Dell motherboard

teleman

Distinguished
Apr 21, 2009
7
0
18,510
I am considering a Dell Studio with a Core i7-920. It seems like a decent enough deal, but I asked Dell what kind of motherboard was in the system, and all I got was:

"Its the Intel X58 chipset (Tylersburg)" and
"It can support up to 12gb 1066mhz Tri channel DDR3 SDRAm- there are 6 dimm slots. Its the Intel X58 Chipset. It has 3 PCIe x1 slots available and 1 PCIe x16 slot available."

Any idea of the quality of this unidentified Dell board or how it compares with a decent/comparable ASUS or Gigabyte x58 motherboard?
 

hundredislandsboy

Distinguished
Don't buy Dell now or ever. I learned my lesson the hard way and instead of saving cash I spent more trying to upgrade a year later. From Dell's cases to Dell's power supplies to Dell's motherboards including Dell proprietary BIOS', they intentionally make it difficult to upgrade because they want you to come back and buy another Dell. Dell is about quantity not quality and IMO they take shortcuts and skip over quality.
 

reborne_33

Distinguished
Apr 20, 2009
27
0
18,530
Yeah... I take HundredIslandBoy's view on this... I volunteer at a local computer club where we prepare systems for re-use. They're great for things like servers and business workstations where upgrading is not a priority and all you want is a reliable workhorse. Indeed I have a Dell PowerEdge 1600SC server tower in the back room next to me for my website/e-mail/LAN fileserver/backup server and it goes like a trooper.

Anyhow... One of the tasks I perform at the club is repairing and specing the machines that come in... Dells tend to have custom mobos, custom BIOSes and other custom nasties including heatsinks & mounts and front panel connections (usually in the form of a single plug/block that is setup in such a pinout that you can't easily stick a Dell mobo in a regular case without first jury-rigging some sort of adaptor on a bit of strip-board.) The same goes the other way... Screw mounts in a Dell case along with the remanents of their custom coolers mean that you can't easily (if at all) bung a retail mobo in a Dell case at a later date for upgrading.

That list of nasties is before I even get into the realms of the P4 generation of low profile desktop cases. We had a batch of about 40 of these things in a while ago, of which we got 15 working straight away, with a bit of mix 'n match we got about another 10 of them going with spares from the ones that wouldn't go at all. The common points of failure with this batch seemed to be either a cooked CPU or a dead PSU. All of these seemed to be using laptop parts for the 3.5" FDD and CD-ROM/DVD drives with delicate minature ribbons and connection adaptors all over the place. As far as the rest of them were concerned, we just gutted them for spares and dumped them in the pile for recycling.
 

teleman

Distinguished
Apr 21, 2009
7
0
18,510
Thanks for the response. I had really planned on a build and priced one out with a good mobo, a core 2 duo and a nice graphics card- thinking I'd overclock and have a decently fast, upgradeable gaming machine. Then I see the Dell ad for an i7 plus a display in the same price neighborhood and hmm...let me re-think.