Dell Precision t3500 for gaming?

Hey all I have a t3500 on the way by next week and though I don't plan on gaming much on it this still seems like a great thread to join in on. I ordered one with the w3530 cpu, 8 gb ram, 500 gb HDD and some kind of Cheapo Quadro. I'll repost here once it comes. If anyone's interested i picked it up for 68$+28$ shipping (I think I got a good deal but I'm hesitant to get too happy til I see it running). My purpose for this machine is to run my modest studio for making youtube vids, DJing and streaming. Thanks for all the info posted here everyone I can already see how I will upgrade it in the near future.
Welcome Robert. Best of luck and let us know how it goes.
Having used ssds in my t3500, t5500, and t7500 machines, they are definitely welcome.
Good to know. Were they SATA? The subject of PCIe SSDs came up in the Dell forums recently. Had been wondering if boot drive in that configuration was possible.

http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/desktop/f/3514/p/20009778/20991344#20991344
 
Yea, I have never found a machine running a decent SSD on SATA to be slow by any means... over 200mbps and I'm happy :)

anyone on a T3500 with 6 cores?

Hell, I have a older 12core 1snt gen i7 (Xeon) MacPro tower I got Windows running on.. runs pretty good. Haven't put in a GPU to try games thought.
 
My T3500 has a 5670 in it, and I have HT enabled so 12 threads. Its a solid gamer with the gtx 1060 6gb. But I built it and don't use it. Last game I played was super Mario brothers on an emulator, but it does rock anything at 1080p
 
My T3500 has a 5670 in it, and I have HT enabled so 12 threads. Its a solid gamer with the gtx 1060 6gb. But I built it and don't use it. Last game I played was super Mario brothers on an emulator, but it does rock anything at 1080p
Don't use? Well, hop to it man! :p

Been rocking the rig in my sig with Doom arcade mode at Nightmare difficulty .
 

Attachments

  • doom.1.jpg
    doom.1.jpg
    208.6 KB · Views: 36
Last edited:
It's what I always seem to do when I build a gamer. End up not playing very many games, yet have an extremely capable box... I'll probably start on Fallout again though.
 
These are nice machines. The t7500 on eBay is also a nice basis for a inexpensive gaming rig. You can get a hex core easily, they have multiple pci-e 16x slots and they come with a 1000 watt + silver certified psu. Throw in a graphics card and you are good to go.
 
Last edited:
These are nice machines. The t7500 on eBay is also a nice basis for a inexpensive gaming rig. You can get a hex code easily, they have multiple pci-e 16x slots and they come with a 1000 watt + silver certified psu. Throw in a graphics card and you are good to go.

I've found the T5500 to be the sweet spot of the 3. Same size as a T3500, but comes with an 850w silver certified PSU, and can take the ECC registered RAM that is way cheaper.

They are especially great if you manage to pick one up with the second CPU card. I have one now with dual X5650, 96GB of RAM, an SSD, and a GTX 660Ti as a secondary box for crunching video content, etc.

Making one for my bro for his bday, dual X5660s or so (still to buy em), 48GB of RAM, an SSD, a GTX 970.

I also have a T3500 with a W3670 CPU, SSD, 18GB of RAM and a GTX 750Ti. Haven't really fiddled with it much, work is keeping me away from my toys a lot. :( May sell this one to a friend.

The T3500 though is best if you want to Hackintosh, due to it has an X58 chipset.
 
Another T3500 appeared while I was at the airport. Love it when that happens. SSD with the OS is gone. No biggie.

Got a T5500 board free since it had a few bent pins when a butterfingered tech dropped a CPU on the socket. Thinking of making it into a video editing box since it could then be cheaply populated with 48gb registered RAM.

? Do you think the 525w power supply will handle that?
.
t3500.2.jpg
ssd.jpg
 
Hello!

I was reading this lengthy and educational post and wanted to check if you guys can help me with the issue I am having.
I have Precision T3500 too, with Dell 09KPNV motherboard, A17 BIOS, Intel Xeon W3530 2.80GHz and 12GB RAM, two SATA drives and Asus Xonar DGX PCIe audio card.

This came with an Nvidia Quadro FX graphics card in the primary, blue PCIe x16 slot that I was never able to install the latest drivers for, because the screen would just go blank in the middle of installation and Windows 7 would freeze. I replaced this Quadro FX by ADM Radeon R7 200 later on, and updated to Windows 10. I had similar issues with the latest AMD driver as well, but it seems Microsoft got it fixed, so the AMD card seemed to work fine with drivers updated by Windows.

I decided recently to update the graphics card with EVGA GeForce GTX 1050Ti 4GB, and Windows kept trying to install the driver for it and fail like with the very first graphics card, and attempts to install the latest driver from the vendor will give the same results - computer would hang with blank screen in the middle of installation. I tried installing the graphics card in the other black PCIe x16 slot and bingo, it worked like a charm with the latest drivers installed. I moved the card back to blue PCIe x16 slot, and it would start loading Windows, but stop in the middle of the way and beep continuously with blank screen.

I decided to try another EVGA GeForce 1060 SC Gaming card and run into exactly the same issue as with GTX 1050Ti. Does not work in blue slot, works in black slot.
Tried disabling SERR messages in BIOS, no luck.

I do not see any bad pins or any other damage in the blue slot.

I am planning to take the ASUS audio card out and try the graphics card in the blue slot again.
I am also planning to upgrade the CPU to X5690.

Any ideas what could cause the primary blue PCIe x16 slot to fail with GTX card while it worked fine with AMD card, and GTX cards work fine in the black PCIe slot?
Thanks!
 
switching between AMD/ Nvidia causes graphics issues with any system. You need to clean the AMD stuff out with a remover and then reinstall fresh drivers. Either that or your Mobo is bad. Normally these have trouble with the AMD cards.
 
Honestly, I would install the GPU that you want to stick with, then reinstall Windows 10.

Also, there are two different heat sinks that come with the T3500. One is just a hunk of aluminum with fins, the other has heat pipes. Can you describe yours?
 
Honestly, I would install the GPU that you want to stick with, then reinstall Windows 10.

Also, there are two different heat sinks that come with the T3500. One is just a hunk of aluminum with fins, the other has heat pipes. Can you describe yours?

I re-flashed the BIOS, reset the settings to defaults, and set them back up, but have not tried the blue slot after that yet.
I also run built-in BIOS diagnostics, and online motherboard test, both came up clean on everything, including PCIe related tests.
I would not go as far as reinstalling Windows 10.

The heat sink is the one with heat pipes.
 
switching between AMD/ Nvidia causes graphics issues with any system. You need to clean the AMD stuff out with a remover and then reinstall fresh drivers. Either that or your Mobo is bad. Normally these have trouble with the AMD cards.

Would not AMD/Nvidia driver conflict affect both PCIe x16 slots?
 
No. In fact a trick to use an AMD card in one of these computers is to use an Nvidia card in the black slot and put the real card in the blue slot. There's a type of address problem that causes it.. So the long and short answer is it depends..

I can attest to running a T3500 with X5670 and 12gb of ram on Win 7 with both a Geforce GTX 1060 6gb and a AMD Radeon 7790 before that. Both cards perform flawlessly on this computer. Obviously the 1060 runs better but the 7790 is surprising too when I had it installed
 
No. In fact a trick to use an AMD card in one of these computers is to use an Nvidia card in the black slot and put the real card in the blue slot. There's a type of address problem that causes it.. So the long and short answer is it depends..

I can attest to running a T3500 with X5670 and 12gb of ram on Win 7 with both a Geforce GTX 1060 6gb and a AMD Radeon 7790 before that. Both cards perform flawlessly on this computer. Obviously the 1060 runs better but the 7790 is surprising too when I had it installed

Interesting. I will try 1060 in blue slot with 1050 in black slot at the same time. The native 525W power supply should allow that. And will look into AMD software clean up.

What is the performance bottleneck of T3500 in general? Hard drive speed limited by SATA 2?
 
Last edited:
No. In fact a trick to use an AMD card in one of these computers is to use an Nvidia card in the black slot and put the real card in the blue slot. There's a type of address problem that causes it.. So the long and short answer is it depends..

I can attest to running a T3500 with X5670 and 12gb of ram on Win 7 with both a Geforce GTX 1060 6gb and a AMD Radeon 7790 before that. Both cards perform flawlessly on this computer. Obviously the 1060 runs better but the 7790 is surprising too when I had it installed

I just left GTX 1060 in the black slot and added GTX 1050 Ti to the blue slot, and Windows loaded fine!!! It did not recognize and auto-install the drivers for GTX 1050 Ti, but I successfully installed them manually.

So, apparently, there is nothing wrong with the blue slot?
 
These computers have some address problems with the slots where stuff gets funky sometimes, but it's a tradeoff because they are dirt cheap but extremely fast for what you pay.

I have a cheap Sata 3 PNY SSD as my main drive and yes that's the bottleneck really, but it's fast enough. 270ish mbps transfer rate IIRC. The X5670 is fast enough but a X or W5690 would rock with 3.9 GHZ hex core. The PCIE 2.0 is not a bottleneck on the GTX 1060 and this thing rocks modern games.
 
What is the performance bottleneck of T3500 in general? Hard drive speed limited by SATA 2?

SATA 2 hard drive speeds won't matter much if you have a decent SSD on there. Sure, it'll only go at 3 Gb/s instead of 6 Gb/s, but with a SSD a bunch of the perceived speed increase comes from the super low latency on the drive and that'll still be intact.
 
These computers have some address problems with the slots where stuff gets funky sometimes, but it's a tradeoff because they are dirt cheap but extremely fast for what you pay.

I have a cheap Sata 3 PNY SSD as my main drive and yes that's the bottleneck really, but it's fast enough. 270ish mbps transfer rate IIRC. The X5670 is fast enough but a X or W5690 would rock with 3.9 GHZ hex core. The PCIE 2.0 is not a bottleneck on the GTX 1060 and this thing rocks modern games.

Any ideas where I can get new Intel x5690?
I purchased from one online store in "New" condition, but it had remnants of thermal paste on it, and obviously was used.
 
realistically, you probably won't find one. It was released Q1 of 2011, and IIRC discontinued by 2013.. There was also a boom where 1366 xeons became popular because they could be had cheap and overclocked well.
 
Back
Top