Dell Clamshell Hell - Dells thermal nightmare pc's of the early 2000's. OptiPlex GX260, GX270, GX280
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- čas přidán 30. 05. 2024
- Dell GX260, GX270 and GX280 desktop style pc's.
*Update - Fixing the temperature problem:
• DE-HeLLification - Del...
00:00 Intro
00:55 Bad Caps
01:18 Air flow
01:48 CPU FAN / Thermistor
02:40 Capacitor Replacement
03:15 Multimeter Thermocouple Temp
03:21 Internal Temp Idle
03:27 Internal Temp 100% CPU
03:39 Fan noise / Bad cooling
04:10 Outro
#dell
#pentium4
#retropc - Věda a technologie
I remember seeing one of these machines with XP, where every once in a while, the Broadcom Gigabit NIC would fail in a way where it stopped being able send traffic, yet the network status in Windows would show it sending *billions* of packets, eventually showing so many digits, the ones on the left would get cut off.
I've seen that before, but not on a dell. And the NIC continued working, so it may have not been broadcom either (or at least, a different one)
The funny thing about the clamshell computer, for me, is they make good space heaters.
Early on in my job at a small business, I worked in one of the side rooms of a building that didn't hold heat all that well.
To make matters less ideal, the heater shat the bed one winter.
As luck would have it, I found a clamshell Dell in one of the closets upstairs and it was running a pentium 4.
So, with the boss's permission, I took it out of storage, shoved XP on it and used it for moving files around, something I already had to do at the end/beginning of the new year anyway. Since we had gigabit infrastructure and gigabit is such an ancient standard, it was the perfect device to shunt files around while giving the room oodles of heat. It even raised the temperature of the room by a few degrees.
These machines will always have a special place in my heart as a space heater. XP was very efficient and I probably could have gotten extra heat out of it if I tried installing 7 or 10. Being that it had a pitiful 512 MB of dedotated waaam, that simply was not an option.
I solute the Dell space heater era. Long live the inefficient turds
This might be the best comment I've read recently! The "inefficient turd" comment at the end is the icing on the cake and gave me a good chuckle.
bad cases do not make the computers better at heating spaces. in fact it makes them worse. the heat is being generated regardless if it's being properly dissipated or not. What really matter is power consumption, and these are usually not that high-power... well except the pentium 4 ones. but for today's standard? their power supply is like 150w. that can't even power a low power gpu nowadays
@@GraveUypo I agree. The heat only makes sense if it's being moved effectively.
I did leave out of my story that I reapplied thermal paste since I knew it'd probably be crusty and I had some at home from when I applied it to my other computer.
That along with a program called SpeedFan set to 75% power is how I moved the heat in a way that raised the room temp.
I chose 75% bc it was quieter than 100 and wouldn't cool the heat sink to such a degree that it would lose its heat. The idea was to keep the core heat and blow the hot air, not necessarily to cool the CPU or the heatsink efficiently.
I did experiment with leaving the shell opened just a bit but I decided it was cooling too well. Back to the heater core concept, trapping the heat helps the air coming out be warmer.
I'm thankful the PSU hadn't shat the bed with the workload I placed on it. The NIC, however, was fiddly at times. Not sure if that was an infrastructure issue or that the cpu was near 100% for extended periods or if the NIC itself had heat dissipation issues and the heat was causing intermittent failure but it didn't seem to have a rhyme or reason. By the time I cared enough to check it out, my boss had fixed the heater and all my files were moved. It didn't matter at that point.
Oh man, I remember around 2010 replacing dead capacitors in those bastards running our lab microscope cameras. We had 5 or 6 of them with Pentium 4 inside, the CPUs thermal management was horrendous so they were slow as hell thanks to constant throttling. Those PCs were supplied with proprietary controller cards for the microscopes so it was either buiing five new £20k microscopes, or resoldering. I got an employee of the year award that year, not kidding. :D
Lol, had to be mostly gx270's if that many caps went bad 😅
Weren't the cards some standard (say PCI) interface? Sucks really, but I get it that keeping old PCs to run "old" hardware (quotes on old cause we all know these things DON'T get outdated like PCs used to. Nowadays not even PCs are getting quickly outdated anymore).
Heck Intel made the 386 and 486 in embed package until like the 2010s for replacement industrial PCs and such, old CNC controllers might very well be using those and replacing machinery or test equipment that uses the old PCs and components might run well into the millions sometimes.
@@Kalvinjj They were, but the guy who set up everything left years prior, Olympus stopped support for those models, it was honestly quicker to fix those MBs than try to figure out how to set up the drivers and software for those weird contraptions. :)
That sounds right. When I was in grad school two years ago, there was a Gateway running Windows 2000 so that they could use the Gel Doc (nowhere near as expensive to replace as those microscopes, but still $5000).
Oh boy does this machine bring back bad memories.
I was a contractor for Dell in 2007 replacing all of the faulty motherboards in these machines due to the capacitor plague. I think I swapped around 4,000 motherboards for a government agency, it took I think 3-4 months.
There is a "fix" you can do for these units, you can use a specially made duct (or just 3D print one now) so that 100% of the CPU exhaust exits the case and gets deflected upwards outside of the case and away from it.
The second mod is to open the PSU and reverse the direction of the fan so it pulls in air from the back of the case, rather than hot CPU exhaust. The machine shutting down is more often caused by an overheating PSU thermally shutting down. A further mod is to power the fan externally, since it is a temperature controlled fan and runs far too slow. Replacing it with a better fan that moves more air also helps a lot.
The later SX280 with an LGA775 socket you could do one further mod to, replace the CPU with a lower wattage variant. The Cedar Mill core Pentium 4 6x1 parts with a D0 stepping had a 65W TDP, compared to the older 89, 95 and 115W parts. This drastically reduced internal case temperatures and increased the longevity of the machine, after you recapped it of course.
Every time I see a product like this I wonder if companies do even basic tests their sht before selling it.
Completely Agree. But I'm sure someone higher up said to just ship it. Thing is, over the years you'd think they'd update it with fixes, but no.
@@jims_junkeverything quality wise went down hill at dell after the 2002 decision to start manufacturing in china and abroad.
@@marcellachine5718 Americans are perfectly capable of bad design and manufacturing
Apple did "function follows form" for decades especially thermally: the Apple III failed very often because due to the lack of ventilation (Steve Jobs insisted on passive cooling and no vent holes) it seemingly got so hot inside that some chips dissoldered(!) and early iMacs (and the G5 again) or the infamous PowerMac G4 Cube also have their temperature issues (a stock G4 Cube is fine but you can't upgrade the CPU without adding a fan).
And just a few years ago the MacBook Air (pre-Retina) got frying hot and the Retina one from 2018/2019, Louis Rossmann did a video about this, it has just a aluminium heatsink directly on the CPU and a fan not even close to that (instead of a heatpipe with some fins directly in front of the exhaust side of the fan): czcams.com/video/iiCBYAP_Sgg/video.html
Also the 15" Pro with i9 performed worse in multicore benchmarks than the i7 version because it ran into thermal throttling faster...
Now with Apple Silicon it's kinda okay, my Air M1 is throttling after some time on full load, but it isn't dramatically slower, you can even improve that by adding some thermal pads (the surface temperature of the case will increase, they originally tuned it exactly so that it doesn't exceed the maximum permissible surface temperature of 54 or 55°C).
Reminds me of the HP Omen Obelisk prebuilt "Gaming-PCs" I saw a few years ago, it had a tempered glass window, no plastic but the inside was awful - the mainboard had "naked" VRMs not even a simple aluminium heatsink, the M.2 SSD also had no cooler, CPU with a stock cooler (that also ran into thermal throttling) and RAM without any heatsink, at least the graphics card had a DHE-cooler but at least that had a little illumination (and in the top it had a LED strip) I don't need a ton of (RGB) illumination with cables like Lian Li's Strimer but IMHO it should be "showable" at least with a glass side panel and that one really wasn't and also had poor airflow, just an exhaust fan in the rear, the front was closed and directly behind that the Hard Drive mounted vertically.
@@marcellachine5718what does manufacturing have to do with a poor design? everyone manufactures in china
When I look back upon my IT management days -- there are certain "it burst into flames" -- "express elevator to hell" moments that will always be memorable to me. One of those moments was when the company I worked for bought hundreds of those GX260 PC's to replace older Gateway PC's being used at workstations. From day one -- you name it OMG -- it happened OMG. And of course -- when my company complained to Dell about the you name it OMG -- it happened OMG problems -- they insisted that the OMG problems were due to user error. But then my company threatened to sue Dell about the OMG problems -- and they ended up swapping out the motherboards in an attempt to resolve the OMG problems. BTW, my fav GX260 OMG problem was when in the process of frying because of overheating -- them caps going "KAPOW!" and the screen suddenly going black. Which, I would be confronted with a user screaming "OMG -- I LOST ALL OF MY DATA!" -- and me sighing "OMG -- not again!"
I get the sense the "OMG"s here are an acronym that isn't the common internet shorthand(except for maybe the last one)
I worked for Dell Support when these machines were still ubiquitous. If we got a call for one we always knew it would have bad capacitors. Another thing about those cases (They were officially called the 'Transformer' btw IIRC they were the Bumblebee for the desktop can Optimus for the tower, may be wrong but that's what I remember, the newer cases were 'Matrix' named Neo, Smith and Trinity.) is that they had a tendency to guillotine cables if you weren't careful closing them
and now I'll probably remember this for the rest of me.
Whoa memories, I was in college in 2001-2005 and these were everywhere! We had hundreds of these in all of our computer labs around campus.
I had one of these as a file server a few years ago, with a 1TB WD Black hard drive adapted from SATA to IDE. I had it running for a few months until it suffered a catastrophic power supply failure (heard a really loud bang from the system) that killed nearly every component except the aforementioned hard drive and 2.8Ghz Pentium IV CPU.
Ouch, lucky you got to save the drive.
Ayyy fellow PSU popper. Same deal, had a handme down one of these when I was younger and it popped its psu, dumped some mystery opaque goo everywhere inside the PSU.
I like to call those SFF clamshell Optiplexes Easy Bake capacitor ovens. I believe I stole the term from uxwbill. From what I can tell their tower counterparts actually have some front ventilation and run much cooler and happier -- but the cap plague being what it is, it still has a way of killing off those poor ugly-cute things.
aww man I COMPLETELY forgot about uxwbill. Thanks for reminding me! One thing I will say for these ugly-cute things (which you're right), when you had to carry tons of them, the rounded face made it very comfortable.
@@jims_junk I actually rescued a GX240 from a client about a month ago -- it's absolutely mint aside from being a bit dusty. Well, and now missing a hard drive. I'm not sure if the capacitors are pristine because they just got lucky or because they never really used it, or because the 1.6 willamette and 16MB Rage128 Pro they specced out for it just didn't get super oven-like compared to higher clocked Northwood and especially Prescott chips.
It's actually kind of sad to look at -- it came with 128MB of RAM and you can clearly tell they hastily threw another 256MB in it less than a year later because XP was probably predictably terrible on there. Another bizarre thing about it is that it also shipped with a Zip250 drive -- why they opted for one of those and not more RAM from the factory I'm not sure. Either way it's SDRAM only so it was never going to be a screamer, but at least it's in great shape!
@@jims_junk I remember they eventually made ones that looked like Xbox 360s lol
I had the tower one back in the day and I never had a problem with it over heating. I did a lot of gaming on it too.
I remember my highschool used this kind of Dell, and they were getting fairly old by the time I was in 11th grade when I took a programing class. One of the school techs was in the classroom at least once a week swapping machines, parts, or cleaning them out from the junk kids would stuff into the vents, CD and floppy drives.
He overheard that I was interested in learning how to build and fix computers so a few times he would show me a couple of things as he worked on the machines in the classroom. I remember once he said "touch that hard drive." and it was HOT. Like no wonder they were dying.
My senior year the machines were being replaced by newer HPs that did have proper ventilation. Though I recall him saying he still wasn't exactly happy cause he knew kids were going to stick paper, gum and such into the now front facing vents.
My office in the 2000s had them all press together one time because they didn't know about the heat flow and one day they caught fire due to this issue.
Apple heard of the issue and gave us a discount on mass lot purchase of their computers.
I see these end up thrift stores all the time nowadays and im frankly suprised they survived being scrapped or just thrown out
My parents had a full tower version of this clamshell design. The one thing I do remember was the weird USB ports in the front, aimed down at a 45 degree angle and upside down, made connection USB drives really tedious
Edit 4:15 yeah that's the one
ah yes...I don't know who thought that up. Most people put the tower on the floor, so you have to blindly reach down and feel around. For the time they looked nice, but that was about it.
My parents had one too! The Dimension 4400 specifically.
My dad's gx280 had the cap problem sadly, I wanted to play with it
I still have a GX 270 SFF which to this day still is in operation. However I had to swap out all the caps since they were just looking like the ones in the video and furthermore I did some modifications to keep it's internal ambient temperature a little lower.
- Added a Fan to the chipset heatsink
- swapped out the old alu-heatsink with a later copper version of the GX 280
- removed the green mounting brackets to improve airflow
And the last one I did seemed to be the most "successful one" - The PSU fan always seems to run at the lowest speed no matter how hot the unit gets. I simply re-wired the fan to 7v directly so it blows out more air at the back which also takes more fresh air in. The big ol' HDD which was blocking the airflow anyways is now gone and had been replaced with an SSD.
Overall this PC still looks quite decent and somehow "flashy" but that's really it. It's a hot oven paired with a Pentium 4 which makes for a good space heater in the winter.
I should also note that I have an PCI Wi-fi Card and a GeForce 6200 installed which both takes space in the unit and create additional "heat" - I did some "basic" tests and can confirm with the mods done above - the systems internal ambient temperature doesn't go over 55°C - measured at 22°C room temperature and full load on BOTH CPU and GPU for around 15 mins. According to my SSD it doesn't go over 41°C after a full day of system power on and doing some random work tasks.
If you don't use any extension cards just remove the slot cover and you get more air intake at the back. Removing the CD-ROM or the Floppy drive won't help with thermals and will result in the CPU fan slowing down which makes the whole "benefit" of more air intake useless + your CPU heatsink will start to get toasty since that whole case design somehow needs a certain "negative air pressure" inside to make the fan work correctly.
However this doesn't seem to apply to the newer GX 280 since this one has a PWM controlled fan and spins up regardless if the case is closed or not thus it ain't better tho because it's equipped with a prescott P4 which gets even toastier than a s.478 P4
After all the suffering I'm starting to wonder why my unit is still alive after all. Well it seems like it serves a purpose as a "thermal testing event" lol
Before you ask: Yes, I had both machines but the GX 280 died because of a faulty CPU socket (cracked solder joints). Yet the XBOX 360 was more popular with this problem LMAO.
Kinda reminds me of an XPS 400 I picked up, has a giant fan, tops out at 2800 RPM with a Pentium D so it gets LOUD, but I have never had a thermal event with it yet, did recently put a GT 640 in it, really supercharges it nicely
It's a BTX form factor which has far better airflow than the older ones. Yet I think a Pentium D in the same SFF Clam shell design like the one shown in the video would melt the whole CPU core through the socket lol. design@@MemeReviewer
Bad capacitors were the real issue. We were doing a major OCR project back in the day and needed extra horsepower for the job. So, we used to pick up forklift pallets of used Optiplexes and let the beater farm do the OCR. We recognized the heat issues early-on and ran them with their covers wide open, but even then the caps would still smoke and pop, even with external fans blowing on them. I forget the final page count, but it was in the millions.
If you really want to get the caps angry, pull the 12v power plug for the CPU and fire it up. They'll cook quick!
This. Dell has barely ever had problems with ventilation.
Videos like this just help spread misinformation.
@@michaelfingers7726 No matter what brand the computer is, clogged heatsinks and limited airflow cause overheating.
Calling this video misinformation is like you didn't even listen what he said about bad caps + heat.
Wow... that thing sounded like a Jet Engine. I was and am a fan (no pun intended) of Dell PC's in general.. but this particular design is a no go for sure. What puzzles me most are the Early XPS cases have insane airflow. I use a XPS 630i case for my Sleeper PC Build. Good job with the video my friend. 👍👍
Thank you!
Like I said to @siliconPower74, I want to believe that it was all the Dell higher ups fault originally for just forcing the design out the door..but if that's the case you'd think they upgrade or fix it sometime in the designs life
@@jims_junkI wouldn’t be surprised if this is from the era when Intel was showering Dell with money
That OptiPlex case design of the era makes my 2011-ish ThinkCentre case design looks sane by comparison. Which is notable to my eyes due to it shipped with custom PSU that were shorter length-wise. And that means if replaced with normal ATX PSU there wouldn't be enough gap between that and 5.25 inch ODD. (Although by that time I removed the disc drive.)
Oh man the GX260 was my first ever computer... at least the one I owned myself!
I got that thing back in like 2010 and I ran that thing with its toasty warm P4 running XP SP3 up until 2015 when a family member gifted me a Gateway laptop.
Good times!
I probably used it 8+ hours a day for about 5 years and never once did it ever cross my mind how hot the thing would get.
I even used it to hotswap trick my OG Xbox and reload EvoX on it once it bricked itself due to losing time and having no dashboard to reset it.
This explains why whenever I opened it the mobo and optical/hard drives were so toasty warm!
I remember some of the revisions of this design had the power supply fan external to the power supply itself with a shroud. Those fans were some of the only airflow to the machine and would fail and the machine would just cook. I heard about at least one instance where that caused a fire.
Every school in my area used to have both of these exact PCs 20 years ago. They didn't upgrade them for like 10 years. It's wonder they ever lasted that long. They were surprisingly good enough to run some emulators on.
Yup, they were everywhere and we had them in the schools we supported too. Why did they last so long? They got repaired. Once out of warranty the schools then had to pay for parts. After you have invested so much into them, most don't want to just throw them out and buy new.
I would put the Halo 1 PC demo on them and play Blood Gulch (only map available) over the school’s LAN network with classmates. Better days.
I used to be apart of a in-school tech support program as a student back in the day. I would purposely short those clamshell ones for being so slow. I knew they'd be replaced by a newer model and I would be able to take the shorted ones and practice working on them.
I had one with a lease to own program from a tutoring service. I believe it was a celeron and it only had a single stick of ram ~250m or so. Wish I kept the monitor it came with though. The crt it came with was actually a high resolution one.
The typical school computer running Windows XP 32bit professional in dusty humid class with matching Dell CRT computer monitor + keyboard and mouse!.
Grew up with these in the computer labs. We didn't get computer time often, so when we did I almost always kept forgetting that the big light grey dell logo was not the power button. Oh what i would do to see a modded one that makes that logo a nice big button.
Imagine my suprise where the GX280 i had installing windows overnight suddenly pegged its fans at 100% and scared the crap outta me 😂For some reason it keeps doing so even though the case is clean/open, after which subsequent boots just ramp the fans, though considering the PSU and board caps look like volcanos, it was left outside, in surprised it even works..would be fun to see one of these modified. Additionally, like other dells, the northbridge temp will affect surrounding fans, the CPUs dont get hot in these to warrant the temps, but to provide any meaningful pull based cooling, the cpu fan has to create enough dissipation for the chipset, new paste and a molex fan w/ 5v mod would probably solve these issues. Its hillarious you can actually use these as a hair dryer at 100% (trust me i know, i misplaced mine and pulled the cpu fan off :P and ive also run the pentium 4 on a chipset heatsink and it was able to idle in the bios and in windows briefly just below TJMAX, so its definitely not CPU related, those poor chipsets are toasting themselves alive.
I used to diagnose failure of these using the method: Is the tower about to take off as the fan is at 100%, yes - dead motherboard, scrap it 🤣 as the motherboard would generate a PWM signal to control the fan speed but if the board was dead, this signal wouldn't appear and the fan, by default, would go to 100% in absence of the signal.
You can easily take out the floppy and cd drive and leave the cover off the front. You can even put a 80mm fan in too.
Oh absolutely. But when they were new and you had thousands in a professional environment... that's not gonna happen
@@jims_junkYep, the boss isn't going to be happy with stuff like that.
or your boomer father after he got a brand new expensive PC @@qwertykeyboard5901
@@qwertykeyboard5901 if it wasn't your personal pc who cares, the company will replace it with a new model every 2-3 years anyway.
Back then you used the floppy and CD drive though, it isn't like today where computers don't ship with them anymore. This was 90s and early 2k. . .
My retro rig is an earlier version, the GX150, but looks identical on the outside. The interior has a little different layout with a vertical daughter board holding the PCI slots near where the PSU is in your model. For the 1GHZ Pentium III that it has though thermals always seem slightly toasty but nothing like this. As hot as P4's ran its kinda insane they thought this case would be anywhere near adequate.
You can get that slightly larger version in GX260-280 as well and the GX150 in this SFF version too
These are retro now? Man, I'm old!
The towers bring back memories of working in my dad's computer shop back in 2007-09 where countless Dell towers died from leaky capacitors. We would set the customers up with refurbished boxy HP machines, commercial grade ones that were reassuringly heavy. Few of those ever went bad on us, making it our best selling PC by far. I miss working at that shop, but my dad ultimately closed it to move onto other things.
I used to fix a bunch of the later versions of these SFF computers, GX620's with the grill at the front.
The early ones with Netburst (Pentium 4, Celeron D, Pentium D) chips were absolutely terrible with thermals like the ones in the video despite the added front intake fan. The unit would only pull in air, one through the PSU intake and one through the front, which would bake the hell out of components. When I worked with them, the most common failures for these would be the PSU's.
You could do a little mod to reverse the front fan so it would actually exhaust air instead, which helped with the thermal issues but made the fan noise way louder.
It got a bit better when Dell rolled out the units with Core 2 chips that ran way cooler than the P4's, but they still kept the same restrictive case design.
A friend gave me one of these cursed things from their attic to do data recovery on for old family photos before it was chucked. I took it home, plugged it in, and was met with silence. No hard drive, no fans, no POST beep. I opened it to look for some sort of problem when I felt heat rising out of it. I touched the CPU heatsink and immediately received a burn. The blasted thing was in some sort of weird "on" state but wasn't running, so the CPU had heated the sink up VERY HOT without any airflow.
Right at that moment every single motherboard capacitor next to the CPU exploded all at the same time, releasing the magic smoke everywhere and right into my face. My room smelled like burned metal for weeks.
I have a gx240 to this day. Only use if for the rare experiment now but it has a very similar config. Bought it used as an off-lease many many years ago so who knows how hard it worked before I got it. But the reason I commented was I still have a soft spot for this one. Used it for almost 5 years, 24/7 as a completely self contained dvr. Not 1 problem that I recall. About 40W draw if I remember correctly. And reasonably sure it would boot right now if I wanted to.
I have a 750ti that does the same job for me now. Single-slot, low-profile card with a tiny little 40mm fan in the middle. It's my go-to "known good" GPU for testing things because it needs nothing other than slot power to fire up.
We had tons of these die at work. I had the bigger version, not tower, GX60. It took 25 minutes to boot. I'm in IT. Switched to AMD, one of those APU versions. Boot time 25 seconds to be fully productive. Mind you, that was around 2008 and the company was not willing to spend any money. I upgraded that with 5700G recently. What a monster. And yes, I used the APU one for about 11 years.
Good video and commentary format. Looks like it's efficient in terms of just taking quick footage and editing down and narrating to tie it together. Information-dense with constant demonstrations. It works. I've dealt with issues like this (I always end up with used Dell PCs, which overall I'm quite pleased).
Solid video. Succinct and to the point. Info density was off the charts!
I remember seeing these brand new in my kindergarten classroom. I was so young I was ignorant about the problems. I just enjoyed it having Windows XP and every weekday hearing the startup.
Oh man, I did desktop support during the heyday of these things. Going ham on the Maxtor slimline drives and sending photos to Dell was fun, and diagnostic was easy as pie. "Oh you're having issues? I'll image you a new workstation and bring it by" then give Dell a call for a new motherboard and/or power supply.
Rolling out full disk encryption was exciting, you never knew what would go wrong.
These were my school’s PCs, iconic
This explains why these computers ALWAYS had failing harddrives when I worked as a computer tech in the 2000s
These bad boys kept us warm in computer lab class in Canada back in 2003. Good fucking times
The black and gray Dell Dimension is what comes to mind when I think of Dell.
I enjoyed this video. There are interesting details about the cooling solution.
back in 2014 i was gifted a tower version of this to play around with as i had never owned my own computer! while my parents threw out that PC a long time ago, the original DELL speakers and subwoofer have been sitting on my desk ever since that day in 2014. such good times lol
Jeuss, bringing up memories of middle and high school and seeing these computers in EVERY classroom that required a computer, including teacher's desks an the library.
I'm an Australian, I always remembered see a couple of these Optiplex's setup at the Commonwealth Bank to encourage people to start using internet banking.
We had these in late primarily school through to the end of high school (mid-late 2000s), not too many of ours failed but I did notice the next revision of the OptiPlex case design had a heavily vented front panel, so Dell definitely learned their lesson.
This was the era I like to call the era of the great transition. Where dell and many others started using the Pentium 4, before the limits of that chip was reached. Sadly this lead to a lot of Pentium 4 machines having very bad lifespans, especially dells. Eventually leading to them using the Centrinos and finally the Core 2 duos and even a few AMD’s. Many machines from this time shared a lot of similar design languages, and I feel that Dell’s machines definitely were a fine example of this, especially with their laptops. The Inspirons went from black boxy or funky shaped machines from the Pentium 3 era, and gained a more uniform boxy shape before eventually moving on to the streamlined white and silver look they had for a couple years. My very first computer was from the very beginning of that era and it was called the Dell Inspiron e1405. I still have it to this day, and with plenty of upgrades it’s a robust little machine.
Back in the day people would always ask me what computer to buy and I would always say "don't get a dell", explain my list of reasons, and everything I suggested was "out of budget". Months later they would get their computers and would say "it does not run my programs, can you look at it?" or "I can't game, can you look at it?" And Everyone got these small clamshells, or those small mini atx gray computers. Nothing they could really do with 128-256mb of ram, 150w PSU, and no AGP slot, can't share files over the network because it ran XP home edition. Most didn't even come with floppy drives, in an era when we still used them. It was so frustrating telling people not to buy junk and they did it anyways and wanted me to fix their problems.
great video. love the channel growth
the one and only prebuilt i bought was an optiplex270, for working in a studio full of mac G4s and having enough, during the breakfast, went to a computer shop, saw a dell, win2k pro. bought it, installed photoshop, finished the damn job.
it paid itself the same day. I still have it somewhere.
I worked for a company that deployed hundreds of these GX270s... They were notorious for blown capacitors, and collecting dust with EASE, however, the case itself was rugged, and many systems lasted for 10 years lol.
This was the desktop choice for the district of schools I went too, so I grew up on these desktops, first with xp, and then win7
I always wondered why the computer lab/ library in elementary school was so warm. Perfect heaters xD
I learned on one of these machines in high school! Was the first time I learned how to swap out cpu and ram. Those p4's would come out of the socket with the heat sink ALOT of the time.
I had one of those at work. from time to time it would ramp up the cooler speed so high that the whole desk vibrated.
My introduction to these clamshells was finding one that someone had dumped on the side of the road and I picked it up cause I was curious what it was. Immediately hated the case design when I opened it up. Surprisingly it still worked and had no leaky capacitors on the board. Kept it for a while to run older XP games that didn't play nice with modern hardware, but eventually recycled it when I found something better. Still have the original hard drive from it that's currently in an IDE enclosure for Nintendo Wii home-brew.
I had a friend who is CONVINCED PCs run better opened up. I had a high end lian li case, back in the day so we had to use a thermometer in the case, and proved with correct air flow the area around the graphics card was cooler. This was in the early 2k and he STILL runs his PCs open. . .
i wanna build a rig in one of those old school cases, liked the crazy green manifold for the cpu cooler on the bigger ones
Cool vid! We had a Dell Dimension at home at that time. Still had the CRT monitor. Later we had an XPS 430, which my father gave to me. I used it for many years and added a better PSU, GPU and a Samsung SSD (which was quite expensive at the time). I don't have the XPS anymore but the SSD still works in my PS3 :D
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These were my high school computers and every lab had different ones out of service. Never had a full functioning lab.
Nice~ Always loved them
Back in 2003 a buddy of mine got one of the mid tower version brand new for $500. We called it the iron clunk because it was heavy, hot, and slow as molasses.
This CHANNEL will be BIG!
I loved Dell's tooless design to open the case as an electronic recycler... One or two less screws to remove to get to the hdd, ram and CPU
I had a Gx260 as a kid, ripped the front panel off and it ran like a beast
This was the type of model my school had with windows xp on them. Remember using Micromedia software on them in tech class.
We had a bunch of these in our municipality when I was doing IT back in the day. Probably had a hundred of them go bad on us. We were one of the groups that were helping Dell try to figure out what was going on at the time.
I’ve supported these, and never noticed the lack of air intake on the front. Crazy!
Supportes these back in 2007-2008. The power supplies and capacitors were always failing
Boy do I remember these. It was so bad, Dell just sent me about 10-15 motherboards and told me to swap them as necessary.
I remember taking my AR reading tests on these in our school’s library
0:16 i have one of these in my room right now! its just that the capacitor on the power supply popped a few months ago. i found this computer outside at a free garage sale!
My secondary school had these in the I.T. Suites. They were all so loud.
I called Dell warranty so often on these machines back in about 2007 or so. Still have 2 of them kicking around as feet for a small desk lol.
my first "gaming" pc was indeed a gx280 with a low profile 3450 video card in it! i still have it somewhere in my basement!!!! great memories! it was shaped like and xbox 360 when it came out and my friebds couldn't believe it was a full fledged pc!
I remember recapping afew of these. Tho when i got into eletronics repair most of these systems were already gone but theres afew still going. I recapped them and would replace the psu fan with a high airflow fan that would suck air from the power supply so it would bring in cool-ish air from the back. Id have a thermal fan speed controller near where you put yours to keep the fan running fast enough to help maintain temps. I also would make some make shift ducting for the cpu fan so hot air was less likely to recirculate in the case. Over all these systems were a thermal disaster and dell had no clue about thermal air flow designs for cases.
It certainly didn't help that computer desks and home office hutches in the early 2000's were designed with a "Computer Nook" that essentially boxed the PC in to a particle board crate with just a small hole on the back to run cables out of. Stand-up Dell towers didn't stand a chance in hell, which they almost got as hot as.
VERY true. Also even if someone stuck it on a table, the desktop would be blowing against a wall with a ton of cords around and a monitor on top.
This was our family computer when I was a kid and I remember opening it up as like an 11 year old and going “huh that fans in a really fucking stupid place”
I worked for a glass company that got these Dell's. The Dell guy was in all the time replacing the motherboards. I never ever liked those plastic box tombs.
My nightmare with Dells of this era (a faulty Dell Inspiron that Dell replaced with an 8300) is the reason I switched to ThinkPads in 2008, starting with the T400. I haven't looked back since. I have yet to send a ThinkPad for repairs.
I had one of these growing up, eventually without warning it would never turn on again (interestingly without the thermal event error)
when I opened it, I discovered that someone repasted it with ceramic thermal paste, and the Dell Easy-Bake oven literally cured the CPU and the heatsink together.
to make things worse.. the model I had was the GX60, which was like yours but the difference was that Dell saved a few pennies by not soldering in the AGP slot. so you had to deal with the "extreme" graphics (which could barely manage solitaire). it also had an 1.7ghz Celeron CPU which, even after a fresh windows reload a netburst celeron can't even idle (100% cpu all the time), they were that bad.
truly the HP Stream of the era lol
Holy shit we had that PC style since 2003-2011! Im surprised after all the malware i put in that thing it atill worked for so long.
my first P4 was the server version in the full tower Clam shell design. they had a great sale were you could buy an OS Less system and it was something like half the price of the same spec optiplex. It kept good thermals and never failed from bulging caps the entire time i had it, which was something like 10 years. The Front cover had a grid of holes instead of the happy face flip cover thing. The Front USB ports wear installed, but inaccessible. I ran extension cables to them internally and routed them up to my desk. Good times
Excellent video! I actually love to grab these up since they are cheap, and what I will do it A: replace the caps, but also B: cut a hole in the front just behind the little grey flap-looking thing by the USB ports, and add in a 60mm fan to draw in fresh air from the front.
One minor thing I noticed, you accidentally labeled the AGP slot as PCI-E in your drawing :P
Excellent video, keep up the good work!
Also... Keep an eye out for the half-height AGP cards for these things... Half height AGP cards are EXTREMELY hard to find, and run absolute CIRCLES around the integrated graphics. They also help with just general use, not just gaming. The desktop environment needs to be rendered too, ya know :P and being able to offload that onto a dedicated GPU (a popular pick was the GeForce4 MX 440, but more commonly you will see the Quadro NVS 200 or the Quadro FX 500 (again, both are REALLY hard to find)
oh crap i didn't notice that about the drawing...force of habit I guess
I have a clamshell Dell that I changed out the PSU fan and added a low profile nVidia GPU to, it's a perfect little portable retro lan box.
Turns out i am not the only one who has had that thought, but i have some more additional things to say.
First, the cable management is a mess and is impossible to fix the issue, and it caused damage to 2 sata cables that were going to an 80 GB seagate HDD from 2004. I don't remember if it also happened with angled SATA connectors, but i was really annoyed by it.
Second, that machine, like you said, really sucks at cooling. Dell should've considered that the Pentium 4's heating issues and a small computer don't mix. I had a Dell Optiplex GX280 equipped with a 3 GHZ HyperThreaded Pentium 4, and sometimes it would crash and shutdown without warning, but keep in mind that it had a standard case fan that was hacked to work on that thing that always worked at max speed since 2018 when we tried repurposing this PC for retro hardware purposes, because we didn't wanna spend money on that thing or old PC parts.
It also had a tendency to dry thermal paste quicker than other Pentium 4 PCs i've had, which led me to believe that the heat dissipation sucks on that thing, and not to mention it's held with plastic clips on mine, which would break.
Third, one day, it started doing beeping noises having to do with RAM, meaning that either the connection is bad/the ram died/the system is failing, which happened in 2019. My own fix was reinstalling the ram in a specific way, and that sort of fixed the problem.
In 2020, it has kicked the dust, resulting to throwing that PC in the trash and building an old Retro PC from scratch, probably a lot better than this abomination.
Thank you for making this video BTW. It just goes to show that Dell makes poor choices on their consumer lineup, even 21 years ago. I loved the concept and the looks of the GX280, but sadly, it was crippled by the issues you mentioned and the ones i had.
Just like a modern tempered glass case, no airflow whatsoever.
And wow, over 60°C in idle. The tCase threshold for a Northwood 2.6C is 75°C
Would really help to have some sort of intake. Possibly some opening at the top.
they do look very nice
I don't think there's a single one of these in existence desktop, or mini tower that doesn't have some bad capacitors. The larger desktop versions weighed a ton too. Like you said, they looked cool but that was about all they had going for them.
i love these though. i mean i don't use them but i think they look so good. a little bit of case modding can probably make them usable.
Oh! The clamshell I tried to forget those; what a nightmare. Thanks a lot :-( ;-)
That and the proprietary nature of most off-the-shelf PC's.
Oh yeah. Where I worked back in time hard drives would die like flies in those optiplexes.
Oh god. I deployed hundreds of those in offices in the UK in the 2000's. They were terrible at everything except heating rooms.
I supported so many of these PCs (GX260's). Seems like ages ago.
That USFF case type was so ahead of it's time, but the ribbon cables were a problem with these case types.
I service some of these machines every day, and I can confirm that the ribbon cables were the half-blame for the problems.
Though I'd imagine those case types would be ideal today now that we no longer use ribbon cables on PCs.
i had one gx280, i had to order a spare mainboard because the original had exploded capacitors, but i was quite happy with it. it had a p4
I remember seeing these back in elementary school. I always think of this as a School Computer. But the first one I can remember was some white computer that were very old, I forgot the model was but it all I can remember it was a Windows ME or 2000 because of the old Windows logo with only a blue desktop background and there were in the kindergarten class were they have a educational game installed.
Missed opportunity to call it a Clamhell
I still have a Dell Optiplex GX270 CMT sitting in the closet. Still works fine except for the clicking fan. I can't believe i used it for almost 6 years straight. I knew it was slow. But didn't think it was all that bad until i got my laptop which had a Core2 Duo. Going from a Pentium 4 to a Core2 Duo was a big difference lol.
The GX280 ran even hotter due to the CPU model but they did cut a channel around one of the sides of the thing to try and let it breathe a bit more. Didn't help that half of ours were shoved up against something or under desk shelves with little air reaching the back of the PC so they just rebreathed their fiery death all the time. And don't get me started on the dust covering the back grill :)
LOL I think we need to start a therapy group for those of us who had to support these things.