Why the Dell XPS is a POS 

Fun fact: Recirculating hot air is exactly how a convection oven works. This computer is so poorly designed, it is literally cooking your components.

What is impressive is how the case is designed to compact everything together in a way that makes it easy enough to access everything. What's not impressive is that someone decided that this type of layout was ever a necessary thing to design at all. Having had to salvage the components from 2 XPS 8920s (which surprisingly didn't have truly proprietary parts beyond the SD card reader), I can say it definitely felt like the case design was the product of brilliant engineers forced to design something that was a complete waste of their talents.

this is a laptop (honestly, the size of heatsink makes me that came out of a 1466) heatsink, tied to a desktop-grade CPU, tied into a crappy OEM-grade case that turns the CPU into an oven. very cursed design indeed. corners cut everywhere.

Things that should be illegal: -Proprietary Desktop Motherboards -Soldered System Memory (common in recent AMD and Intel laptops) -Soldered SSD (fuck apple)

And they just end up as E-waste because it's not like you can take the components from this shitty case and put it into a better one, it's all proprietary parts that don't fit anywhere else lol

This is why you never buy mass-produced prebuilts as a private person.

I used to work on Dell pcs, it used to be something that was worth it's weight in gold because of the people who cared on top. Nowadays it's money, money, money when I worked on the later generations and I knew they're all junk!

You know it's bad when HP seems like a good option

I remember when XPS was the high-end lineup. Now they're just typical crappy prebuilts.

Dell = Doesn't Ever Last Long.

4:20 I never expected TheGreatestTechnicianThat’severLived to become an actual raccoon under the desk lol, you’re content is amazing BTW

Dell has a huge issue with keeping the same designs for way too many years. The xps desktops, xps laptops, precision laptops all thermal throttle throttle. It actually pisses me off how dell refuses to redesign their pc’s to better suit modern hardware. Dell’s power delivery, thermal solutions and chassis haven’t changed since 4th gen intel and it shows because hardware changed since then and dell’s pcs aren’t holding up

I still remember when XPS systems were good. I have an XPS 730x and its got these MASSIVE vents on the front with two big fans behind them. Its able to cool the xeon x5690 i ended up putting in it just fine and all the parts are standard atx so it can be upgraded, repaired, or gutted to put something way newer in no problem. It even has battery powered led lights that can light the inside when your working on it! Great system, its sad to see how far the xps line has fallen.

I worked for a Dell EMC service provider previously, and yeah. This design of Alienware Aurora/XPS case is a dumpster fire. What on earth were they thinking.

Very interesting and informative! Keep keeping it real and running!

All 5 people last year, all million people this year. Time flies! Congratulations on your insane growth!

what impressed me is that the quality isn't the same between the new dell products (lasts 1 month) and the old dell products (lasts 20 years if you take care of it) with upgradability and innovation that was actually good what a waste of good components.

As a psa for new people, buying gaming laptops or desktops stay completely away from any alienware and Dell product. Like seriously, all their products will overheat, go with any other brand I got a secondhand gaming laptop even after repasting the dam thing it still overheated to the point it cooked itself I repasted the cpu and gpu like 3 times it just always ran hot it was only a 45 watt intel cpu I swear such a waste after that failing I don't trust any prebuilt or Dell/Alienware product lol atlewst they gave me a newer laptop through the warranty that was nice I still have it

I owned several Dell XPS Systems from the 400, 8300, 8500, and 8900. Never had a heat problem. I parted ways with them when they started using proprietary power supplies starting with the 8910 series.

Actually, when they were newly launched the fan-curve was quite agressive and they would ramp up to prevent overheating but after a couple of bios updates the fan hardly even spins (I had one of these). Seems like they must have gotten a heap of complaints and figured that thermal throttling is preferable to the sound of a jet engine in most office environments.

I haven’t used a Dell PC for a long time, but I remember their larger sized Optiplex’s being way better than this, despite being pretty low end. Those just used a regular ATX case from what I remember, and would be cool to do a sleeper build with. At least their laptops are pretty nice from what ive seen with the inspirons and XPS’.

This is why custom pc always rules!! Buying OEM desktop is absolutely pointless

Dell is like the modern Packard Bell lol

This made me even gladder that I went the extra mile to build my PC myself.

Informative and unfortunate. I have a Dell Inspiron 3670 which uses a more traditional case design. The air flow is bad since there's no case fan and it's just open air in the back, but it has a funnel blowing air out the side directly off the CPU fan and there's enough intake that it doesn't overheat for something cheap. They didn't even have to try and they still made a better case design than what I'm seeing here. It's especially disappointing because you can tell the engineers wanted this XPS to be a professional system for people to repair themselves, but put no thought into the longevity.

Wow.....someone needs a vacation :);)..... cant belive how big that motherboard is !!......I had a rig issue like that once, someone told me I should have it water cooled......so I filled up the barhtub and put it ln......actually worked good, untill I pluged it in......and " oh no"........that was that......guess I didnt have the tub water cold enough....I wont do that again

I hate it when brands air cool the cpu like that. If you want to have silence and performance you wanna go with a big heatsink and a (relatively) weak fan. You can also do the opposite approach and put a freaking jet engine on a tiny heatsink, but that's gonna run loud and hot.

Dell is our vendor at work. Dell puts a 13700 inside of a Dell OptiPlex Micro 7000 with a laptop fan. Not the 13700T, just the 13700. I am not an engineer but the thermal events we see in lot are hilarious. One lady was gone for two weeks and her computer had a thermal event. Did the computer shut off? Of course not. It kept running. It fried and it wouldn’t POST. Thankfully it was under warranty.

This desktop PC is begging to be modified. I don't know why PC manufacturers still use loud Delta branded fans. There are much better choices considering how much Dell charges for their XPS line. I own a Dell Alienware m17 r3 notebook computer. The price and performance is amazing but it gets really hot. I decided to modify the intake and exhaust ports to increase airflow. As a bonus the amount of fan noise was reduced. It was a 30 minute job thanks to a Dremel with a cut off wheel disc. This voided the warranty but I happen to love voiding warranties.

Dell makes both incredibly good computers and incredibly horseshit ones, no inbetween, this one is an example of the latter.

Yes, this is the "beauty" of planned obsolescense + propritary parts to make Hell-Dell/Alienware + HP tons of money

I have two of those (8910 and 8930), but neither mine have that weird heatsink thing. They came with just normal fans. This is very odd. Both machines have had their power supplies replaced as for some reason, both computer’s psu fans just didn’t spin. It was very strange. Should also be noted that both machines are i7s (6700 and 8700), but you would think the i9 would get a better heatsink than the i7s.

That reminds me of the HP Omen Obelisk, that thing was so stupid, especially the look: it has a tempered glass side panel, but all the components were really ugly, the mainboard had no VRM heatsink, the M.2 SSD had no heatsink, the RAM also (I don't say that these improve the performance, but it looks better with a window side panel when such components aren't so "nude") and the CPU cooler was literally a Intel stock cooler, together with the case rear fan completely generic black fans, no LEDs or even RGB LEDs (which was already pretty much around in 2018). At least the GPU had an illuminated "Geforce RTX" but it had a leaf-blower DHE cooler and a little RGB lighting by a strip but that's all. And because of the stock CPU cooler and almost no air intakes in the front (it had the 3.5" drive bays vertically) it also performed rather poorly, the CPU couldn't keep above the base clock for very long. I also get flashbacks of the old Dell Dimension series, especially the smaller (SFF?) variants were prone to overheat due to poor ventilation, saw that on "Dell Clamshell Hell - Dells thermal nightmare pc's of the early 2000's. OptiPlex GX260, GX270, GX280" My Optiplex 7010 SFF and 3040 SFF work fine with i5s, but these also got some proper airflow with a front grille and fan blowing fresh air into the chassis and directly into the PSU, however in the 3040 the PCIe 16x slot is the lower one, so you can only use 1 slot Low Profile GPUs, while the 7010s 16x slot is the upper one so you can use two slot ones; my Radeon Pro WX3100 gets a little warmer in the 3040 but is still far away from critical temperatures, maybe in the 5040 and 7040 the PCIe 16x is again the upper of two slots. That almost nonexistent fan control is almost like Apple's, on some MacBooks they begin to kick in at 80°C but don't rev high to get rid of the heat, but rather slowly, at least you can change that with Macsfancontrol software, on the 7010 you haver either the standard fan mode that is at least rather quiet (but doesn't ramp up when it should, above 75°C core temperature for example) or you deactivate it and get the full blast and these are similar noisy as servers.

At first glance, I thought this video was about using a Dell computer as a point of sale machine, before I realized POS stood for "piece of "

The worst thing is that I have like an old HP desktop back from like 2010 or something and it's still working and it's not running that hot

have a coworker i stayed with for a bit and my wife both tell me i should advertise to build PCs for people. but living within range of a microcenter im not sure if there would even be a market for me to do that. because it would have to be, they buy the parts and then i could assemble it for them and granted i would likely give them ideas of what would work fine within a budget to give them a decent gaming pc. but again having a mega store nearby where people can get it done for a small fee.....not sure how many of the "i dont know how to assemble a computer" people live near me. i had minimal knowledge getting into it going from an older used xps, to a secondhand pc that i had to fix case headers and reinstall windows on to buying guts and case for a whole new build minus ssd as i just swapped it. my only exeperience goes back about 20 plus years when i upgrade a walmart bought HP pavilion with a graphics card and i might have dabbled with adding a sound card in there. or being able to add drivers for external peripherals like an external zip drive.

I really adore this type of reviews. Being a continuously angry engineer myself, I can definitely relate to how angry you sound at some of these designs...

I used to have an XPS 720, and seeing dell ruin the XPS brought immense disappointment.

What’s even worse is that Dell has been using that heatsink design for at least two decades. There’s some SFF Optiplexes with Prescott Pentium 4s (another CPU known for being very toasty) that have that same exact heatsink design and it didn’t work then, either.

You don't get it, according to Dell logic. The air spawns in via a magical teleportation method. This proprietary method is trademarked as "Dell crapcool"... The shutoff is just to let you know its working correctly.... Jokes aside you should outright ban all variations of that specific dell model, Dell also has a obvious windows contracting scheme since they have tailored BIOS FIRMWARE UPDATES for their machine without your permission. Which means Microsoft on the behalf of dell can just break your machine just so you can buy another dell system. HP has done the same thing. Dell has also made it harder for use with Linux by supplying their own WIFI intel-based modules that are deliberately designed to not work with Linux (Dell wireless) unless you use ubuntu.

Mistakes : Bought a prebuilt from a big manufacturer. Would buy a PC from like, memory PC so I can choose the parts and put less money in it

great video, good job!

once upon a time i too bought and became highly dissatisfied with the prebuilt desktops! i decided to be a system builder and assembled them myself with every part selected by me haha

Had a dell xps many years ago when it was a full size atx case (like mid 2000s); big cpu cooler, 2 big case fans, but no problems with staying cool.

I love your videos, they make me laugh always! i am from argentina, and here the story it is so different...that pc here is a GIANT! but customers conta afford it!

I suggest a 10mm drill bit and plenty of cooling holes

Great video!

I have one that no longer works and I'm quite surprised it wasn't the CPU or Motherboard that failed me after 6 years of abuse with how dusty my uncleaned, dusty room in the middle of the desert, but rather, the PSU (lmao. It still needs airflow and dust still is an issue for that) I do plan to scavenge the GPU for whatever I might use it for

I had a Dell G5 5090 for a year and a half and it had a better heatsink, but it was still worse than the Intel fucking stock heatsink. That CPU (i7 9700) went to 100°C in a few seconds before its boost window ran out, and it was at around 85°C while gaming. I ended zp replacing that shotty cooler with a much better low profile one ans now I really had to try actively in order to get this thing to throttle. I left the 4500RPM 80mm case fan in because the 92mm fan I installed was quieter but also didn't move nearly enough air. The stock fan profile on mine did actually wramp both 80mm 4500RPM to 4500RPM when the CPU got close to 100°C, but they were set to take like 10s to get there slowly. It was ridiculous. The RTX 2060 it had was decent, but also had one single not-so-quirt 3600RPM fan. That luckily never had to turn up that high and the stock fan profile was okay but I ended up making a custom one. With the better CPU cooler, I could unlock my CPU'S default 75W power limit, but the VRMs couldn't handle more than 140W sustained unless the side panel was open. The max I could see in games was only around 120W, but the VRMs still mostly sat at around 90°C because they had NO COOLING ON THEM AT ALL!!! That was the reason why after only two years of owning it, I built my own PC. It was a fucking piece if garbage for my use-case (gaming mostly). It did come woth dual-channel RAM, which seems to be a premium in prebuilts nowadays, but I threw an additional 2x16GB kit in. I ended up selling that shitbix to a friend of mine that makes music and could profit from my 48GB of RAM (they were still working on a laptop with 8GB at the time)

Dell used to be good. I used to run their older computers into the ground without an issue. What a shame. Just another brand gone to sh*t. SMH. Good job though pointing this out. You have helped make it more apparent and hopefully saved someone from buying a crappy Dell XPS.

I had a mechanic who I loved who's a lot like the guy in this video. I took my 2012 Hyundai Elantra in, described the problem, and he instantly knew what the problem was. I liked him because when he got really heated over the issue being so common, you knew it was because he cared about his clients and didn't like they were getting cheap quality from their dealerships

my first desktop was a 2012 Dell XPS 8700 and to say it was slow was a understatement. I tried using it as a NAS recently but the old i5 CPU is just so slow its a huge bottleneck

it is extremely difficult now to find a normal laptop, without a regular problems of soldered SSD,CPU, GPU and RAM. Some vendors even put a glue drops on the side of the soldered RAM, to make it impossible to reflow.

My wife & I have had two Dell XPS 8930's since November 2017. They are good machines. I had to replace the original Dell Nvidia1050Ti in my machine after 5 years.

How about cutting a chunk out of the side, and install another vent? Moving the guts to a new case?

that's not a computer... that's a vacuum cleaner: loud as all hell and sucking up all the dust around itself while staying really, really hot

I had an XPS 8940 that was doing this same thing. Micro Center bought it back and I custom built instead.

It reminds me of those turbo buttons on old 486 era systems, that would clock your CPU down, if your physics were to fast in game It's not a button, that slows your PC down when pressed, its a hinge

The question is that the motherboard can be removable ? Bcs it might be possible to remove the hardware and place it on a new case

Is the temp measuring software freeware? And does it include functions to override the system or is that a seperate program? I would love to have something like this for my laptop. At the moment I only have a "half baked" solution named NoteBook FanControl, but it's far from perfect.

As a lucky owner of an Aurora R11 I have the same issue. And I have not an heatsink 😵

I feel sad becouse my old Dell precision workstation works perfectly after 15 years. I have upgraded it with a new GPU but otherwise it woks perfectly and now I see how it has gone for them. Anyways great video

After the side panel was opened, I couldn't help but wonder, why is the power supply SO CLOSE to where the CPU is? As if the heat coming from the power supply weren't a big enough problem, it also looks like it's part of the restricted airflow problem!

Nikocado avocado's farts have more airflow than this

you can tell this guy loves his job

This vid is gem!!

And here I thought seeing my DIY pc temps at 70 something Celsius was something i should fix! I did, but I later found out that those aren't terrible temps for air cooling.

I have a XPS 8940 from 2021, 11th gen i7. The interior is a clean layout, much different than the 8930. It still gets too hot when the GPU is maxed out. I need to added another fan to pull air in. I upgraded the CPU heatsink/fan assembly and added VRM heatsinks to try to keep this P.O.S. alive. These were Dell aftermarket/upgrades from Dell. Windows 10 Pro as supplied new has issues as sometimes after power on, one of the SSD's goes into a 100% utilization and locks the system. Other times, I press the power button, system turns on, then off. 2nd press it powers up properly. Cheap bastards did'nt even supply a HD activity light on the front panel, it's located on back! I will 'never' but another Dell XPS again. At least the Optiplex XE3 I bought years ago has been trouble free.

Like you showed, the case open keeps it cool enough. It's in fact a brilliant heatsink design, made by engineers that know heat transfer properly. Then someone decided that airflow was NOT part of the heat transfer and took a huge dump on top of all that brilliant engineering. Thank you. Nice f**** job. I can bet that if it had like 2 cm wider of a gap between that CPU cooling fan and the PSU, it would work well.

Its the Apple II computers all over again minus the tech line telling you to drop the unit just to fix it.

Bro putting that fan to max speed sounds like my ps4

You know what, Dell designed this case around the time 6th-7th gen Intel cpus were out and they were pretty cool-running. Even then the ventilation wasn't ideal but with 8-9th gen cpus getting hotter, the case design was hopeless. This style case didn't stick around very long too, only about 3 years, and their current xps case is far better optimized. The design that came before was one that Dell was using for about a decade with only small internal layout adjustments.

The problem with most of dell computers is that they only have 3 fan speeds: inactive, audible and way too loud. And they use crappy loud fans and design their cases so that they accumulate a lot of dust (pull fan config). I had Inspiron 5680 with aircooler and they didn't even bother to mount vrm heatsinks (I think watercooled one had them), put ssd slot behind gpu (which wasn't such a bad thing, because when I was transfering lots of data I just turned on gpu fan and it didn't throttle). Motherboard of that piece of shit also had a feature that would check if all parts are present, which would be ok if it wasn't impossible to turn off. I replaced stock cooler for noctua nh-u9s and it kept showing message at boot that fan was not detected. And eventually I also replaced a PSU, because its fan was really loud and was making knocking sound. Then I upgraded the case and it was showing that front panel is missing (so they must have some checking if stuff is theirs). When I started using my pc as server, I had enough of those bios messages (because it didn't continue to boot, but just waited for someone to press escape) and bought a normal motherboard. I also upgraded from 2 unmatched sticks of samsung and gskill 2600 and 2400 MHz 16 gb of ram to 32 gb 3200 MHz. I also swapped stock ssd for Crucial p5 and the only original components are cpu, gpu and 1tb hdd. TLDR: If you need a desktop PC, don't buy Dell and if you need a cheap laptop also ignore Dell and just get an older used thinkpad.

damn nice vacuum cleaner (I`v never heard such noise from pc)

They fixed this on newer models I believe

What about the laptop 17" XPS?

what's the software you use to benchmark?

This was my grandfather's computer design.

Hot air rises, heat radiates.

what is the name of the software in which you're seeing the temperature?

It very much looks like that PSU should be rotated 180° in its mount. If that was done, and if it sucked in air from outside the case, the PSU would pass air from outside the case through its side hole and into the CPU fan.

The Inspiron 5675 desktop from around this era, however, is pretty much a standard mATX layout, and the size is almost the same. Other than the stupid choice of facing the PSU to the bottom without ventilation holes, it is okay.

I remember those Dell fans videos here on YT. 10.000rpm sounded like a jet. xD

Wow, I'm glad I got a CyberPowerPC for my most recent computer two years ago after years of buying Dells. The circulation on this POS is atrocious.

This issue would be solved very easily if they put a front fan, or if the heatsink is attached to some kind of guide and has more or less the same area of the upper fan. Another un-wise design consideration is the usage of a "generic form factor" PSU. Unbeliebable how they can outsource to make all sorts of components, but not a power source well suited for a compact enclosure. A complete disaster. The quality disparity in those dell computers is scary.

the middle finger at the start 💀

To be honest idk why the vent is so godamn small

Omg it’s the greatest technician who ever lived on RU-vid

At this point just get a 3d printer and make a air channel for the thing. I had a friend with one of these and I did something similar with glue and molding plastic. It's ugly as shit but who is going to see it when it's closed. Keeps temps down under load. I created two channels for air side by side. Take the air incoming from the back vent, pass one channel over the CPU and the smaller one over the RAM and then pipe it up to the top fan as an exhaust. Similar to heat pipes on laptops. Of course I molded a new heat sink using recycled aluminum cans so that the air channel pipe goes right through the heatsink and I used the original fan to pull the air. It's ugly, the plastic is pink and the heatsink has some left over bits of color in it from the can labels but damn if it doesn't work. The temp sits around 79 when benching with it some times reaching up to 84 but that was the highest it got.

I don't understand why they'd opt for that heatsink/blower combo when they could have easily fit a more traditional heatsink and fan that would perform significantly better.

I have that standings at graphics card but idk what it’s called?

I used to work at a dell repair center. that metal chassis is used on alienwares and another line of theirs. I called that frrame the Choke me daddy chassis. oh and they used that same damn design on throug h13th gen cpus.

Its almost a better option to pull the cpu, gpu, ram, storage, throw that POS case in the trash, and get a new case, motherboard, and PSU (it didn't look like that swinger special came out)

Wait until you see the XPS 8920, with only ONE singular top fan that sounds like a jet engine.

they weren't always built like this. I built some by just gutting the case and installing my own junk from micro center in them. keeps them from prying eyes. they were for a shop that didn't have the best security but it was a good location.

never knew dell was so bad at pc builds. Makes me glad I saved up and got someone to build one for me

Oh, so that's what those computer screens in F.E.A.R were talking about.

Dell Latitudes (Laptops) are great though, imo even better than thinkpads.

Lol that fan sound

ive had this exact one since 2020 and i literally just run it with the sidepannel off cause of how badly it overheats,