Dell Vostro 460- upgradeable enough to be worth it?

[NTMBK]

Sure it will. For starters, it will overclock, which tilts the price/performance equation strongly in the direction of the custom system.

Dells are cheap, I'll give them that. But I mean that both ways. They use cheap parts too.

In order to get a good OC you'll need upgraded cooling (which bumps up price) and the unlocked processor (which bumps up the price), and you reduce the expected lifetime of the single most important component in your PC.

I'm currently writing this on a PC I scavenged from work as it was being thrown out- a 10 year old Dell which still runs beautifully. (2 x 2GHz Xeon w. HT, 2GB RAM.) My work uses Dell for all our mission critical machines, and they're sure as hell more reliable than some custom special with a cooked CPU. The consumer ranges may be dodgy, but the Dell business machines are reliable.

 

[mfenn]

If you want an inexpensive, quiet, and well-designed machine (which is what you wanted in your other thread), a Dell Vostro/Optiplex is great. They spend millions and millions of dollars on R&D and qualification. No, it isn't as flexible as a custom-built machine, but it will very competently take care of 95% of people's computing needs.

 

[Agamar]

I got one about 5 months ago during a sale. I got the highest end quad-core i7, put my higher-end 650W power supply, 600GB raptor HDD, and 16G of crucial memory in it. I also put in my Nvidia GTX 460.

I have been running it no problems from day 1. I have played quite a few of the latest games with no issues.

 

[T_Yamamoto]

I got one about 5 months ago during a sale. I got the highest end quad-core i7, put my higher-end 650W power supply, 600GB raptor HDD, and 16G of crucial memory in it. I also put in my Nvidia GTX 460.

I have been running it no problems from day 1. I have played quite a few of the latest games with no issues.

Highest end? Like...2600k? They put those in dells?

 

[gmaster456]

Highest end? Like...2600k? They put those in dells?

Yep. But the K version is only available in the Alienwares to my knowledge. But they do offer, Vostros Optiplexes and Precisions with the 2600 non K version.

 

[engiNURD]

Yah, I've been buying dell deals (for home use) and upgrading the vidcards for a while now (if needed). It's usually for my family/friends who don't want to spend much on a custom system, and need a monitor/kb/mouse along with the tower. Price ranges from $350 (w/o monitor) up to $500 (w/ monitor), but typically get the $430 w/ 22" monitor deal. For those that want to play games, I upgrade the vidcard to something the PSU can handle.

Quality is decent, and reliability has been good. I started doing this during the Pentium Dual-Core/Core2 era Vostro 200's (so around '06/'07? at about 1-3/yr) and I've only had one PSU and one HDD die (different machines) out of the dozen+ or so that I've setup. Both of those were after the 1yr standard warranty, so I replaced them myself. Haven't really had to use Dell support for those home systems (I use it a lot at work). I actually get more support calls from friends that I've built custom gaming machines for than the dell buyers.