I bought a T3610 for £50 (1607 v2, 500GB HDD, 8GB, K600, Win8.1). Later I realised they copied the specs from a better one, so I bought a 2650 v2 for £5. It's a lot better for gaming than my DIY 2008 PC (Xeon E5450 @ 3.9 GHz, Abit IP35-E, 4GB DDR2). It's a bottleneck and for years it has occasionally hung loading windows or rarely BSOD later. Maybe after swapping in my old GTX950 the Dell sometimes locked up when gaming with a black screen after ~90 min, but a couple of times web browsing. It was unresponsive to input, but sometimes I heard a gamer's mic still on and could ping it. Parsec and VNC didn't work. In the event viewer it mentioned Nvlddmkm and resetting TDR on GPUID:200. After weeks of troubleshooting, I read someone had a whole office of T3610 do the same when they'd upgraded from Quadro to Nvidia gaming cards. *The suggested fix was to turn off VT for Direct I/O (VTd) in the BIOS!* No problems now. Another issue I had was disconnecting in game. It seems to be due to using a short, 4-wire ethernet cable. Maybe it disliked connecting at 100 Mbit to a Gigabit router with lots of packets. I haven't got Wake On Lan to work, so I hope it's the router settings.
The 2650v2 is really good, I'm currently enjoying the 2680v2. You get 2 more cores for around $15. As long as you have the most recent bios, you should be able to run ant E5-26XXv2 chips. About the only upgrades I can really do now are faster ram, or the 2697v2. Not worth it though, too expensive for such little performance gains.
I don't have one, but most Dell and HP models use a different pinout on the PSU. You can get adapter cables for standard PSUs online for under 20 bucks.
I got one myself. What cheap upgrades can be done from stock? Got the PC for free. My plan was to run it as barebone ESXi server for virtual machines. Maybe 1 or 2 SSDs. I know this kind of Dells have most proprietary connectors. Can fans be replaced? Maybe with adapter? CPU heatsink can it be replaced to something better and modern? This is after all 11 years old. Can it be rack mounted? What else can be added or upgraded? Maybe removed or deleted?
@@ThriftStoreHacker Thank you for fast reply! What will give me the most CPU cores/performance for the bucks? What are the sweetspot? I've seen the stock heatsink be replaced with a Noctua 2011 xeon heatsink with a fan and a 5pin to 4pin adapter. Works great.
@@orfeous sorry, thought this was a different video. Lol The max processor fir that machine would be the 2697v2 and 1600mhz ddr3. You can run any 26xx or 26xx v2 with ddr3
How old is that 3610? I found, in a dumpster, 4 Dell Precision towers (workstations) : 3 T3620s & 1 T1650. All have the Xeon CPU. The 1650 is about 10 years old, & the 3620s about 7 years old.
