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Dell Optiplex SFF vs USFF heat?

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Valnar

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Apr 3, 2001
Messages
4,561
There are a bunch of off lease Dell Optiplex's on eBay and I want to buy a SFF or USFF version for an IP camera NVR (Blue Iris). My only worry is I don't know how hot these things get. Since they were made for business use, I assume they were designed around an idle of 0-5% CPU. In my case, it'll probably be a constant 40-50% all day long.

If anyone has one, can you tell me what your Speedfan temps show on it under different loads? thanks.
 
Depending on what processor is in them, the temps will vary. But what's more important is that the USFF cases have ZERO airflow and overheat bad resulting in not only bursted, but fried caps.

I picked up a cheap 745 USFF and before I knew it, it was running super slow when just trying to do a clonezilla backup of its stock setup. Once I opened the case I discovered why--there's no place for the hd, chipset, or memory heat to go! And the stupid 'smart' fans just kept puttering along while the chipset heatsink got hot enough to burn me if I touched it.

The only solution was to remove the hard drive completely, replace it with a uncased ssd, leave the case open, and use HWinfo to floor all the fans. This keeps it 'cool enough' but it still can spike up in heat. The good thing is that a q6600 swapped right in and works great.

If you plan to have the NVR storage inside the case, forget the USFF format and go with the SFF, which should have a better cooling design.

I don't have speedfan, but under hwinfo, the 4 core temps will get to 40c just idling. When I floor the fans, this drops by over 10c to below 30c.

Hope this helps. (y)
 
Hmm okay thanks for the info. The 745 was about 10 years old so I imagine the chipset process was bigger too. Was it a Core2Duo or PentiumD? That could explain it.
 
I bought my mom an Optiplex 760 USFF a couple years ago. It works for what it is, does not get too hot but I'm only around it when she hits a setting wrong, it's reliable hardware. I put a cheap SSD in it along with Win 10 and it's good enough
 
Well I pulled the plug on a Optiplex 9020 USFF on eBay so I'll be able to answer that question myself shortly. It has an i7 that's overly powerful for the task so hopefully will keep the CPU usage down too. We'll see.

It appears the heat & capacitor issues are on the older ones. Hopefully they've redesigned the heat expulsion a bit better since then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_OptiPlex
 
Valnar said:
Hmm okay thanks for the info. The 745 was about 10 years old so I imagine the chipset process was bigger too. Was it a Core2Duo or PentiumD? That could explain it.
Click to expand...
Yeah it's old, but so is everything I have (I still have P4-1.8s that I'm using). Some of the other Dells I have from that era like the gx520 and 210l have no cooling issues with upgraded processors.

The 745 originally had an e6600 and the heating issues were even before I upgraded it to the q6600. When I realized the 745 had cooling issues, I tried everything to make the airflow better--case orientation, checking the fans, and more. It was only when I noticed that it ran much cooler without the cover and figured out how to change the fan speeds was I able to use the system--otherwise it would just get too hot for my liking and would have just died a quick death.
 
Valnar said:
It appears the heat & capacitor issues are on the older ones. Hopefully they've redesigned the heat expulsion a bit better since then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_OptiPlex
Click to expand...
Yeah, I see that article states 2003-2004. I'm happy to say that aside from the 745, I haven't seen an issue with any of our other Dells like the gx520, 210l, and precision 670. I think it's just that case design that was terrible.
 
Valnar said:
There are a bunch of off lease Dell Optiplex's on eBay and I want to buy a SFF or USFF version for an IP camera NVR (Blue Iris). My only worry is I don't know how hot these things get. Since they were made for business use, I assume they were designed around an idle of 0-5% CPU. In my case, it'll probably be a constant 40-50% all day long.

If anyone has one, can you tell me what your Speedfan temps show on it under different loads? thanks.
Click to expand...

I picked up a Wyse 7040 (Dell Optiplex 7040 USFF) w/ i7-6700TE for use as a micro hypervisor several months ago. I've since added 2x16GB DDR4, and a 500GB Samsung 960 Evo NVMe SSD.
As of now, it's most intensive workload has been running Plex via docker, which generally transcodes native 720p or 1080p HEVC files to H264 for streaming to a few users.
The average CPU temps are 35C idle, 60C under load, while the PCH is consistently hovering around 64-65C.
It's a great little device, especially if you can get one for a good price.
 

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Got my 9020 USFF and its working great. Core Temps usually around 45 at 13% cpu average.
 
Check the surrounding components as well. My core temps never get above 39 even without me adjusting the fans, but the chipset and ram is frying at these core temps.
 
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