Last week, I purchased a refurbished "Scratch and Dent" Dell XPS-8300 from their Outlet site as a back-up unit to my Dell T3400 workstation. I'm a big fan of the i7-2600 Intel CPU, and I was able to find several pages of these processors in the recently discontinued Dell XPS-8300 on Dell's Outlet site. I paid $699 for my XPS-8300 + tax. Free shipping. My XPS-8300 came with the i7-2600 Intel CPU and a 1 Terabyte SATA-II Hard Drive at 7200 with 16mb of cache. It also came with a 16 DVD as well as a separate 6X BluRay read/write drive. The PSU is rated at 460 watts, with a nice strong 12v rail. Came with only 2 gigs of DDR3-SDRAM and no graphics card. But it did come with Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit) as the operating system. In any event, I bought a PNY-NVS300 graphics card for my x16-PCIe slot to support dual-monitors that support the Nvidia "NView" desktop software from New Egg for $115 and purchased 16 Gigs of DDR3 PC3-10600 unbuffered RAM from Crucial Memory for $92. I also purchased Samsung's 64 GB Solid State HD for $89.95 from New Egg to use as my boot-drive. The reviews of this HD are stellar. All in all, I probably saved nearly $400 from having to purchase a new unit. Even more important, was the fact that I was able to obtain a TON more flexibility in CONFIGURING my computer, given that Dell's brand new XPS-8500 essentially comes in 3 standard builds, with no option to add Windows 7 Pro, or additional memory. And as far as the "Scratch & Dent" status of my XPS-8300 was concerned, I couldn't find any dents on arrival, and the scratches were only noticeable with a magnifying glass on the case. Also comes with the 1-year warranty, same as new.
Does the SSD just sit in a bracket beside the HDD? I may do this to my new XPS 8500 sooner or later. Kinda shocked how slow boot up is vs my laptop with SSD. Will be nice when HDD's disappear.
It is a USD $600 card shopped as new. It is more than the CPU and motherboard together. The question is why. If one is looking for a motherboard to house the CPU, choosing one that offers more PCIeX16 slots would offer more lower cost options to equip the graphics card(s).
Yes. In the case of my Samsung they gave me a 3.5" bracket to screw the 2.5" SSD onto. Samsung also provided the SATA cable and power cable, not too mention a copy of Norton Ghost for data migration ( I suggest doing a fresh install, though) It's mind-boggling just how small (and thin) these solid state drives are! The Samsung 830 Series has exceptional performance. The 64 Gig MZ-7PC064 is $89.95 at New Egg.
Thanks. I'm thinking of just replacing the HDD with 240gb SSD. I don't use much storage space. And SSD are really getting cheap.
The SSD... solid state disk... is a misnomer. Where is the DISK? There is no disk. Nothing is spinning. SSS for solid state storage is more proper. Often times the SSD is overrated. Yes the boot up is fast, and data access is fast. But it seems a waste trying to put everything on a SSD. For example, for most of the cached data during your day pluse the operating system and your apps, a 40GB to 60GB drive may be sufficient. You don't necessarily have to put all your archives, your favorate family photos and videos all on the SSD. The difference between access those data for your viewing from a SSD compared to from a HDD may be negligible. Why spend the extra money to buy a humongeous SSD and put everything on it? You can easily get a small SSD, put the OS, apps on it and use it for trading cached data, temp storage, etc.. All archived data can be stored on a more inexpensive second drive.
OP, I've had two "custom rigs" built from ground up by a computer guru, expert, nerd, whatever. Lol Best thing I can point out is stick with what Scat has told you about the Dell outlet and the T3500. I get a reliable, more predictable machine for about 1/3 of what I paid for the prior "race car fast," newest "just gotta have" setup that's more gamer than necessary for a trader. Knowing trading is already a minus sum game (commissions, slippage, too many fees to list, etc), no need to pay three times what you should IMO for a quick, reliable setup... Btw op, if you ran www.speedtest.net what are you getting down, and up right now? No need to buy a Ferrari if low test regular unleaded is what you'll be using... Last, no flames about minus sum game vs the typical zero sum game thinking. Even when you win, you still lose to a degree as you're as my Grand Father used to say, "greasing more palms than you could shake a stick at."
I have 2 custom-made Q6600 @ 3.0Ghz over 4 years old each ... pretty much running 24/6/365. I had 1 HD go intermittent failure on one unit a couple months ago, I replaced the 2 HDs of the raid array, 1 at a time, no sw re-install whatsoever. I would say a key aspect in any computer is having good airflow through the case, I know Dell & ACER (& probably others) routinely use shrouds for outside-air intake directly on the CPU, but that doesn't mean the rest of the case has good cooling. I would bet many (too many) of the short-lived custom built computer were lacking proper air-flow through the case.
No doubt heat is a killer! My last build setup was a cooler master case and no problems with heat. In fact, I only had one problem with both custom builds, and still no problems today. Haven't had any heat issues at all with two dell precisions either though. Also zero problems with both precisions, and in at 1/3 the money...