Nice score, but you missed the M.2 NVMe interface next to the SATA connector. You can turn these into a low-power file server or Multimedia server by adding a 2-4 TB SATA drive for the data and a small NVMe for the OS. 🤓
I bought two newer different ones second hand for about 100 euro each. Most Dell service contracts end after 5 years, so they dump them. This is an old model. They come in various different configurations. Mine have both HDMI and Displayports, besides one also having a VGA slot. The brass screw is for a small external WiFi antenna as the casing is metal. It requires a tiny Wifi card. They come with basic SSD's for like the OS. You can add an Nvme next to it. The newer models come with quad cores also, use really low power and are basically silent despite the fan. Great computers for all kinds of basic stuff running W11. They come with a service tag making it very easy to use Dell support for installing drivers and all.
Antenna is for the wifi it also takes a M2 SSD as well as the 2.5in drive. It has connection for HDMI connector up to 64mb ddr3 memory. Nice compact little machine.
That thing under the heat sink should be the south bridge chip! It basically handles IO, USB, sata, pcie and other interfaces. It😅 works in tandem with a Northbridge chip.
The SS logo next to the USB ports stands for superspeed, that means they're all usb 3. I was also confused when I bought my Dell precision 5520 in 2017 and all the USB ports were black. Also those T processors are really interesting, they are standard socketed desktop processors that fit in the same socket/motherboard as your regular non-T or K processors. Unfortunately they're usually only sold to large businesses, as the T stands for "tray". I've long thought about buying a second hand T processor like an i5 12600T to put in a home theater PC because they run more efficiently than a regular processor.
That external antenna is for wifi,I believe.Being that this is a 4th Gen Intel,it cannot run Win11 legitimately ,so a Linux or Dual boot Win 10/Linux is in order to future proof it. Well worth your 15 bucks.
Certainly a good deal. Could definitely put Windows 11 on it if I really wanted too, it's not hard to get around the TPM requirement. I believe you may be right about the antenna, that's what I get for only working with laptops 90% of the time.
This computer does have an expansion port on it. The black connector by the CMOS battery is a port expansion header. You can buy a selection of add on ports to give you more external IO, and the port is mounted to the knockout in the back of the case. I would personally buy the HDMI add on port and use it as a media computer for the TV. I have a Lenovo Think centre Tiny that I use just for this purpose and it works great.
I run this exact same unit as my homemade server of sorts...with OpenMediaVault and a variety of personal services like Pihole, a BOOTP server, some old gameservers (Quake3, UnrealTournament etc). With a M.2 SSD for Debian and a 2TB drive for data. Runs absolutely great! and got it for like $15 haha.
Very good to know. My friends are talking me into using it to run a Minecraft server. I missed the M.2 slot when making the video and luckily people have been pointing it out.
Those were aimed at business, hence the DisplayPort rather than HDMI. Very common in retail, hospitality, restaurants, medical offices, hospitals, etc. These were often mounted on the back of the monitor or under the monitor shelf, where it's small size kept it out of the way, and unnoticed.
Core 4th gen CPU PCs can do many things, especially if you stop think of it as needing a monitor for more than initial setup and upkeep. It is an overkill home assistant, if you are into home automation. Like others have said, it can be a great small NAS with the SATA M.2 and Sata drive connection. You have WiFi on it, as well as, and a network port, so you could turn it into a firewall/router/AP with IPfire, pfSense or OPNsense, but the 16GB RAM is way more than what is needed. You CAN upgrade the CPU, but you already have one of the better ones for the Micro form factor and any upgrade would create more heat to dissipate. I currently use this exact model in my kitchen for internet recipes and food videos (@720p).
i7 4785T is validated by Dell as it's 35W, the same as the 4590T. The 4790T is 45W so is not validated but theoretically should work. The cooler may not handle it though.
SS means Super Speed so those are USB 3.0. I don't know why they aren't blue. Hmmm. I have been looking for a micro for some time but I want a specific one. Another great video! Keep it up!
Thank you for your feedback! I have to assume these things are pretty rare since I had literally never seen them before making this video despite the ubiquity of Dell office computers and their niche appeal. There's plenty online from what I've seen but I doubt you're likely to stumble upon one in the wild like with other Optiplexs.
For multiple years Dell was not coloring USB3.0 ports on business line machines. It's a little frustrating plugging things in needing to remember which ports are the 3.0 because where I put my tower I don't have good lighting to see the tiny labels. The blue would be easy to see.
I have 3 of those mini PCs, a Dell, a HP, a Lenovo all essentially very similar 7" sq PCs, they all run on a Skylake 6100T chip dual core 4 thread, and the Dell one lets me run Win7 on it with a Gigabyte USB3 patched installer. The other 2 have not allowed that so far so will have to run Win 10 or Linux. Mine cost about $100 or so from Microcenter. One of these days I will try Haiku OS and Hackintosh just because... After Skylake its damn impossible to get Win 7 running except in a VM. The machine you have is still well worth the $15 and could run Win 7 without hassle.
These are definitely not rare, they sell in the millions for basic office use, especially to large corporations, universities and the like where there's a demand for small, easy to install yet still somewhat serviceable computers, where space savings is a benefit, and where performance requirements are moderate. They're still common today, despite laptops being far more of the default now than ten years ago. Also, 8GB of RAM has been insufficient for even a basic office worker's application load for... well, maybe not ten years, but not far off. Oh, and that antenna connector is for the WiFi, nothing more complicated than that. You can even see it's connected to the m.2 WiFi card inside the case.
Very interesting, I had assumed this were somewhat rare given the fact I've countless standard full towers and SFF PCs but had literally never seen one of these until a few days ago. The appeal makes sense though, pretty much everything I guessed they might be used for in the video appears to line up with the research you did and what you said. Not sure I agree with the 8GB of ram not being enough for office applications when this thing was likely to be in use though. I was using 8GB in an office setting as recent as two years ago and had no issue. There's obviously a lot of variation in the resource needs for office applications, but I'd be willing to guess the type of customer purchasing a PC in this form factor is not going to need it for intense office workloads.
@ColinSlater33 That likely means you've been more exposed to more performance sensitive operations (say, natural or computer science departments at universities, etc.), as regular desktops are essentially never bought for regular office use these days - without add-in-cards they're 90% empty air, bring no real benefits, consume more power (which starts to matter even for a few watts when you're running thousands of them) and unless you've got a need for compute or graphics acceleration or other accelerators, the PC will be using the iGPU and no other AICs. And the large size of a regular desktop is a poor fit for today's terrible working conditions, uhm, sorry, "flexible workspaces", where space saved means money saved - though they're still perfectly usable in a regular office setting too. At the university I work at this form factor or the marginally larger ones (with an integrated PSU but no PCIe slots) have been the default desktop option for more than a decade, though these days the vast majority of people use laptops. And you might have had an okay experience with 8GB, but most likely your computer is using a decent amount of swap space - I regularly run close to my 16gb with my regular workload of a couple of word docs, outlook, teams, some pdfs and a few Firefox windows loaded with tabs (less than a hundred total, but still a few), plus some background tasks and management software. Windows is pretty decent at dealing with this, especially with an ssd, but more ram will still make the system more responsive (though more than 16GB is overkill unless you use chrome and have far more tabs open than me).
Very good to know. In the office environments I've worked in I have pretty much seen only laptops, which makes sense given the trends towards remote work and "flexible workspaces" as you call them over the past few years. I could definitely see these things being more popular before laptops became the standard in offices but I don't see why they would be very popular these days outside of use cases where a company wants a computer to stay in one place for information security reasons while also having strict space requirements.
@@ColinSlater33 this would be a great Batocera machine. Or homelab. Or whatever doesn't require a GPU, as the processor is actually kind of good, and with 16GB of RAM you're golden. Haswell still holds up today for a lot of things. I'm still using a Haswell chip (2 actually, both i5-4590) and with an SSD it's quite tolerable, can even run Windows 11 on it (unofficially, but hey I got it to work, and it carried over my Windows 10 license key, so it's legal) and my main rig is running a rolling-release distro of Linux (specifically Garuda) so to say that it's outdated, while true, is not to say that it can't run current operating systems and be usable.
r/MiniPC's: "am i a joke to you?" Intel nucs are even smaller. They even have PCs that are the size of fire sticks. minisforum makes them in a N100. Also 1. That is a wifi/ BT attenta. 2. The T in The CPU name is low wattage, but isn't laptop which usually has U at the end. 3. Lots of times the Wi-Fi chip can be pulled out and you can put an m.2 sata m key in.
I'll have to check that community out. I've heard of NUCs but I assume they don't have the same appeal or as large of a customer base as these ones which were intended for enterprise use cases. Could very well be wrong though, I don't know much about them. Also, the Wi-Fi chip is not in an M.2 slot, however there is one tucked away under the driver caddy that I missed in this video.
Intel NUCs are a it smaller, but a lot more expensive for the consumer. Even when people start selling their NUCs the secondary market will be small compared to these previous office machines.
@@ColinSlater33 two of the big mini PCs that aren't one of the big legacy brands are Minisforum and Beelink. Also Asus just bought out the NUC brand from Intel.
Nice score, but you missed the M.2 NVMe interface next to the SATA connector. You can turn these into a low-power file server or Multimedia server by adding a 2-4 TB SATA drive for the data and a small NVMe for the OS. 🤓
Looks like I did miss the m.2 slot. I am definitely leaning towards using it as a server as this point as I'm not quite sure what else to do with it.
I don't think this generation had NVMEs, they only had NGFF SATA. P
@@mrkdosmil2879 I had a Z97 motherboard which was 4th gen Intel and that had NVMe. It was only Gen 2x2 but yeah, NVMe was a thing, even back then.
I bought two newer different ones second hand for about 100 euro each. Most Dell service contracts end after 5 years, so they dump them. This is an old model. They come in various different configurations. Mine have both HDMI and Displayports, besides one also having a VGA slot. The brass screw is for a small external WiFi antenna as the casing is metal. It requires a tiny Wifi card. They come with basic SSD's for like the OS. You can add an Nvme next to it. The newer models come with quad cores also, use really low power and are basically silent despite the fan. Great computers for all kinds of basic stuff running W11. They come with a service tag making it very easy to use Dell support for installing drivers and all.
I like to use these mini Dell PC's as media players (connected to my TV with a mini wireless keyboard with integrated touchpad)!!!!👍👍👍
Antenna is for the wifi it also takes a M2 SSD as well as the 2.5in drive. It has connection for HDMI connector up to 64mb ddr3 memory. Nice compact little machine.
That thing under the heat sink should be the south bridge chip! It basically handles IO, USB, sata, pcie and other interfaces. It😅 works in tandem with a Northbridge chip.
The SS logo next to the USB ports stands for superspeed, that means they're all usb 3. I was also confused when I bought my Dell precision 5520 in 2017 and all the USB ports were black.
Also those T processors are really interesting, they are standard socketed desktop processors that fit in the same socket/motherboard as your regular non-T or K processors. Unfortunately they're usually only sold to large businesses, as the T stands for "tray". I've long thought about buying a second hand T processor like an i5 12600T to put in a home theater PC because they run more efficiently than a regular processor.
That external antenna is for wifi,I believe.Being that this is a 4th Gen Intel,it cannot run Win11 legitimately ,so a Linux or Dual boot Win 10/Linux is in order to future proof it. Well worth your 15 bucks.
Certainly a good deal. Could definitely put Windows 11 on it if I really wanted too, it's not hard to get around the TPM requirement. I believe you may be right about the antenna, that's what I get for only working with laptops 90% of the time.
@@ColinSlater33 You can see the cable going from the antenna jack to the WiFi card...
Yep, definitely see it now. Did not see it originally.
Yes, it can run win 11 iot legitimately
This computer does have an expansion port on it. The black connector by the CMOS battery is a port expansion header. You can buy a selection of add on ports to give you more external IO, and the port is mounted to the knockout in the back of the case.
I would personally buy the HDMI add on port and use it as a media computer for the TV. I have a Lenovo Think centre Tiny that I use just for this purpose and it works great.
I should’ve been more clear, I was talking about PCIe when I said “expansion slot”. Good information to know though.
I run this exact same unit as my homemade server of sorts...with OpenMediaVault and a variety of personal services like Pihole, a BOOTP server, some old gameservers (Quake3, UnrealTournament etc).
With a M.2 SSD for Debian and a 2TB drive for data. Runs absolutely great! and got it for like $15 haha.
Very good to know. My friends are talking me into using it to run a Minecraft server. I missed the M.2 slot when making the video and luckily people have been pointing it out.
@ColinSlater33 check out LinuxGSM, it makes setting up game servers so much easier!
@@ColinSlater33 check out LinuxGSM, it makes setting up gameservers so much easier!
Those were aimed at business, hence the DisplayPort rather than HDMI. Very common in retail, hospitality, restaurants, medical offices, hospitals, etc. These were often mounted on the back of the monitor or under the monitor shelf, where it's small size kept it out of the way, and unnoticed.
Makes sense. I assume these things were more popular before laptops took over most offices and tablets replaced a lot of POS systems.
Core 4th gen CPU PCs can do many things, especially if you stop think of it as needing a monitor for more than initial setup and upkeep. It is an overkill home assistant, if you are into home automation. Like others have said, it can be a great small NAS with the SATA M.2 and Sata drive connection. You have WiFi on it, as well as, and a network port, so you could turn it into a firewall/router/AP with IPfire, pfSense or OPNsense, but the 16GB RAM is way more than what is needed. You CAN upgrade the CPU, but you already have one of the better ones for the Micro form factor and any upgrade would create more heat to dissipate. I currently use this exact model in my kitchen for internet recipes and food videos (@720p).
i7 4785T is validated by Dell as it's 35W, the same as the 4590T. The 4790T is 45W so is not validated but theoretically should work. The cooler may not handle it though.
SS means Super Speed so those are USB 3.0. I don't know why they aren't blue. Hmmm. I have been looking for a micro for some time but I want a specific one. Another great video! Keep it up!
Thank you for your feedback! I have to assume these things are pretty rare since I had literally never seen them before making this video despite the ubiquity of Dell office computers and their niche appeal. There's plenty online from what I've seen but I doubt you're likely to stumble upon one in the wild like with other Optiplexs.
For multiple years Dell was not coloring USB3.0 ports on business line machines. It's a little frustrating plugging things in needing to remember which ports are the 3.0 because where I put my tower I don't have good lighting to see the tiny labels. The blue would be easy to see.
I have 3 of those mini PCs, a Dell, a HP, a Lenovo all essentially very similar 7" sq PCs, they all run on a Skylake 6100T chip dual core 4 thread, and the Dell one lets me run Win7 on it with a Gigabyte USB3 patched installer. The other 2 have not allowed that so far so will have to run Win 10 or Linux. Mine cost about $100 or so from Microcenter. One of these days I will try Haiku OS and Hackintosh just because... After Skylake its damn impossible to get Win 7 running except in a VM. The machine you have is still well worth the $15 and could run Win 7 without hassle.
These are definitely not rare, they sell in the millions for basic office use, especially to large corporations, universities and the like where there's a demand for small, easy to install yet still somewhat serviceable computers, where space savings is a benefit, and where performance requirements are moderate. They're still common today, despite laptops being far more of the default now than ten years ago. Also, 8GB of RAM has been insufficient for even a basic office worker's application load for... well, maybe not ten years, but not far off.
Oh, and that antenna connector is for the WiFi, nothing more complicated than that. You can even see it's connected to the m.2 WiFi card inside the case.
Very interesting, I had assumed this were somewhat rare given the fact I've countless standard full towers and SFF PCs but had literally never seen one of these until a few days ago. The appeal makes sense though, pretty much everything I guessed they might be used for in the video appears to line up with the research you did and what you said.
Not sure I agree with the 8GB of ram not being enough for office applications when this thing was likely to be in use though. I was using 8GB in an office setting as recent as two years ago and had no issue. There's obviously a lot of variation in the resource needs for office applications, but I'd be willing to guess the type of customer purchasing a PC in this form factor is not going to need it for intense office workloads.
@ColinSlater33 That likely means you've been more exposed to more performance sensitive operations (say, natural or computer science departments at universities, etc.), as regular desktops are essentially never bought for regular office use these days - without add-in-cards they're 90% empty air, bring no real benefits, consume more power (which starts to matter even for a few watts when you're running thousands of them) and unless you've got a need for compute or graphics acceleration or other accelerators, the PC will be using the iGPU and no other AICs. And the large size of a regular desktop is a poor fit for today's terrible working conditions, uhm, sorry, "flexible workspaces", where space saved means money saved - though they're still perfectly usable in a regular office setting too. At the university I work at this form factor or the marginally larger ones (with an integrated PSU but no PCIe slots) have been the default desktop option for more than a decade, though these days the vast majority of people use laptops. And you might have had an okay experience with 8GB, but most likely your computer is using a decent amount of swap space - I regularly run close to my 16gb with my regular workload of a couple of word docs, outlook, teams, some pdfs and a few Firefox windows loaded with tabs (less than a hundred total, but still a few), plus some background tasks and management software. Windows is pretty decent at dealing with this, especially with an ssd, but more ram will still make the system more responsive (though more than 16GB is overkill unless you use chrome and have far more tabs open than me).
Very good to know. In the office environments I've worked in I have pretty much seen only laptops, which makes sense given the trends towards remote work and "flexible workspaces" as you call them over the past few years. I could definitely see these things being more popular before laptops became the standard in offices but I don't see why they would be very popular these days outside of use cases where a company wants a computer to stay in one place for information security reasons while also having strict space requirements.
SS on a USB port means "super speed" = USB 3 speeds!
Put Linux on it
I might, depends on what I end up doing with it.
@@ColinSlater33 this would be a great Batocera machine. Or homelab. Or whatever doesn't require a GPU, as the processor is actually kind of good, and with 16GB of RAM you're golden. Haswell still holds up today for a lot of things. I'm still using a Haswell chip (2 actually, both i5-4590) and with an SSD it's quite tolerable, can even run Windows 11 on it (unofficially, but hey I got it to work, and it carried over my Windows 10 license key, so it's legal) and my main rig is running a rolling-release distro of Linux (specifically Garuda) so to say that it's outdated, while true, is not to say that it can't run current operating systems and be usable.
No Windows 11 for you!
20-30 watts at idle. No go for server.
r/MiniPC's: "am i a joke to you?" Intel nucs are even smaller. They even have PCs that are the size of fire sticks. minisforum makes them in a N100.
Also 1. That is a wifi/ BT attenta. 2. The T in The CPU name is low wattage, but isn't laptop which usually has U at the end. 3. Lots of times the Wi-Fi chip can be pulled out and you can put an m.2 sata m key in.
I'll have to check that community out. I've heard of NUCs but I assume they don't have the same appeal or as large of a customer base as these ones which were intended for enterprise use cases. Could very well be wrong though, I don't know much about them. Also, the Wi-Fi chip is not in an M.2 slot, however there is one tucked away under the driver caddy that I missed in this video.
Intel NUCs are a it smaller, but a lot more expensive for the consumer. Even when people start selling their NUCs the secondary market will be small compared to these previous office machines.
@@ColinSlater33 two of the big mini PCs that aren't one of the big legacy brands are Minisforum and Beelink. Also Asus just bought out the NUC brand from Intel.
150 to 200 euros in my country ...
Wow. What country? That seems excessively high for hardware this old.
annnnnnnnndd its all over my screen
Brother
it's a WI-FI antenna!!! You should broaden your BASIC IT knowledge if you want a future in streaming about IT,HARDWARE etc...unless you wanna rabble
I glanced at the spec sheet while making the comment my bad bro