its construction, lack of proprietary components and choice of CPU fan significantly more appealing than the G5 5000-series** Dell: 😨 “N-no! This has got to be a fluke!!”
"The old industry approach was proprietary technology and vertical service solutions, ... Customers now universally reject these notions." - Michael Dell "Our business is about technology, yes. But it's also about operations and customer relationships." - Michael Dell
I remember getting the cheapest dell you could get back in the early 2000's as a basic web-browsing/ home office PC for my dad and my step mom. It was $300 CAD (not including monitor, which I bought from somewhere else), and I was absolutely floored by how cool its custom cooling solution was for such a dirt cheap PC. I remember also liking the keyboard and mouse that it came with. I was very impressed with it given the super low cost (it also came with windows XP). It still is, to this day, the quietest computer I've ever (barely) heard (aside from passively cooled laptops). I never actually tested it to see what it could do under a sustained workload, but I remember that it had one (or maybe two) relatively big fans running at a low rpm, with custom ducting which channeled hot air from, I think, a relatively large CPU cooler, and directly out of the case. I remember being able to get the fan to run faster, and that it was always really quiet and pleasant sounding. That PC worked fine for over 10 years, until it was eventually retired. I also have a dell laptop which is now 12 years old, (A Vostro 1320 iirc) and it still works. It was $650 CAD and had a Core 2 Duo P8600, which was a very powerful laptop CPU for that price range back in the day. It also had easily upgradeable RAM and storage drive. It also had an easily replaceable battery, and I've only had to replace the battery once so far after 13 years. I think I need to re apply the paste on the CPU, because it seems to struggle to keep the cpu properly cooled under load, but it still allows me to do the basic things that I like to be able to do with a laptop. Dell really has gotten a lot worse over the years, but I'm sure they were making a lot of crap or overpriced stuff back in the day as well (but I definitely was quite happy with some of their low-end stuff between around 2003-2009
I have an old Dell optiplex at my mom's house as an off-site backup. It's got proprietary front panel and power button connectors, and I think it's a proprietary PSU, but it was cheap and super easy to work with.
Congrats to Dell for winning the "Its Better than Dell" award... even if it was from a decade ago. You should try and get it up and running for modern benchmarks if they even work, and a proper case review.
Dell used to put together decent systems. I abandoned them when everything started going proprietory. Nowadays you can get around things like power switches by getting an adapter from ebay. But back then it was impossible to work on these things without extra wire, diagrams, solder and a bit of luck. I started building out of necessity and found a love for it. So, in the end I have to thank Dell for being so shitty that this guy started building rigs instead of being held hostage to big prebuilt.
I love the way GN sell their own tools, but Steve still uses that BeQuiet screwdriver as one of his go to tools🤔Why not, it's a great screw driver, you actually see quite a lot of tech youtubers using them. They are handy for releasing GPUs from the PCIe slot too.
Vostro series! That brings back memories -- At an old IT job, we had a supply contract with Dell and deployed OptiPlex desktops for years. But we had a large number of client offices which had to run our software on systems which we needed to image and support. OptiPlexes were too expensive, so I checked specs and decided that the Vostro series would be fine. And they ran great -- well beyond their expected lifetime. They were being pulled out from under desks and countertops long after we thought they should have all been replaced. Vostros were basically Dell's version of a "white box" PC. All bog-standard parts. Even a standard BIOS and standard drivers. None of the custom stuff found in the more typical OptiPlex line. They weren't intended to be high performance machines, just a decent-value workhorse and they did just fine in that role. And I caught that Antec 900 reference! Yes, indeed, an Antec 900 is a challenge for cable management. But I have one holding a 5GHz OC'd i7-6700 right now, with an RTX 2080 shoehorned inside... It's still a surprisingly good air-flow case today.
that "standard 24 pin" most likely has been rewired. Around 2012 me and my dad tried to repurpose a dell we found in the garbage and nearly blew it up because the pinouts didnt match so definitely check that before you reuse/swap any oem power supply
I wouldn't say it's "most likely" unless you had the same Dell, the OptiPlex 990 MT for example is a standard wired 24-pin (I've swapped in normal PSU's without issue) but like you said it's something you should check
This is very true. If you also check out Dell pc's farther back, you will find many / most Dell computers were one of the worse brands using proprietary parts in thier system. I started building PC's around 80, or 81.
9:47 that looks a lot like Noctua's, unless I'm missing something I would say that is better than a screw, specially if the fan doesn't have any anti vibration pads.
I remember the Dell Dimension XPS R400 from 1998, from way back in a time when Dell was actually somewhat of a poster child for making highly customizable prebuilts you could order online, that were pretty well made. Back in those days it was novel to order a customized computer online, and back then Dell actually let you customize *FAR* more about the build than they do these days. Once upon a time Dell stood out for having far more customization than the other big brands. Since then they've thrown it all away of course.
I had one of those for college in 1998. Aside from the proprietary PSU and motherboard, everything else was pretty standard. The case design was way better than the Baby AT cases most people had at the time. The PC was insanely upgradable given the limitations. In the end I eventually upgraded the CPU twice first to a Pentium III 700 MHz, then to a Tualatin Celeron 1.4 GHz (with a fancy adapter). The GPU went from an NVIDIA Riva 128 ZX to a Voodoo3 to a GeForce 2 MX to an AMD Radeon 9000 Pro. I upgraded the internal sound card to a Sound Blaster Live! Value. Also added a Promise Ultra ATA/100 IDE controller and an Ethernet card. I was using it well into the next decade and only replaced it with subpar laptops until I eventually built a custom desktop in 2012.
my current computer started out as a Dell prebuilt I bought in 2009 that served as my intro to computer building. this made me feel so nostalgic! i didn't even switch out the case until 2017!
I still have my Inspiron white retail version of that case that I spray painted black. Had the Q6600 too. I screwed an 80mm Apevia blue LED fan to the front (only got 3 screws to thread at a weird angle) and cut a hole in the side panel and top for additional fans (side was intake and I think top was intake too). It was the first and really only modded case I ever owned. Ahh, the memories.
5:05 That looks exactly like my grandparents eMachine with 'Windows Me' that they bought at Costco in 2001 that they still have to this day for their AOL Email. Their motherboard is more of a weird lime-seaweed color and mustard/ketchup all over. It takes about 3 minutes to be fully booted from pressing the power button to being able to move the mouse cursor without lag/jitter.
6:40 Did this with an HP computer that’s with my family since 2006. I basically gutted it and used the case for a new PC with a R3 3200g. Fitting since it still has its AMD and ATI Radeon stickers.
Check out the plastic holding the heat sink in that Vostro 400. The plastic on each screw post was molded seperately from the rest of the mount and has a join with the rest of that mount that would often fail when it got up to temperature. When those fail the heat sink just falls off with no way to reattach it.
Dell is pretty good in a business environment. Slap a custom image on it and pick which Dell management tools you want. Just don't plan on doing much if anything in terms of upgrades, other than maybe RAM or storage. That goes for desktops and laptops. I recently got a new Dell laptop for myself. It had so much bloatware on it I just nuked the OS. Much better now.
What a throwback, first decent multicore setup I ran was the "sister" of the vostro line the silver Inspiron. 720p/30fps never will feel the same as it did in 07' ...
My dad got this old server case from HP with a power supply in 2006. We had a Pentium 4 system then, we swapped and exchanged parts to build a combined cabinet. In 2009 we changed it to dual core, and then a first gen core i5. Used that set up till last month as a backup cabinet. Switch the HDD a couple of times and now it rocks an SSD and I run CentOS 8 on it. Mainly use it to check removable disks for viruses before using them in windows (still have some use cases). It works. 17 years and it still runs. Standardised parts really help
Having worked at Frys for a decent while, I can confirm that older dells were built better. We had a few Dell XPS from around 2010~2012 and those were built pretty alright.
I remember being in a really low end core 2 duo waiting for Q6600 prices to drop after along time, they held a ridiculous amount of value for way too long
@@justinv3080 today it is - low end and useless, I remember the "compaq presario" example. :o ! when I bought the Core 2 Duo Dell Inspiron it was a high end ten years ago, that's what I mean.
That's pretty interesting to see. I had a Dell Inspiron 5675 from 2017 for my first gaming pc, and it was pretty much like that vostro, standard parts except for the proprietary connectors from the front panel to the motherboard, so i was able to upgrade the gpu and the power supply easily, and i thought that was pretty cool for an OEM prebuilt, so it sucks to see that right after they came out with the G5 and threw all that out of the window.
I mean just to give Dell credit where it's due, Their business line is actually pretty decent as far as reliability and servicability. Granted, I haven't worked anywhere that uses HP computers. I've worked in IT for 10 years. Everyone likes to screw over people for their consumer line.
This was an impressive show of how backwards Dell has become. Also thank you for notifying us of the modmat stock. I picked up one as a show of support and vecause I've always wanted one. Great product you came up with! :)
I’d be very interested in the future in the video of how PSUs age, maybe like testing a range of old ones by brand and seeing how all of them held up, this might be hard to test but I feel like if it’s possible it could be amazing to know what makes a good PSU and what makes them last…… and what doesn’t
Several years ago, I purchased a prebuilt dell system. Just recently, I decided to upgrade the components inside of it, and it was by far one of the most miserable experiences ever, especially for the GPU. It didn't come with one, so I put in an old GTX-1050 Ti, and decided to upgrade to the RTX-3050. Turns out that the PSU that's included has the most proprietary cables ever made, so basically, I had to purchase a new 650W PSU along with a sketchy adapter from Amazon for the motherboard just so it'd run. Worst part of it all is that the documentation on the PC is horrible, so if I want to know the Pinouts for example on the PSU cables, I'd have to go digging in the Dell Forums for help. Overall, not a nice experience at all and I would have much rather just built my own PC if I could go back in time.
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If you want to see the modern competition for the Dell Vostro 400, we have an entire playlist of prebuilt system reviews here: th-cam.com/play/PLsuVSmND84QuM2HKzG7ipbIbE_R5EnCLM.html
Grab a GN Tear-Down Toolkit on back-order now to guarantee you get one in the next run! We have arrival dates on the store now. These have been in production a long time and have been in constant demand, so to make sure you get one, pick up a back-order here: store.gamersnexus.net/products/gamersnexus-tear-down-toolkit
We compared the Vostro 400 to the Dell G5 5000, a system so bad that it needed two videos. Part one is here: th-cam.com/video/4DMg6hUudHE/w-d-xo.html
Dell > Dell confirmed?!
I have a Dell XPS 630i and I would love to see you review one of them. Standard power supply, fairly standard case (other than mounting opposite side / upside down). I’ve had the case through many other boards (running an Asus Rampage board in it now) on the original PSU and internals. That might be as close as they have been to following standards.
Upgrade the classic dell case with modern components
They also has shitty proprietary mobos back then too. Remember BTX? inverted layout which was hard to find if not impossible in the aftermarket.
@Gamers Nexus are you guys going to get more coasters.. I would like to buy the set with four glasses if you do. I already have the volt mod mat and the large wire frame mouse pad.. it's all great items.. thanks for all the hard work
What an honor to get a (relatively favorable) review 14 years after launching the Vostro 400! A big thanks from the team at (the former) Dell China Design Center that launched this PC. The real sad story about the first-gen Vostro was that we worked on an AMD (when K8 was still competitive) version right till the end, but the product was cancelled at the 11th hour.
Yo this needs to be bumped to the top!
You guys built a solid product. I bought my Studio 540 (basically the same machine but with a different CPU, RAM and graphics and Vista) in early 2009 after my Dimension 2350 had its power supply take out the motherboard. It still lives on today as my HTPC, I replaced the power supply about 10 years ago, and its been through a couple of DVD drives, but otherwise it hasn't skipped a beat.
Tiananmen
@@EnwardHiggins Could be funny if you weren't just harassing a random chinese citizen who could be anywhere in the world now lmao
Dell towers have NEVER been worth a crap. Paper-thin aluminum cases that flex, proprietary hardware/power-supplies. Horrible stuff. You're interpreting "tolerable" with "favorable" (and neither of those is "good".
The only decent product dell makes is rackmount servers, and occasionally they produce a passable laptop.
So in other words, the new Dell can't even get the "it's better than Dell" award?
haha
The funniest thing to me watching this is before he even opened the damn case I was immediately going "no it's definitely better" because I actually had an old Dell PC from right before around the time Dell went completely to shit circa the 2012-2014 era. All my shit was standardized from back in the Ivy Bridge/Sandy Bridge era, including the power supply, board, basically everything wrong with the new Dells wasn't wrong back then, in fact I don't even think my old system was loaded with nearly as much bloatware (it didn't come with the good old software packages either though just like windows media player, notepad, mspaint).
The funny thing is Dell actually wouldn't be a bad power company if they stuck with making power supplies. Somehow my filth encrusted PSU from nearly a decade ago kept working right up until getting a new system. Its power supplies are beyond just "it's fine." It's like the one last component they didn't fuck up for some reason.
They did indeed use to be quite shit with boards however. My old board had NO heatsink over the southbridge and NO sinks over the paltry VRMs, which is exactly why shitty old Dells are locked at the BIOS level, which is meaning if you get an ancient Dell even you can't just swap out the crappy i5 or whatever and stuck an unlocked i7 in there and overclock it because there's no real way around the locked down BIOS. Which is just as well I suppose because those shite VRMs are going to cause a fire if you overclock on them anyway.
More like: The old Dell gets the "it's better than the new Dell". Award ^_^
@@pandemicneetbux2110 They locked the BIOS down because they didn't want you buying the cheapest model and tweaking a few settings to make it perform as well as a model several hundred dollars more expensive.
that's a burn, lol. I think Michael Dell himself felt that one sting.
I can see Dell's next marketing push already;
*"Timeless designs" - Steve, Gamers Nexus*
I'd actually laugh if I saw that come up
I honestly hope that they'll do something like that. Would laugh my ass off.
🤣
Even the old Dell gets the "Well, it's better than Dell." Award.
Lol
It’s amazing how much standardized parts mean in a prebuilt. My first ever desktop was a Dell XPS 8100 circa 2010. Over the years I swapped out the GPU for an AMD 7870, the power supply for a Corsair CX650, the CPU cooler for a Cooler Master, the mechanical HDD for an SSD, and even swapped all of the components into a Rosewill case with better air flow. I eventually gifted that computer to family members and it lived on until early 2021. All of this was made possible by standardized components.
What happened in early 2021...?
@@johnbamber7374 we don’t talk about the “incident”
i also have a studio xps 8100
@@johnbamber7374 It still worked. But by that point, a lot of the core components were just very dated (the CPU for example was a circa 2009 Core i7 860), so its owner moved onto something a bit newer.
Is it even considered the same computer after all those changes?
I do not recall when it was but at one point dell was using a standard 24pin header with a custom pint out, really fun to watch the board smoke when you replace the psu
they did that for quite awhile and it lead to many dead systems or psu's back in the day iirc. I never understood why either, it would have cost them MORE to have a normal psu custom wired and an otherwise say cookie cutter Intel 440BX motherboard with the only difference with it being wired for that specific psu.
My sister uses a 9010 optiplex with i7-3770 and it has a standard 24 pin. The newer haswell ones (9020) had a non-standard mobo connector
I remember Compaq doing the same thing. Luckily for me it tripped the PSU protection and nothing died.
The 'non standard' components are clearly used to drive down cost - they sell way more servers than desktops so economically makes sense to use the same PSU etc. Server components tend to be fairly reliable also.
I haven't done it, but would be interesting to see overall cost comparison of pre built Vs a budget custom built with same specs for all these pre builds you have done (sorry if this has been done already!).
The ewaste point is fair, I gradually replace bits of my system over the years. I still have a backup system that uses a 10yr old intel mobo/CPU and it works fine. It's just not in their interest I guess
@@nicksimkins Bunch of garbage.
Actually Dell has improved a lot at cheaping out on their components. Really helps with their margins.
nah its just that the Vostro he is looking at was $2k+ and his new machine is $900. Considering the value of the dollar has fallen greatly from 2008 to 2021 the $900 machine would have been like $500 and the $2000 machine would have been like $3800.
@@Jimster481 the value of computers has also come down a lot since then (and then went back up a bit in 2021)
@@Jimster481 Vostro may be an expensive business line of PCs, but a 14 years old PC shouldn't be better built than a new one from the same company...
The late 2021 Alienware desktop is actually the current G5 / XPS / Inspiron / Vostro chassis dolled up in plastic with a higher watt psu. Impressive that they essentially sell the same case with different hardware (and same software).
I feel like at the very least Dell could put their own weird motherboards and PSUs in there but still make the case compatible with standard ATX and mATX by providing the requisite screw holes and mounting points. There are plenty of aftermarket enthusiast cases that expand upon the basic ATX spec and do it without breaking compatibility.
Ah, the good old days. When you could just slap a gpu into a pre-built and actually have a competent pc.
My sister had brought in a IBM PC with Pentium 4 so she can work at home and it it got a empty AGP slot! I placed a GeForce4 card and I had a blast playing Half Life 2 with it.
Brian... was this recently?
@@blazed85 My thoughts, exactly
Thats how I built my 1st gaming rig. Slapped a 9800GT, 2GB RAM, and a new PSU into an HP Pavillion desktop. 1000s hrs on gmod, tf2, and guild wars on that thing!
Also, yes, it did run Crysis. On low settings lol
My story was with a prebuilt Lenovo HS250 slim, so I bought a new case and a 1060 (this was back 2017) then just to end up that the mobo need bios update but sadly the manufacturer site doesn't had a lest bios lol
In the late 90s and early 2000's I always recommended dell to my clients because their products were always tested well and they would use descent components. They also had great on site support for my larger clients that could afford it. Its sad to see the crap their dishing out now. Thanks for the video.
I wasn't too into computers back in the early 2000's, but my schoolmates were, and I remember them always talking smack about dell.
I thought Dell were supposed to be pretty good computers too (having been told that in the early 2000s). I've always had Dell computers/laptops and they've been fine, but i'm not much of a gamer.
I mean for standard house use, not bad in the early 2000’s. Attrocious for gaming, but not bad outside.
Now, the whole company is e-waste
There was actually a time when buying a Dell would get you a reasonably good system and a GPU upgrade could turn it into a really decent gaming rig. It was a fairly short time but it existed....I guess when big profits came in the company moved to making more profits with cheaper parts and spending the money on marketing instead of offering the good system deals that gained them profits.
Yep I was lucky to get mine during that period. Windows 98 SE period, it also came with Altec Lansing speakers/subwoofer thing was a beast. (Could shake the house) System was able to handle Half-life when it first came out (yes at one point half-life was demanding lol)
*Very early Dell had ridiculous parts surprised they actually made money lol. Kind of like Alienware back in the day.
Then: "Dude, you're getting a Dell!"
Now: "Dude? You're getting a Dell?"
i smoked some pot dude i went to Jail free Dell
"Dude...uh...Dell..." **
This comment is perfect 🤣🤣
WWE: Hell in a Cell
DELL, post-2020: Hell in a Dell
@@First-Name_Last-Name Id trust Mick Foley building a case over dell, and most likely Foley has been hit with it, fallen on it, or been blown up with it
I guess the old saying "they don't build them like they use to" applies to Dell computers as well
Didn't they switch caps and mosfets during the old pc production? There was a lawsuit of them blowing up. So it's built great but ruined it by switching out the good stuff with crappy stuff midway of making it.
Uhhhh... I disagree. I have a Dell from 2004 sitting here somewhere and it’s built the same way the modern example is built. Actually, even more proprietary parts bc the fan on that ting is also proprietary.
@@mouaxiong8618 Capacitor Plague. It's wasn't just Dell. Capacitors were dying everywhere. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
@@bodgemaster7946 If you're talking about the rear case fan, it's not exactly proprietary. It's a 90mm which is still widely available.
Remember when Dell was originally formed in the '80s and they targeted enthusiasts (in addition to businesses)? I wasn't even born then so I wouldn't know if they sold *good* computers, but they certainly sound like they used to be a top-tier prebuilt manufacturer.
That Vostro 400 is bringing back so many memories!
I remember hacksawing a Classic "blowhole" into the sidepanel, so it doesn't overheat after upgrading one of them with a better GPU.
Was a pretty popular upgrade for the forner family computer/hand-me-down: bigger PSU, new GPU, a side mounted fan with a metal mesh.
@@timhartherz5652 I'm not sure if this works on the Vostro 400 but some of them can be overclocked from 266mhz fsb up to 333 with a simple mod also.
@@mortenee88 every little bit helps for the broke student, some had to make do with the original PSU, leaving the side panel open and putting a deskfan next to it.
This and similar models stayed around for quite some time.
I have a old vosto so still running strong after 10 years. Still somehow putting out acceptable fps.
@@timhartherz5652 yeah back then it was basic setup to take side panel off and put a 10" fan blowing in or play with laptop on "no-mouse" servers with touchpad or thinkpad nipple.
witnessing the downfall of Dell is actually quite sad. I remember blindingly recommending everybody to buy Dell computers because it was a guarantee that everything would be fine. That was such a long time ago tho... My first laptop was actually a Dell Vostro 1510 from like 2008 which still works to this day. It was so good.
I can never forgive Dell and HP et al for the janky angle of the CPU fan alone. UNFORGIVABLE!
Lenovo does it too
"dell is the best friend money can buy" is indeed a quote from Intel. From internal emails at the time when they were bribing companies like Dell to not use better amd cpus. I'm surprised amd survived what Intel and Nvidia have put them through.
AMD _won_ the lawsuit that nearly destroyed their company. That's how impressively destructive Intel's campaign was.
@@Mavendow how destructive, like slamming a sledge hammer and cleanly removing the jaw destructive?
@@ZudeXbox360 Intel didn't just go after AMD, they went after AMD's partners and vendors too, locking them into exclusivity deals specifically to break AMD's supply chain. For their behavior, Intel got sanctioned by multiple arms of the U.S. government. Which is unheard of even for horrid companies like Monsanto.
I'm an AMD investor so I may be biased, but this is why I get frustrated how people are quickly declaring Intel the underdog that we should throw our support behind because AMD raised prices by a hundred bucks (even though their motherboards are cheaper). If it it wasn't for AMD we'd still be paying 1000 bucks for a 6 core.
Intel has pulled so much pigfuckery in the past it's insane.
@@shanez1215 Well said. That new 12900 would likely be at least $1500. Intel is using AMD price tags on their products today.
Dell in 2008: Decisions made by engineers.
Dell in 2021: Decisions made by accountants.
They were always cheap. They just got better at being worse.
@@mostevil1082 Cheap but at least cared, now they just don't care anymore.
Basically Intel for the past 10 years until now.
@@BasedAstraea The process here is "cost-optimization", the more time goes on the more they find corners to cut
@@marcogenovesi8570 There's a difference between being anti-consumer, and cost cutting. Also devising a way to make your customers always buy new products because fixing the old one is impossible through cost or obscurity, is anti-consumer. I can assure you, Dell isn't engineering their motherboards and cases purely for "cost-optimization" they can do that in the parts choices they have for the primary PC components, then make it all back by over-charging you for it. The engineering department is being instructed to make the motherboard and cases easier to assemble on a factory line and non-standard so they can force the customer to buy new hardware every 5-6 years after something fails outside warranty.
I have a Dell Studio XPS with an i7 970 and it is almost 100% standard parts. Dell didnt always suck and in fact the XPS used to be the hidden gem in the lineup. They were often as good or even better than the Alienware ones for much less. You dint get the cool "gamer" case but you got performance....and standard parts.
Same, but with an i7-920. The PSU did die after about 5 years, but because it was a standard ATX, it was easy to replace. Airflow sucked, but this was before GN existed. Also the custom wiring for the front panel was a pain to move into a new case.
This was true even as late as 2012, 2013. I think it was round about 2014 that they started sticking things like non-standard motherboard power and such in there. Pretty sure you could still get a working XPS system with a like i7 4770 in it and it'd be functional for gaming even to today for the most part. Its main problem always was the same as today which is few people outside what might as well be called boutique SIs actually bothered to not put trash boards in there, in fact I just saw some video where I was impressed by the SI using a Tuf x570 which I thought was unfairly glossed over by the reviewer because over time like 80% of your problems are going to come down to the board. Bad CPU? Check the socket. Slow RAM? Need to overclock? Want an SLI rig? Need more storage? It almost always comes down to the cheapness of the board and its generation.
In the case of an old XPS, yes, you often could just swap out the highest end CPU on that socket, get something like a new cooler say a 92mm Arctic which will fit inside the case, throw in some extra RAM, swap out the graphics card, and presto you've still get a modern gaming system which can in theory play the newest demanding titles.
@@pandemicneetbux2110 You should be able to do such, but Dell, HP and Sony were dicks about it and made proprietary BIOS which limited options on most of their motherboards. You can build a PC with all consumer parts but have a BIOS chip on the MB which limits functionality; that is the old game of Dell, HP and Sony.
I'm still using mine, since I've been able to continue upgrading it. I put it in a better case, better power supply, added a new graphics card, and replaced the i7 920 with an i7 990X. It's awesome how standardized this PC is.
Dell studio xps 8100 user here. i7 860. Replaced the PSU,The GPU (Had a gtx 460,got a 6gb 1060) and added 2 SSD's.
As kinda trash as their cases were back in the day, I still love their 2000's computer vibe. It's always fun to see people who are dedicated to the cause heavily modify them in order to build super sleeper PCs.
Doing that now with an OptiPlex 780. It currently has an Intel e7500 Core2 Duo OC'd to 3.65Ghz using the BSEL electrical tape mod to circumvent the locked down BIOS. 1TB Samsung Evo 870 SSD, 16GB dual rank, dual channel DDR3 RAM running at 7-7-7-20 clocks. Running Windows 10 Pro and a plethora of Linux Distros without so much as a hiccup. Waiting for an EVGA GTX 1650 4GB DDR6 GPU that's currently on it's way and about to order an Intel Q9650 Core2 Quad just to max everything out possible. Oh and an upgraded cpu cooler just for shits and giggles. Tinkering is fun, especially on older stuff. Funny how such an old Dell can still keep up.
The Q6600 was Intel's second "glued together" processor. That was two Core 2 Duo chips on the same package. Only without any actual glue - they had to communicate solely through the front side bus, which means any signals from one die to the other would have to go down the socket pins, onto the front side bus, then back up the socket pins.
Their first was the Pentium D, which was two single-core Pentium 4 dies on a single package. Same lack of logical glue.
In both cases, multi-threaded performance suffered due to the lack of proper communication between cores. Something you could easily see when comparing to the genuine multi-core CPU's from AMD in that time period.
That aside, at least the Q6600 had decent performance on the whole, being an evolution of the Pentium 3, unlike the absolutely atrocious Pentium 4.
I vividly remember when the C2D and C2Q were introduced. Heck, it almost feels like yesterday even though it was 15 years ago. They were such a a leap in performance and efficiency over Netburst that it stunned a lot of people. Along with the Pentium M's in mobile, Intel was setup to ride high for years.
Q660's was my friends budget chip until he upgraded to the g4560 and now is running Ryzen 9, talk about a leap
VIA had (well, has) x86 license for all x86 designs up to Pentium 3. I remember tech journalists making fun of VIA for not even trying to acquire one Pentium 4 design. And lo and behold, it lived on up until Nehalem. In the mean time Via turned P3 into multi-threaded, multicore low power CPU - it was just better material.
@@OnTheRocks71 1.86 GHz launch core 2 could match the performance of the pentium d 965 emergency edition, running at 3.73 ghz and pulling roughly 1.83 jigawatts of power. Jaw dropping, and those were spanked by the e8000 series just 20 months later.
A few years ago I replaced two overclocked q6600 systems with sff hp i5-3470 systems. The q6600 systems used $12 ebay CPUs that ran at about 4 ghz with air cooling (old coolermaster hyper 212s with AS5 paste).
I used them for multiboxing games and they were still holding up surprisingly well despite being on 24/7 running at 100% in the deep southern Texas heat. Despite using hd5770s they pulled almost 300 watts EACH from the wall and were space heaters.. Could almost keep my living room warm in winter almost purely by folding on those machines.
It kind of blows my mind that my current setup can run games full screen full load and use 300 watts or less TOTAL. The setups being a ryzen 5 3600 system with 32gb ram 1tb nvme ssd 3x 1tb spinner with a GTX 970. A HP/compaq SFF business machine with an i7-3770 16gb with 2x 1tb drives and a gt1030 2gb gddr5. another HP/compaq SFF with i5-3470 8gb ram hd7570 1tb and 2tb spinners.
It's amazing how much more efficient modern CPUs are.
EDIT : If you were wondering you can see the screen of one of the q6600 machines in the three eve videos I posted that showed all the screens while I was boxing (the top screen). OBS was NOT kind to the q6600 machines or my primary machine which was a fx6300 based system.
Those Q6600s were damned good performance for the price on the used market +8 years ago.
I find it funny how they still use the exact same cheap OEM aluminum heatsink fan for 13 years
Maybe someone got a good deal and ordered waaaaaaaay too many of them 😂
for low end cpu's they aren't bad. a block of aluminum is a block of aluminum
Same as HP
I just custom built a haunted Halloween house party off the floor style desktop computer with those hockey puck 1st GEN i3-530 cpu coolered motherboard HP SFF
th-cam.com/video/JC1uOp-7huQ/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/enveRWAwrxg/w-d-xo.html
For something like a 65W chip they sure do, at least bigger than the Intel boxed fans they put on the 65W class back then. Obviously that only works if the chip really only draws 65W and not 130
13+ maybe
They're using cases they mass produced in the 90's still, never mind the type of things they do to make sure you have as much trouble as possible upgrading or fixing one.
E-waste champs, 3 decades running.
Hats off to Dell, making the "it's better than dell" score easier to achieve for other companies. If nothing else, they are a team player.
Used to think that Dell made pretty solid computers until I began watching your videos. That's because I was last updated on Dell back in about 2008, which to me, being an older guy, actually isn't that long ago. 😄
Dell computers are good. Just not the super powerful gaming ones. As you can see in the video.
@@Warp2090 Thanks for the clarification! 👍
@@somerandomvertebrate9262 Yes. I think if you get a more basic dell computer you'll be fine. I'm using a dell computer right now and its lasted a good 3 years. It's just a basic dell desktop though. Costed around $750
@@somerandomvertebrate9262 Sorry to reply again but if you're looking for a powerful computer such as a gaming computer or a powerful office computer stay away.
@@Warp2090 750 bux is gaming territory for me as i just built a pretty good PC out of pastgen parts for that (Z390 with 8700k and 1080ti, i could go for lower tier stuff and cut cost even more but i wanted those CPU and GPU). There could be an arguement for commercial desktops as i just spent a year overhauling (among other things) a fleet (100+) of 7th gen HP 290s that could be cannibalized in case anything failed in them (but nothing did, they were all champs and just needed ram and storage upgrades) but for personal use? No. Fucking. Way.
Hey I had that old Dell as my first computer, well mine was from 2007 and silver. I loved that thing, it and the dell monitor I got with it lasted me almost a decade and it still sits in my room because I can't bring myself to get rid of it.
Despite my fond memories though I'll never buy a Dell again, it's insane how much they've regressed since the late 2000s.
Something wrong with the poor thing? If so those machines are so easy to repair it is amazing but they just get outdated, a lot of times when they are thrown out it is just due to being old sadly.
@@cdos9186 old motherboards are an absolute pain to find and generally overpriced.
@@potatoes5829 Annoying how the people that know what they are want ridiculous prices for them and most of the time people that have no clue what it is they just end up getting thrown out. : (
Back in early 2000's this was how my friends and I gamed. We bought these premade PC's because they were a decent price for teens on a budget. All you had to do through the years was upgrade your gpu or ram.
You can actually still do this with some brands, here in europe we got that ALDI brand Medion. All normal Parts , i bought one with a 5600g in it 16gb ram and slapped a 1650 super in it for a friends. Runs perfect
I also had an optiplex and crt monitor in the 2000s but the optiplex was one of that flat laying cases it had like 1gb ddr1 ram and a pentium 4
@@tomweyts i bought one and send it back this october, since it was literally garbage, first it came with a kink in the watercooling tube because the cooler was mounted wrongly then the OS was installed on the HDD storage instead of the SSD and it basically didnt run, i had to remove the HDD to install windows on the SSD because there was some kind of software that made it so you could only install it on the HDD. Also for a highend gaming pc that it supposedly is, its performance is crap, not to mention that if you let it run under heavy load for over 2hrs that it shuts itself off, was the first time buying an aldi pc and i will never buy a pc there again.
@@empi2597 weird ... The one that my friends is now Running doesn't have any issues.... I gave it a full night of benching & stresstesting. Stabilty test of Aida 64 ran for 10 hours with no crashes or issues
@@tomweyts nothing weird about it, if you look and research a little, the type of aldi pc that i bought has had massive sendbacks. not to mention that with a 11900k i9 and a 3080 geforce a 750W powersupply is a joke, that whole pc is ridiculous if i think about it more carefully shouldnt have been blinded by its cheapness, that machine was a hot pile of garbage, not to mention the benchmarks with both those components performed over 20% below average.. that thing was a disaster.
_"Sometimes the news is sad, and so we wanted to cheer everyone up by checking on the progress of the human race."_
*OOF.*
“By looking at two Dell computers.”
Even worse lol 😂
I dunno about you, but those words definitely cheered me up. Especially with the content of the rest of the video.
By every communist the human race degrades a decade.
It's good to see a channel advocate responsible repairability rather then advocate replacing perfectly good, working power supplies just because their sponsor is a power supply manufacturer.
The rubberized fan mounts are a great upgrade though, removes a lot of vibration noise. I scavenge them from old systems like this whenever I can to re-use them.
I guess the new PC with butt plug holding the fan is kind of good. It mitigates the chassis vibration.
My moms boyfriend bought 2 of these. One for her and one for his mom. Within a few years the MB in both were dead from the same problem. The ram slots stopped working one by one. There ended up being a class action he was a part of where Dell knowingly used faulty capacitors to save a few bucks. So I wouldn't say dell was any better back then tbh.
Yeah but at least you could swap the motherboard in this one. And when the class action ends you might have gotten 40% of the cost back. Now imagine a class action on the G5 you get 20$ and maybe a cpu and gpu
At least that board is easily replaceable and the fact that it lasted a few years.
You bet now they use the same shitty caps and make things non-standard so that you can't fix it.
Yeah, no clue how many GX270's I had to repair. Yep, caps ain't supposed to look like that...or leak. Boot the computer up - see a black screen with "thermal event" on it, no need to even look - caps are toast.
Lots of things had bad capacitors back then...FYI.
Okay let me rephrase that: Dell is worse now
WOW! Does this mean the old Dell gets the coveted "Better than Dell" award!
When Dell can't even get an "It's better than Dell" award!
no Dell award, just the Timov "You've Devolved!" award, lol.
Ctrl+C
Ctrl+v
Great video! Only criticism may be that you're not comparing oranges to oranges. The Vostro is the "small business" line (step up from consumer grade Dimension at the time, or Inspiron tower now, but below the real business line, OptiPlex). I'd be interested to see a comparison to a current day Vostro or OptiPlex. The G series is just a consumer grade machine and I wouldn't expect it to be much more than disposable. I also feel the quality of Dell ProSupport vs. consumer support is vastly better. But totally agree with the disappointing direction Dell and other OEMs are headed, seems no one makes good consumer grade pre-builts and they're all spiraling toward the bottom.
I had a vostro 400, it was a great starter system at the time for someone who needed an initial rig to build from. I threw in a GPU and it worked great! Ended up replacing other components until eventually the original dell was no more, and so in a way, that system is still with me today.
a true ship of theseus moment
I also had a dell vostro 200 the slim version, still have it actually. Keeping it to do a sleeper build in it, but it was clear this was a real Personal Computer from an OEM, all industry standard parts even if the TFX psu was a bit uncommon it could be replaced with an off the shelf part, the case even came with thumb screws so it was obviously built with the idea of being user serviceable and upgradable.
"They're evolving, just backwards."
It’s like watching dinosaurs become chickens in a single lifetime
to paraphrase Timov, "they have changed, they've devolved."
@@alexmills1329 other way, dinosaurs to primordial ooze, lol.
Devolving..
Return to monke
IIRC, this was a point in time when Dell had specifically stepped up the quality of their builds, shifted towards more standardized components, etc specifically because of the blowback they were getting in the late 90s/early 2000s.
So they're repeating history it looks like. Wonder when they'll get the blowback this time.
I'm so old I remember this. They probably think people are not looking anymore, or haven't been paying attention for enough time they would give it a go again.
@@IncertusetNescio Consumer desktop makes up such a small part of Dell sales that the answer is probably "never". The overwhelming majority of desktop sales at the major OEMs are corporate desktops with service contracts.
@@IncertusetNescio the type of person to buy one of these now will not look inside. The blowback will not come.
Here are some of my thoughts on working on Dells over the years:
The Pentium II and III XPS and L-series were standard ATX with the exception of 20-pin ATX connector on the PSU having a different pinout, and therefore only compatible with those Dell boards. Reusing the case with a different brand board required a new PSU.
The clamshell-opening Dimension 8xxx, 4400, 4500, and 4550 used standard ATX power supplies, but would not fit if a power switch was present on the PSU. They were otherwise proprietary designs.
The Dimension 2xxx, 4600, 4700, 3000, and B110/1100 were standard ATX except for the front panel audio header. They used a thermal-controlled 92mm fan mounted with isolation mounts to a plastic mount that slid on from the inside rear of the case. It used a duct to pull air from the heatsink out of the case. The heatsink bracket was load-bearing, but the mounts could be removed by unscrewing them, allowing for different brand boards (and non-stock coolers) to be used.
The Dimension E310/3100, E510/5150, E520, and E521 were BTX-based. ATX power supplies work with little or no modification.
The Inspiron 530/531 is a white colored version of the Vostro 400. Dell would use this case design for a few more years. However, on an Inspiron 570, the BIOS will complain at boot if the case's card reader and USB ports aren't connected.
As far as I know, the Dell Inspiron machines were standard ATX-based designs up through at least the 4th-gen Intel chips (such as the Inspiron 3847). However, depending on model, the cases don't have a swappable I/O panel out back.
While my pc started out as a prebuilt, it thankfully didn't use anything proprietary and I quickly learned how to upgrade and build them myself. This has allowed me to keep my pc in nearly constant everyday operational usage for 7 years now. Best of all, as I accumulate older parts, I've been slowly building a complete second pc to either repurpose, sell, or give to my friend who wants to get into pc gaming. With my latest upgrades, all I need for the second one is a decent PSU and storage.
Steve: "Has any anyone ever done a film peel shot with film that's been on a system for like 13 years?" 4:47
Clint@LGR: "You mean 30 or 40 years, right?"
Eyy lmao
As strange as it is, I'm still running 4 of those Vostro 400s in my office. They've been relegated all the way down to the systems for the interns, but with some minor upgrades that we made over the years (SSD+8GB RAM) they are serviceable. The newer Dell systems that we have in service have had constant and consistent issues with power supply failures which have led many of them to go to the eWaste pile.
When you said "Timeless" I picture a guy in a black and white film moving at a slightly faster rate than normal, smoking a cigarette while he's putting together the new Dells. I can imagine a narrator in the background with a classy voice saying "Since before the turn of the century, Dell has been a pioneer and innovator of high quality portable computers at affordable prices."
🤣🤣🤣
And then a fast-forward narration showing a landfill topped with tons of Dell G5 5000-series computers thrown as e-waste, with a new, younger narrator saying “Unfortunately, times have changed, and Dell has fallen far from its pinnacle of invention.”
I hate how I accurately depicted that in my head.
@@daviddebroux4708 same hahaha
My mind read all the quotes in this thread in old timey news reel narrator voice 😅. Couldn’t help but add my own timeless contribution. 😂
[grainy news reel begin…]
“Yes it’s a hay day at Dell, with rapid fire sales and a decent reputation in hand. Here we see Dell’s crack team of innovators busy with new technology and standardized form factors. Over here we see actual customer service taking place… optimism abounds here! what a time to be alive folks.” [news reel ends]
@@Zacks.C-land This cursed thread just became _more_ cursed.
I saw a tool kit similar to the GN one on Amazon the other day and tried to find it again since I'm building my first scratch build right now. I couldn't find it nor do I really need it with a vast garage full of tools. One of your videos popped up and as I was watching it I decided I would much rather give GN my money over Amazon- so I purchased your tool kit like I should have a month ago. You guys are a talented crew and deserve my money and I watch your channel like a hawk. Keep fighting the good fight!
I'm a serial Dell buyer since the days when he assembled them in his basement under the PCs Limited brand. My first one had a bent #1 pin on the parallel ribbon cable that attached to the (5-1/4") floppy readers. As a result it would never read a disk change. I didn't discover it until I scrapped it years later. They advertised that every box was burned in before shipping so I've never trusted them since then. Why did I stick with him, then? The competition has always been worse, and the components usually had a quality differential, things like gold plated contacts and metal instead of plastic and so forth. My last box was a Dimension E510 that lasted 14 years with a power supply replacement at year 10.
My current box is an XPS 8120 from 2017 upgraded last year with a bigger ssd, a third HD and topped up RAM. I also swapped out the power supply with the one I had bought for the Dimension. The case and motherboard on the XPS are nearly identical to the Vostro you tore down here. The two complaints I have about the XPS are that :
- the power supply, which was a standard Silverstone Tek 600W Silver 80+ ATX/EPS, required an adapter for the motherboard wireset which is because Dell went proprietary on the plug;
- there is one, and only one, M2 slot so when I upgraded the SSD I had to shelve the old one.
The Dimension was still going strong when I replaced it. The problem was that Windows XP was obsolete! I'm pretty sure that Microsoft will also be the reason that this XPS will need to be replaced when the time comes, rather than any hardware component failure.
My point here is that it looks like you are comparing apples and crabapples in this video. I'd like to see you do a side-by-side against a current XPS.
I'm also hoping that you assemble a playlist of recommended standard components and maybe even some recommended custom builds.
Thanks for these most excellent videos!
Actually I prefer the rubber grommets for the rear exhaust fan, especially on Dells. Yeah, it makes replacement a bit harder but their exhaust fan tend to have high RPM and airflow, and the grommets do help prevent vibration and noise.
Noctua also provides these with some of their fans
@@zarmaanful All of their fans
@@Topper_Harley68 Redux Line?🗿
Those rubber things might reduce noise, but they collect dust! Had a fan with rubber like that. It had alot of dust stuck to it!
Cant wait to see the Intel Alder Lake reviews from you Steve! Looking forward to Thursday morning!
The rubber pegs holding the fans to the case break down pretty bad with age. I've had to replace several that broke off and left the fan to spin free inside of the case.
I tough they are to isolate vibration and noise suppress the fan a bit? My Noctua case fan came with 4 of these and also 4 screws if you don't have the space to plug them.
@SteelRodent Even if the fans just have a minimum of vibration, which can never be completely eliminated, those can help minimizing them further. I wonder if the ones Noctua or BeQuiet offer last longer. Maybe it's just the cheap ones that age so badly? The ones Noctua offers are made out of silicone, perhaps the cheaper ones are made from bad rubber that becomes brittle.
You can treat the silicone standoffs with cooking oils, makeup oils and well just about any skin safe oil with a good degree of success. However silicone washers or o-rings are much easier to find replacements for given they are sold at hardware stores for a variety of uses.
@@STaRgaTeBG yeah Steve seemed disappointed with those but I think that's one actual improvement.
that older dell is more solid of a system than people realize, even now still. they are able to take up to the highest end core 2 quad cpus, support up to 8, and sometimes 16gb of ram, and have a pcie slot, sometimes 2. so during a shortage they are still a compelling cheap option for emulation and mid range games. 4 solid cores, enough ram to get by, etc.
Dont buy one of these for games. The core 2 quad sounds appealing, but has no inter logic communication. Heavily threaded tasks choke on the bus bandwidth. The Q9650 performs worse then dual core pentiums today. If you go used, go no lower then 1st gen i series, those can still hold their own, albeit barely, in modern games.
@@Nick-ue7iw yea c2q are just two c2d dies thrown together, like the pentium d before it which was 2 pentium 4
Excellent stuff. I still use Dell prebuild 790 with a few upgrades 👍. Thank you for being around..
"we've even got an original peel film. That's right, we got one."
If this doesn't get 10k likes I will never truly believe in karma
Looks like the original tweezers on the cables too.
Where Steve went horribly wrong was disassembly without using a Swiss Army knife, that (hopefully) has a Phillips screwdriver.
I tend to leave most peel film right where it is. It serves no purpose in the garbage.
10:00 actually Steve the new fan fastener is much better. Because it's elastic, it helps isolate the fan from the chassis so it should make the system overall more silent. The screws couple the fan to the chassis acoustically.
Noctua actually provides these with some of their fans
Exactly, I bought them extra from noctua for all my case fans so I hope that's an upgrade and not downgrade...I think Steve is the best person to actually test them if they work as intended, would be nice if he did a video on these...although I think their main advantage will show up after longer use, like if it's also better for bearing longetivity over the years...
Shout out to the Q6600, that’s one of my favourite builds, it was solid. It might even still be alive in my server rack.
I had a Q6600, those are 2.4 ghz stock and I could push mine to 3.3 ghz without a voltage increase. I loved that thing.
Was it just before the core-I series...?
@@Djuntas Well, they were released before the I series. I got mine just after the I series was released. The I7 CPU's were ungodly expensive at the time.
Same here man, the Core2Quad series had some really great and iconic CPUs. Great overclock possibilities, if you managed to tune it properly you could achieve something like +15% of performance.
@@cddll24 Yeah, now i wanna look this vs I7 860 or something hehe..And I did :P yup the I7 860 is way better, but could had been in 08/09 it was not the price king. Apparently q6600 was a 800 dollar cpu on launch, but quickly dropped to 250.
I still have my old Vostro 470 laying around, the only thing that I didn’t swap was it’s motherboard, you could literally change every single part.
But the point he was making was that you could swap the mother board. Here is the thing, almost NO one swaps the mother board on a OEM computer.
I'm old enough to remember when Dell was considered the workhorse, no frills prebuilts that you could trust to last. Times sure have changed.
I remember some of the older Dell computers used a power supply that had a couple of wires in a different order than a standard power supply, but used the same motherboard connector, so if you put an off the shelf power supply in without swapping those wires to match the Dell wiring pattern you would release the magic blue smoke.
XPS 8000 series did not have that problem at least. You're talking at the board connector right? OH wait nvm wtf am I talking about like Dell would've ever had a modular power supply
@@pandemicneetbux2110 I found an article that indicates that from 1996 to 2000 Dell used power supplies with a 20 pin connector and another with a 6 pin connector to the motherboard.
The ones I remember did not use the 6 pin connector because I remember being able to swap 2 wires on a standard power supply to match the Dell pattern and having it work with the Dell motherboard.
Shite like this should be illegal...
@@pandemicneetbux2110 hate to burst your bubble, but dell did/does use 'modular' supplies.
They're proprietary AF, but definitely modular.
@@DrakkarCalethiel fun fact, in some states Dell pcs are illegal now, but simply because of passive power draw while system is off.
Wow, good job Dell... from 2008, you get "its better than Dell" award. And current Dell gets the "POS e-waste champion" award
that award may have a Timov addition now, lol.
"You've Devolved! POS e-waste champion" award, lol.
It would be interesting to test that old power supply. See if there is any degradation with age
Old Dell power supplies were pretty indesctructible.
@@pandemicneetbux2110 i had two computers(no dell) with liteon psu and both worked more than a decade and would still work if those other components didnt die.
The lite-on PSU featured actually is good
HP used this platform of PSU as well.
These have OST caps, better than Capxon but below Teapo quality.
Had Passive PFC.
Good circuit topology/design
0:10 If the quality of Dell computers are the standard by which the progress of humanity is measured we are doomed as a species.
Probably around the late 2010s I bought a couple of Precision T7400 workstations that had been retired from my state's department of transportation and I had a lot of respect for just how effective they were for cable management and tool-free modifications. I think the only thing I needed a screwdriver for was installing the cooler when I added a 2nd CPU.
Expansion cards had toolless retention clips, hard drives had the Dell blue drive trays, 5.25" bay accessories were held in with a spring-loaded sliding latch mechanism. Of course, the case weighed a ton and it wasn't that fast, but for testing old PC parts and learning how to configure and modify computers, they were awesome.
I rly don't miss working with those old cases, so many cuts.
But think of the benefit. If someone were to have stolen your pc you could prove you owned it by dna testing the case
@@RyoLeo lol fair
Those Dell Vostro’s are amazing computers. I used a Vostro 200 from 2008 for nearly 5 years as a main server in my house, AFTER it was decommissioned as a home pc when it was 8 years old. That computer would run 24/7 with its ORIGIONAL hard drive and ran server 2012 R2 like a champ.
"A little bit less than nonflammable"
Came for the PC parts reviews. Stayed for the roastings!
I assume you have your marshmallows ready for the next -gigabyte- psu?
Old guy here, I remember Dell in the 90s when you could actually phone them up and get help!
I have a workstation class system from 2007/2008, a Precision T5400. It uses a proprietary PSU with proprietary connectors, CPU heatsinks that screw directly into the chassis, proprietary front panel connectors for USB, audio, power button, and status lights (the pinout for this is still unavailable to this day), the chassis fans use proprietary connectors, and the rear IO cutouts are part of the case.
They have been at this for a long time.
I am currently modding the chassis to take generic consumer components, (not through necessity thankfully, just a personal project), and the dremel has been required several times already.
9:49 Dude, that's a vibration absorbing mount. Noctua has been shipping them with their fans for decades. That's not a cost saving measure by any stretch - compared to screws, they're a pain to install.
Fitting them on chassis is hard.
Second hard part is pulling the inner ones to mount the fan, they are hard to reach
I remember paying something like 6€ for an 8-pack of those rubber pins back in mid 2000s.
I have recently built a PC with all of the fan screws replaced with these silicon variants - 24 of them to be exact. Some of them were a pain to install because of their crammed position (as PC CORN have said), but in the end they look unique and keep the cheap Deepcool CF120 fans from possibly rattling the whole case.
I wonder if they are going to get stiff and brittle in the coming years.
@@92kosta i think they might be fine. I came across some of the pins i purchased 15 years ago recently and they're still alright. It's probably TPU/TPE so it can degrade but it doesn't have to.
He isn't actually saying anything bad about it but the way he speaks he sure makes it seem like its way worse. Dunno if hes acting stupid for some more "fun" in the video.
But he comes across as an idiot just trying to flame them as much as possible even when there is no reason.
Dell: “We’ve always been this way! We’ve never changed!”
GN: **reviews a 2008-model and finds its construction, lack of proprietary components and choice of CPU fan significantly more appealing than the G5 5000-series**
Dell: 😨 “N-no! This has got to be a fluke!!”
"The old industry approach was proprietary technology and vertical service solutions, ... Customers now universally reject these notions." - Michael Dell
"Our business is about technology, yes. But it's also about operations and customer relationships." - Michael Dell
I remember getting the cheapest dell you could get back in the early 2000's as a basic web-browsing/ home office PC for my dad and my step mom. It was $300 CAD (not including monitor, which I bought from somewhere else), and I was absolutely floored by how cool its custom cooling solution was for such a dirt cheap PC. I remember also liking the keyboard and mouse that it came with. I was very impressed with it given the super low cost (it also came with windows XP). It still is, to this day, the quietest computer I've ever (barely) heard (aside from passively cooled laptops). I never actually tested it to see what it could do under a sustained workload, but I remember that it had one (or maybe two) relatively big fans running at a low rpm, with custom ducting which channeled hot air from, I think, a relatively large CPU cooler, and directly out of the case. I remember being able to get the fan to run faster, and that it was always really quiet and pleasant sounding.
That PC worked fine for over 10 years, until it was eventually retired.
I also have a dell laptop which is now 12 years old, (A Vostro 1320 iirc) and it still works. It was $650 CAD and had a Core 2 Duo P8600, which was a very powerful laptop CPU for that price range back in the day. It also had easily upgradeable RAM and storage drive. It also had an easily replaceable battery, and I've only had to replace the battery once so far after 13 years. I think I need to re apply the paste on the CPU, because it seems to struggle to keep the cpu properly cooled under load, but it still allows me to do the basic things that I like to be able to do with a laptop.
Dell really has gotten a lot worse over the years, but I'm sure they were making a lot of crap or overpriced stuff back in the day as well (but I definitely was quite happy with some of their low-end stuff between around 2003-2009
I have an old Dell optiplex at my mom's house as an off-site backup. It's got proprietary front panel and power button connectors, and I think it's a proprietary PSU, but it was cheap and super easy to work with.
Congrats to Dell for winning the "Its Better than Dell" award... even if it was from a decade ago. You should try and get it up and running for modern benchmarks if they even work, and a proper case review.
Dell used to put together decent systems. I abandoned them when everything started going proprietory. Nowadays you can get around things like power switches by getting an adapter from ebay. But back then it was impossible to work on these things without extra wire, diagrams, solder and a bit of luck. I started building out of necessity and found a love for it. So, in the end I have to thank Dell for being so shitty that this guy started building rigs instead of being held hostage to big prebuilt.
I love the way GN sell their own tools, but Steve still uses that BeQuiet screwdriver as one of his go to tools🤔Why not, it's a great screw driver, you actually see quite a lot of tech youtubers using them. They are handy for releasing GPUs from the PCIe slot too.
I was searching that comment, i thought the same, like man i know this screw driver
Vostro series! That brings back memories -- At an old IT job, we had a supply contract with Dell and deployed OptiPlex desktops for years. But we had a large number of client offices which had to run our software on systems which we needed to image and support. OptiPlexes were too expensive, so I checked specs and decided that the Vostro series would be fine. And they ran great -- well beyond their expected lifetime. They were being pulled out from under desks and countertops long after we thought they should have all been replaced. Vostros were basically Dell's version of a "white box" PC. All bog-standard parts. Even a standard BIOS and standard drivers. None of the custom stuff found in the more typical OptiPlex line. They weren't intended to be high performance machines, just a decent-value workhorse and they did just fine in that role.
And I caught that Antec 900 reference! Yes, indeed, an Antec 900 is a challenge for cable management. But I have one holding a 5GHz OC'd i7-6700 right now, with an RTX 2080 shoehorned inside... It's still a surprisingly good air-flow case today.
that "standard 24 pin" most likely has been rewired. Around 2012 me and my dad tried to repurpose a dell we found in the garbage and nearly blew it up because the pinouts didnt match so definitely check that before you reuse/swap any oem power supply
I wouldn't say it's "most likely" unless you had the same Dell, the OptiPlex 990 MT for example is a standard wired 24-pin (I've swapped in normal PSU's without issue) but like you said it's something you should check
This is very true.
If you also check out Dell pc's farther back, you will find many / most Dell computers were one of the worse brands using proprietary parts in thier system.
I started building PC's around 80, or 81.
9:47 that looks a lot like Noctua's, unless I'm missing something I would say that is better than a screw, specially if the fan doesn't have any anti vibration pads.
Yep - Steve has this one wrong, it's an upgrade and a good one too.
Glad I'm not the only one that noticed that. I legit thought there was something wrong with them that I didn't know about.
But the fact was they didn't do it for noise or for you, they did it to save 10 seconds on labor and 2 cents in material per unit.
Very good for silent builds, they reduce resonance quite a lot.
I remember the Dell Dimension XPS R400 from 1998, from way back in a time when Dell was actually somewhat of a poster child for making highly customizable prebuilts you could order online, that were pretty well made. Back in those days it was novel to order a customized computer online, and back then Dell actually let you customize *FAR* more about the build than they do these days. Once upon a time Dell stood out for having far more customization than the other big brands. Since then they've thrown it all away of course.
I had one of those for college in 1998. Aside from the proprietary PSU and motherboard, everything else was pretty standard. The case design was way better than the Baby AT cases most people had at the time. The PC was insanely upgradable given the limitations. In the end I eventually upgraded the CPU twice first to a Pentium III 700 MHz, then to a Tualatin Celeron 1.4 GHz (with a fancy adapter). The GPU went from an NVIDIA Riva 128 ZX to a Voodoo3 to a GeForce 2 MX to an AMD Radeon 9000 Pro. I upgraded the internal sound card to a Sound Blaster Live! Value. Also added a Promise Ultra ATA/100 IDE controller and an Ethernet card. I was using it well into the next decade and only replaced it with subpar laptops until I eventually built a custom desktop in 2012.
my current computer started out as a Dell prebuilt I bought in 2009 that served as my intro to computer building. this made me feel so nostalgic! i didn't even switch out the case until 2017!
I still have my Inspiron white retail version of that case that I spray painted black. Had the Q6600 too. I screwed an 80mm Apevia blue LED fan to the front (only got 3 screws to thread at a weird angle) and cut a hole in the side panel and top for additional fans (side was intake and I think top was intake too). It was the first and really only modded case I ever owned. Ahh, the memories.
I definitely recall other dells from the 2000’s that most certainly did NOT have standardized components, especially if they were smaller form factor.
5:05 That looks exactly like my grandparents eMachine with 'Windows Me' that they bought at Costco in 2001 that they still have to this day for their AOL Email. Their motherboard is more of a weird lime-seaweed color and mustard/ketchup all over. It takes about 3 minutes to be fully booted from pressing the power button to being able to move the mouse cursor without lag/jitter.
6:40 Did this with an HP computer that’s with my family since 2006. I basically gutted it and used the case for a new PC with a R3 3200g. Fitting since it still has its AMD and ATI Radeon stickers.
Check out the plastic holding the heat sink in that Vostro 400. The plastic on each screw post was molded seperately from the rest of the mount and has a join with the rest of that mount that would often fail when it got up to temperature. When those fail the heat sink just falls off with no way to reattach it.
I love you talk practical rather than rattle down boring data
My 2009 xps was similar. All standard components that I replaced little by little over the years. It's still a great secondary computer.
They just released a redesign of their Alienware Aurora with improved airflow. You should review that one.
I used to be an Alienware fanboy. Till I had my second Alienware and it bricked itself days after warranty ran out just like my first one did.
Used to be an Alienware fanboy until I looked at how much cheaper it was to build a PC yourself and my jaw dropped.
It looks decent but it still sketches me out though
Maybe they should also review the pile of dog shit in my backyard
Dell is pretty good in a business environment. Slap a custom image on it and pick which Dell management tools you want. Just don't plan on doing much if anything in terms of upgrades, other than maybe RAM or storage. That goes for desktops and laptops.
I recently got a new Dell laptop for myself. It had so much bloatware on it I just nuked the OS. Much better now.
What laptop? The business lines (optiplex desktops, latitude laptops) used to be clean, no bloat... i was frankly shocked how clean they were.
Did you compare Sager or Clevo to HP and Dell?
What a throwback, first decent multicore setup I ran was the "sister" of the vostro line the silver Inspiron. 720p/30fps never will feel the same as it did in 07' ...
My dad got this old server case from HP with a power supply in 2006. We had a Pentium 4 system then, we swapped and exchanged parts to build a combined cabinet. In 2009 we changed it to dual core, and then a first gen core i5. Used that set up till last month as a backup cabinet. Switch the HDD a couple of times and now it rocks an SSD and I run CentOS 8 on it. Mainly use it to check removable disks for viruses before using them in windows (still have some use cases). It works. 17 years and it still runs. Standardised parts really help
Having worked at Frys for a decent while, I can confirm that older dells were built better. We had a few Dell XPS from around 2010~2012 and those were built pretty alright.
I would say Dell's spiral began in 2004, but then that's my cynical experience with their tech support kicking in to high gear.
I remember being in a really low end core 2 duo waiting for Q6600 prices to drop after along time, they held a ridiculous amount of value for way too long
core 2 duo was not a "low end"
today it is worse- not for the old years when it was released
@@antonio.x22 I had an e4300, it was definitely low end.
@@justinv3080 today it is - low end and useless, I remember the "compaq presario" example. :o !
when I bought the Core 2 Duo Dell Inspiron it was a high end ten years ago, that's what I mean.
That's pretty interesting to see. I had a Dell Inspiron 5675 from 2017 for my first gaming pc, and it was pretty much like that vostro, standard parts except for the proprietary connectors from the front panel to the motherboard, so i was able to upgrade the gpu and the power supply easily, and i thought that was pretty cool for an OEM prebuilt, so it sucks to see that right after they came out with the G5 and threw all that out of the window.
I mean just to give Dell credit where it's due, Their business line is actually pretty decent as far as reliability and servicability. Granted, I haven't worked anywhere that uses HP computers. I've worked in IT for 10 years. Everyone likes to screw over people for their consumer line.
Over the last 20+ years l’ve changed from a Dell to a “build-it-yourself”. Good vlog -
9:45 those are rubber dampeners to not transmit vibrations from the fan to the case. Noctua also ships those with their fans.
Yup. I still have 1 fan with screws and I can hear it.
This was an impressive show of how backwards Dell has become.
Also thank you for notifying us of the modmat stock. I picked up one as a show of support and vecause I've always wanted one. Great product you came up with! :)
I’d be very interested in the future in the video of how PSUs age, maybe like testing a range of old ones by brand and seeing how all of them held up, this might be hard to test but I feel like if it’s possible it could be amazing to know what makes a good PSU and what makes them last…… and what doesn’t
Great idea!
Several years ago, I purchased a prebuilt dell system. Just recently, I decided to upgrade the components inside of it, and it was by far one of the most miserable experiences ever, especially for the GPU. It didn't come with one, so I put in an old GTX-1050 Ti, and decided to upgrade to the RTX-3050. Turns out that the PSU that's included has the most proprietary cables ever made, so basically, I had to purchase a new 650W PSU along with a sketchy adapter from Amazon for the motherboard just so it'd run. Worst part of it all is that the documentation on the PC is horrible, so if I want to know the Pinouts for example on the PSU cables, I'd have to go digging in the Dell Forums for help. Overall, not a nice experience at all and I would have much rather just built my own PC if I could go back in time.
"It's evolving, just backwards!"