I’ve got one of these in the office – great machine, and I love the layout of the motherboard (lenovo is also using a layout like that now too), but theres some things to look out for depending on what you’re using it for and how you’re using it:
1- if you have nosy coworkers who like looking at the hardware in the chassis, just show them the machine before its turned on, since opening the chassis during operation will shut the machine down while triggering a chassis intrusion alarm. At least on my early model, it also bugged out the dell support assist feature so it permanently thinks a fan is broken, when that fan was never installed on that model.
2- in order to keep the overall width of the unit within reason for product dimensions and cooling reasons, the clearance for cards is roughly equivalent to a 3U server. In places, that is actually slightly less, because the side panel latch has an internal bump running the height of the server. Tall cards like some consumer GPUs will not fit in this case, nor will short-length consumer GPUs that have outward/side facing (as opposed to front facing) pcie power plugs, as the bump will be in the way of the cable. Long standard height consumer GPUs with side facing pcie power plugs will fit, but you might have to squeeze the cabling a bit
3- There were 3 included pcie 8/6pin cables. If you are using consumer GPUs, you may need to buy additional cables from dell or use splitters. At the time I bought my unit, dell did not have the cables for purchase individually, but I managed to cludge an equivalent cable together out of adapters, since the PSU breakout board’s connectors for the pcie power plugs have the same pinout as the plug would on the pcie card as well.
4- If you want NVME support, you’ll need an adapter. You can bifurcate the lanes, but not explicitly – there is a setting in the bios (i forget which, but it has to do with pcie ssds), that you can toggle. Out of the box it was set to a setting where it would not detect dell’s own quad nvme adapter card, and dell’s enterprise support doesn’t have enough experience with those cards (or even the product specifications on hand) to do more than manually walk through trial and error experimentation of figuring out how to use the card in this machine. Turns out its that bios setting.
5- If you need audio for the work you intend to do on this machine and are expecting to get by with the motherboard audio since its usually ‘good enough’ on highend prosumer motherboards, you will be disappointed. Get a soundcard for this – I didn’t need amazing audio or anything, just audio good enough to listen to people speaking during meetings and checking the contents of files I was processing or working with, but the built in audio was really bad.
It should be kept in mind that my forewarnings are based on a very early unit (I got it within a month of launch, since I needed something more powerful right then in order to complete a project)
Despite these issues I encountered, I still very much like this machine, and they wont be problems for everyone.
