Podagrower
Pulling my weight
At my office, I'm the closest thing to IT support that we have. I've worked thru upgrading our 6 really, really old Dell Optiplexs (Optiplexi? Optiplexes? Optipli?) to just old Dell Optiplexs so I'm comfortable with them and their quirks so when I started looking at cameras and saw the recommendation for Dell here, I was pretty happy. In playing swap a roo, I wound up with a 9020 MT at my desk. My workload is the most CPU/RAM intensive in the office-I frequently need to have 20+ MB PDFs open. So I started stalking I7 4790 CPUs on Ebay, I gave up because the prices were just higher than I was willing to pay. But then I saw a listing for a Lenovo Thinkcentre with an I7 4790 for far less than any CPU had sold for. Bid on it, won it, swapped it's I7 into my Dell, put my Dell's I5 into it, relisted on Ebay and sold it for more than I paid because I write better descriptions and take better photos.
Can I tell the difference between the I5 4590 and I7 4790? The answer is no 99% of the time, but when I have a huge file open, the difference shows.
Now to talk about the problem I have hopefully solved. This 9020 MT was my BI computer at home for several months with zero issues, it ran about 35% load 24 hours a day. When I brought it into the office, it started freezing occasionally. Random, didn't seem to matter what was running, just freeze up and restart. The first thing I did was pull 2 sticks of RAM (it has 4 sticks that are all the same speed, but different brands), that made no difference. Next up was a cheap graphics card, (I was using a USB adaptor to add output for my third monitor), no change. Then the CPU change, which also meant the thermal paste was refreshed, no change there either. Today I swapped out the power supply-and whenever you mention Dell and power supply in the same sentence some people get very twitchy. Dell power supplies pretty much suck, and the motherboard connector is proprietary so there can be issues. I went with an EVGA BR 0600 K1 and a 24 to 8 pin adaptor from Must Have Gadgets. Super easy install/upgrade. For some reason I had never noticed that all of the 9020 drives are powered from the board, 2 DVD drives (that I never use), an SSD, an HDD all powered from a single connector on a board with the tiniest power supply they could get away with. So I swapped the SSD and HDD drives to be powered directly from the new power supply, the board has it's power supply, and I have PCIE power should a good graphics card ever present itself.
Can I tell the difference between the I5 4590 and I7 4790? The answer is no 99% of the time, but when I have a huge file open, the difference shows.
Now to talk about the problem I have hopefully solved. This 9020 MT was my BI computer at home for several months with zero issues, it ran about 35% load 24 hours a day. When I brought it into the office, it started freezing occasionally. Random, didn't seem to matter what was running, just freeze up and restart. The first thing I did was pull 2 sticks of RAM (it has 4 sticks that are all the same speed, but different brands), that made no difference. Next up was a cheap graphics card, (I was using a USB adaptor to add output for my third monitor), no change. Then the CPU change, which also meant the thermal paste was refreshed, no change there either. Today I swapped out the power supply-and whenever you mention Dell and power supply in the same sentence some people get very twitchy. Dell power supplies pretty much suck, and the motherboard connector is proprietary so there can be issues. I went with an EVGA BR 0600 K1 and a 24 to 8 pin adaptor from Must Have Gadgets. Super easy install/upgrade. For some reason I had never noticed that all of the 9020 drives are powered from the board, 2 DVD drives (that I never use), an SSD, an HDD all powered from a single connector on a board with the tiniest power supply they could get away with. So I swapped the SSD and HDD drives to be powered directly from the new power supply, the board has it's power supply, and I have PCIE power should a good graphics card ever present itself.