Project TinyMiniMicro Dell OptiPlex 3070 Micro Review 

Just adding since this seems to be a common bit. We purchased this unit a few weeks ago. Total price was $333.68 (I probably should have said $334.) Screenshot twitter.com/Patrick1Kennedy/status/1289215632844578816 --- We watched prices and for deals for a few weeks before buying. Also, the Dell Outlet can have good deals but ones like this will get purchased quickly.

Good news: here are some cheery tones and flashing LEDs. Bad news: your hard drive's dead.

Enjoying this series on small low-power PCs and all the minutiae to watch out for

Excellent reviews. These seem like the winners!

Really useful video, thank you. I have a used one on the way and I wanted to learn what you thought of it. 😊

When I heard the jingle and close my eyes I remembered my Tamagotchi-I kindof want to play my Tamagotchi again.

I had mine (the i5-9500T variant) since June, and I love it. I upgraded mine with 32GB RAM and a 2TB SSD, and it runs great. I do my computer science work on it (HTML, PostgreSQL, ERD modeling, networking stuff, Visual Studio starting the following semester, etc.). I also run VMs like Linux Mint and SEED in VMware, as well as create music. I even use it as a RDP server for my iPad. I'd definitely recommend it.

Going from DP out to HDMI in is easy, you can use a cheap passive adapter. Doing the reverse, from HDMI out to DP in requires an active adapter with supplemental USB power. That said, most monitors have at least one HDMI port now.

Ahh I'm fond of that Dell beep and jingle

Great review. Many thanks from Nova Scotia..

Back with the 3020 Micro that had a spinning disk one of our company's divisions had bough a lot and had a lot of drive failures due to heat generated by the drive/system. The 3020/7020/9020 series were haswell based and also their first transition to this form-factor. So that may be why there was a heat issue. With the 30x0 series Dells you always get fewer USB 3 ports and the higher end 70x0 systems come with at least one USB C port, starting with the 7050 and I believe all the Type A ports are USB 3 capable. And all the 30x0 series systems I've seen have Realtek NICs where as the 70x0 systems always have Intel NICs. Dell does make a Latitude charge cable to micro charge cable adapter and we buy them since we have a lot more Latitude spare PSUs than Micros. That is Dell part # 57J49. Very useful to have around since some of the Micros need a 90w or 130w brick and they sometimes get misplaced and someone will try to use a 65w brick on them which will throw an error at boot and the system may refuse to run. Just keep the old Latitude cords around and adapt them to save money on spares.

I have an older generation 3070 and have one Samsung 960 Pro 1TB m.2 and 850 Pro 2.5inch 512GB for Plex and some other services. Runs great. Only sometimes the m.2 get a bit hot around 50c but still heatly range for that drive.

As for the hard drive, if you buy say, 16 of these machines, you could get one of those IcyDock 16 bay 2.5 inch to 2x5.25 adapters and a SAS controller(requires 4x SFF SAS connectors) giving you a compact 8TB(raw) storage solution, just provide the drive cage/adapter, SAS controller, and computer I have one of these filled with 2TB drives that were on sale for like $60, For $1300, i got 32TB of raw storage (ZFS Z3 reduces that quite a bit) with reletively high throughput compared to 3.5 drives, and i was able to put it in a compact miniITX build that i can cary in one hand.

if the "hey your hard drive is dead" is that little jingle, then what would play when the motherboard is dead? funeral march? XD

thanks for another great video. I'd just like to point out that there are a lot of markets outside of US and other high income countries, where HDDs are still sold and bought and actively used. For a lot of uses that 500GB SATA plug of a device will be more than enough to just get things going, and upgrading to an SSD would not be financially efficient

I can't seem to get more than 1700MBps out of this thing. It appears that the NVMe slot is only operating at PCIe 2.0 instead of the advertised 3.0 so my NVMe drive is basically operating at half-speed. Any thoughts or confirmation?

I bought a Dell OptiPLex 3040M used for our job number board at our office to replace the Raspberry Pi we had used. (MicroSD storage kept corrupting...) - I think it's even worth noting that these Dell units have these nice mounting kits you can buy and mount them under a desk, on a wall, or just about anywhere that doesn't occupy desk space, really. Since we use a TV for the screen, the HDMI port was more than perfect. I seriously am considering replacing our older Dell Core2Duo machines with these OptiPLex Micros as well.

That chime brings me back to working on old Dell Precision laptops. When running onboard diagnostics and encountering an error you get that pleasant chime, warning you your keyboard or touchpad connector died or your graphics card VRAM died or you failed to remind Dell that legacy boot is ancient and you should enable UEFI.

Which one would you choose if the only use you had for it would be running the Synology Surveillance Station Client program to keep a live view of 4 IP cams displayed?

I use 3060 micro's in my lab, that are awesome, and the power consumption makes me really happy as well as the sound

I think I will wait for at least the 5 next épisodes of this series before using my desktop pc as a server. 6w at idle sounds pretty sweet to my ears even though it doesn't have space for my 5 HDDs and undetermined amount of SSDs (it's a nas+multimedia+messingAround build)

Love how much progress the content has made! Feedback: not sure all users will be able to tell, but there seems to be a slight biassing of your sound towards the highs and then sound is a bit thin; ends up sounding a little bit like spitting glass and harsh!

Is the Dell OptiPlex 3070 CORE i5 strong enough to run Adobe Premiere Pro on? Great video, thanks!

Great review Patrick! I’m thinking about the Beelink GT-R Ryzen5 with dual gig NIC 35w TDP for my next pfsense build, can this make it in your series and do you think it be an easy deployment for pfsense build? Regards Shane from Trinidad 🇹🇹

Waiting to see AMD 4000 series APUs(hoping the 8 core APUs will fall into the same price point as the quad core of last gen). Lenovo, and IIRC dell have a nice tool for getting those error tones figured out

i have a 3070 micro same as the one u are showcasing, i am thinking of upgrading the wifi card to a wifi 6 card, what m.2 card would u recommend? so far from the digging I've done seems like best m.2 card is intel ax200, the version without vPro, is this correct or is there a better card?

How's the power consumption? Is it energy saving compared to some Dell laptops?

Hy, do you have any video on how to add extra vga / DP with M2 card

I own this model and I want to add a new display port to have 2 display ports but I can't find anything on dell website ( card name, product code..or anything) Can somebody help me ?

Would it be possible to install an SSD Samsung 980 Pro WITH HEATSINK (considering the Heatsink's width) in the m.2 nvme Slot of this Dell OptiPlex 3070? Would it fit also to be installed along a regular size SATA SSD? (both at the same time)

I like that Dell is pretty consistent with their naming for their Optiplex line. It helps when shopping for these on the used market. Lenovo and HP's are a bit of a naming mess. Now if only it was as easy to find the Optiplex minis as it is to find the SFF and USFF systems...

Q? If you open the chassis of it pc. Could you please inform-is CPU is soldered to the system board or its a socket? To know is there possibility in the future to upgrade cpu. At least in the range of one generation,e.g. change i3 8gen by i5 or i7 8gen?

Thanks for reviewing many of the low power mini PCs. Is there any mini PC with short slots for SAS card so we can use it for NAS server with external SASA HD arrays ?

How can I use the built in mic on my headset?

Does this support esxi 7.0? And 64 gb ram

Picked up a Lenovo Thinkcentre M93p Tiny off eBay for $220. i7-4770T, 8 GB single SODIMM, and a 240 GB WD Green. Works fine as a semi-hidden LAN Minecraft server.

Is fan noisy? I would like to use it as home server. If fan noise is hearable i will buy msi cubi 5 instead

sir what gpu can be installed on that cpu?

Here in 2024, I'm contemplating one of these, with the i5-9500T, as a general office machine, with Windows 11, 365, Teams, Zoom etc. Is that still a good idea?

I know it's been a bit, but di you run into issues with DP to HDMI not recognizing monitor? DP to DP works fine as well as HDMI to DP., but EP to HDMI appears no good.

Is using the nvme slot for optane memory and having a 500 GB drive a good idea?

Your review says you got this from Dell at $333, but they start at $530 on their website :/ When are they putting out their Ryzen 4000G Renoir workstations?

hdd is useful to install unraid as the array does not support trim.

Its a shame that Apples Mini is not so good with access to the internals :)

I'm looking for something as small/cheap as these with pci expansion slots for NICs to run PFsense. Any ideas?

Is there any solutions for to admin IPMI for this unit?

Interesting unit. Would be cool to see something with Nvidia GPU in this mini category (for ML inference). I’m playing with Jetson AGX Xavier which is impressive but unfortunately arm architecture, so not as friendly as x86_64. Curious if you can suggest some edge gpu server.

As always awesome Review but still no machine with ecc support :(

Have you'd checked out Qotom mini PCs? I use one as a router, but they would be good for this project, too.

I just got my Micro Optiplex 3070 last week, and have run into an issue with the Wifi connection dropping with no apparent reason. Resetting the pc will fix it, but this is not acceptable. I ran the Support Assist diagnostics on the Qualcomm QCA61x4A wifi adapter card and does not report any issues. I also checked for latest driver installed. Is anyone else having the same issue?

11:50 For anybody who wants to know about POWER CONSUMPTION = 10 to 40 watt range for these micro computers.

There isn't any option'ed computer on dell's website that is listed for $333.

A couple of questions: 1) I noticed the removable heatsink on the Dell unit. Does that mean the CPU is removable? 2) Have you come across any small units that have one PCI expansion slot?

can this CPU be used for video editing ?

I would go for the HP EliteDesk mini 800 G2 is a 6th gen intel i5 4 core 4 threads and it costs $260 dollars with 16gb ram. $300+ is just too much I think

That's not a dead hard drive jingle, it's the general error jingle for Dell ePSA.

When the only 3070 u will ever have is an optiplex

What's the use case ? I used them for enterprise and not happy with the stupid external power supply. Really easy to loose. I'm talking manufacturing facility.

hi... i watched a video on installing an nvme ssd with the necessary heat sink. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-f8vdtiYxWI8.html ... and it meant taking out the sata drive caddy. Did you do this too and does it restrict to 1 internal drive?? Would this setup be able to do some 1080p video editing?

Is it compatible with non T processor?

I love Dell

I have the i5 version of this for sale on eBay...last one available... Great equipment

The beeps are nothing new to Dell when something goes wrong or breaks

The cheapest config I see right now for 3070 Micro is $529. The mentioned $333 price is nowhere to find.

Great review. Stupid part on the part of Dell.ca. The 3070 Micro with 8 GB of RAM and a 256 GB NVMe SSD WITHOUT the wireless card is $829 CAD. WITH the Qualcomm wireless card, that price (still with the same process, 8 GB of RAM, and same 256 GB of NVMe SSD) jumps to $1401.61. There is NO way that that Qualcomm wireless card is worth $572.61 CAD. Dell -- WHATTTT ARE YOU DOING??? I WAS going to recommend this system over an Apple Mac Mini (because Apple Mac Minis have gone up to $999 CAD now for the base model), but there is NO WAY that I justify a $572.61 price increase for a M.2 Qualcomm wireless card. No way! This is sheer utter stupidity on the part of Dell's marketing team.

What would you do with a Toshiba 500 GB 2.5" HDD? Install your OS on it and never have to worry about the swap killing your SSD by burning through the write endurance limit of said SSDs. I have a system right now that has 64 GB of RAM and an Intel 750 Series 400 GB PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD that I am using for the swap drive, and in the year since my original Intel 750 Series wore through the write endurance, I am now at around 73% of life left on the new SSDs that was sent to me, from Intel, after having previously RMA'd the prior one. At this rate, I will also wear through this SSD about 3 years from now (total life of about 4 years out of a 5 year warranty), and ALL it is doing is merely serving as the drive that hosts the swap file. This IS what happens with SSDs. They are, again, by design, designed to fail. The NAND flash memory modules on them have a finite number of program/erase cycles to them and merely and simply using it as a swap drive is sufficient to kill one within the warranty period. THIS is what you do with a Toshiba 500 GB 2.5" HDD. I would take the Toshiba over a SSD ANYDAY now because I have already had to RMA SIX Intel SSDs back to Intel over the past four years, where unlike the SSDs, the failure rate of the Toshiba HDD is significantly less than 100% (Backblaze put Toshiba drive failure rates at around 1% (Source: www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1-2020/)). Therefore; to recap: SSDs: 100% failure rate. (It isn't a question of if, but a question of when, because you WILL consume the finite number of erase/program cycles of those NAND flash memory cells/modules). HDDs: (for Toshiba) ~1%. I'll take the ~1% failure rate, thank you. (If it weren't for the fact that I've had to RAM SIX Intel SSDs over the last 4 years, I wouldn't be writing this. And the most recent failure as a NAND flash memory module/cell READ error, it wasn't even a write error. When I asked Intel if they had tools to try and bypass the NAND flash memory module READ error so that I can extract the data (because it was my OS/boot drive), they said, and I quote: "Regarding your inquiries, Intel is not liable for data loss in connection with the product, regardless of the cause; for this reason we recommend maintaining a back up of all data on the product at all times." Which means that unless you're going to have a SSD paired in mirrored/RAID1 configuration, your OS drive can and WILL fail on you at SOME point in the future. Furthermore, Intel's own Intel SSD Toolbox can report the SMART status back to you, but DOES NOT tell you when a drive is about to fail, e.g. flash up a warning that your SSD, say, only has about 10% of it's life left or something, so that YOU know to start doing what you need to do in order to start securing your data and your OS/boot drive. Intel's SSD Toolbox will PROBE the SMART status, but it doesn't PROACTIVELY warn you about the imminent failure of its own products. So unless YOU are constantly and actively checking on the SMART status, (which let's be real here - NOBODY does), you will NEVER know that your drive is about to fail and the ONLY time you will know that is when it has ALREADY failed.

A mid-roll ad only a minute and a half in...? wtf.

Who pays full price for Windows 10 Pro? There are genuine offers for licences for around $20 and these are not the ones from dodgy resellers. Also there are lots of Dell SK-8135 and 8115 keyboards out there in job lots for next to nothing. Get one of these rather than some laptop refugee chiclet keyboard 😀🤷‍♂️

Your dismissive attitude regarding the 2.5-inch 500GB HDD speaks volumes.

Patrick, Do NOT use SSDs. They are, by design, designed to fail. I've RMA's SIX Intel SSDs over the past four years, and one of them that was RMA'd last year (Intel 750 Series 400 GB PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD) has already lost more than a quarter of its life, just as a swap drive. DO NOT pull out the mechanically rotating hard drive. YES, they are slower, but unlike SSDs, they are NOT designed to fail.