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Don't buy a gaming PC pre-build from Dell'

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Caporegime
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Just about everything in them is proprietary, they probably do this deliberately so that if the motherboard or whatever breaks outside of warranty you have to buy it from Dell at probably very inflated prices for something that's of very average quality, or just plain bad if you're used to building your own.

Once its out of warranty, or you want to upgrade some of the components there is little or nothing you can do with it, it just becomes landfill.

They had to have spent time and money on developing a system like this so that its components are incompatible with industry standards, its a really cynical way of trapping you into their ECO system to squeeze more money from you if it goes wrong out of warranty and making the components on their own useless.

Don't buy their junk, its bad for the environment, your pocket and your sanity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DMg6hUudHE

 
Saw this today, good video and good points. Although Dell have always been like this, having worked in IT in a professional capacity for nearly 2 decades and having seen hundreds of different Dell prebuilds, they're all a nightmare that either need chucking out once the cheap components start to fail, or have to go back to dell for repairs/replacements which is often expensive or impossible. He was quite right in his summary that there is an argument for prebuilts these days but that Dell is especially bad for them. Maybe as part of a multi-million dollar support agreement in a large corporate office deployment you'd consider it but for single home builds it's outrageous.
 
This isn’t really news, they’ve always been like this.
Their workstations can be pain but you can easily upgrade drives, RAM and sometimes CPU but the issue is mainly longevity of parts availability.
 
Yaayuh! said:
This isn’t really news, they’ve always been like this.
Their workstations can be pain but you can easily upgrade drives, RAM and sometimes CPU but the issue is mainly longevity of parts availability.
Click to expand...

Right but given the current climate of people looking for £200 GPU's that don't cost £600 for a build they intended to make prebulds are now far more important than ever, so this needs to be news again. :) the 1660TI in this thing, BTW, in also a proprietary Dell one, and its ####
 
Dell can be great, one of my work machines was a dell precision, it was a great value piece of kit.

You do have to be a little careful with their configurator, but there are some great deals to be had, at least in the business space. It also had the option to come with Ubuntu pre-installed with no bloat-ware (and a significantly reduced cost).
Also note it's not uncommon to see discounts on the kind of things that nowhere else give discounts on from dell, provided you have a relationship of course.

Probably wouldn't recommend them for home use though, not unless you find a blind spot in their rather odd pricing model.
 
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What I find hilarious is that this guy in the video then tries to sell you an anti static mat from nexus gaming lol

Criticize Dell then want people to buy an anti static mat.

People will always say “don’t buy a pre built I can build it cheaper” etc etc but in reality a lot of people just want a computer.

These pre-built a are perfect for office. You not going to sit building 100pcs for an office are you and hell no you certainly not going to build 6000!!!
 
Bouton Aide said:
What I find hilarious is that this guy in the video then tries to sell you an anti static mat from nexus gaming lol

Criticize Dell then want people to buy an anti static mat.

People will always say “don’t buy a pre built I can build it cheaper” etc etc but in reality a lot of people just want a computer.

These pre-built a are perfect for office. You not going to sit building 100pcs for an office are you and hell no you certainly not going to build 6000!!!
Click to expand...

Its one thing to build it in a proprietary format. Its another to build it so badly it overheats and throttles constantly.
 
I'm confused.... This is nothing new, computers built in mass as cheap as possible, been happening for 30 years+, nice of OP to finally wake up and realise this....

Also nothing wrong with pre built Dell PC's, you get what you pay for
 
Haze said:
I'm confused.... This is nothing new, computers built in mass as cheap as possible, been happening for 30 years+, nice of OP to finally wake up and realise this....

Also nothing wrong with pre built Dell PC's, you get what you pay for
Click to expand...

I had a Pionex back in 1999 and it was nothing like this. It too was a pre-built. No heatsink bolted through the motherboard to the case.
 
Noticed a lot of them are now generalising major parts like the GPU and won't give you the exact make and model included.
Major red flag that it's a cheaper lower quality card like a Palit or a MSI.

Dell laptops are ok, but I wouldn't personally buy a desktop from them.
Not unless I was a IT admin looking to bulk buy units in and I needed the extended support options.
 
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Still doing the proprietary bit then, had two dell desktops (one after the other-would have thought I learned the first time) in the mid oo's, upgraded the rubbish psu's along with the gpu's (which had a proprietary power connector which went to the motherboard if I remember correctly) after a while but both motherboards failed between 12 and 18 months. Advised by the pc repair guy best thing was to bin them as standard motherboards weren't used and were terrible quality. Built my own since and never had a motherboard fail, however with gpu shortages I could imagine a lot more people buying pre-builds. Would never buy a dell again myself however.
 
Not sure that saying to avoid a pre-built like this just because it uses non-standard components is really all that valid, people just want a system that works with a good warranty to back it up, at a price they can afford.
The similar system to the one in that video (10400f, 8GB PC3200, 1660 Super, 512Gb NVMe) is ~£650, that isn't a bad deal, no they aren't easy to work with if you wanted to change the motherboard, (or PSU in this case), but everything else, RAM, CPU, GPU, SSD, Wi-FI can all be changed and there are PCI-E slots spare to add in cards. Who buys one of these wanting to change the motherboard?

Find another pre-built at a similar cost, with a decent warranty to back it up, or even better get OCUK to do you a quote it'll be over £1000, maybe more if you add-on Windows 10.
 
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