this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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Privacy
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I don't have a recommendation but I can point you to Gamers Nexus YouTube channel / website and filter on prebuilts to see reviews.
Big names like Dell HP and Lenovo are bad for ability to repair/upgrade. Although I do love buying their old servers because there are so many cheap ones on eBay.
All respect to Steve, but in this regard he's wrong - the parts might be proprietary in a lot of regards, but these machines are repairable af, they're just not aimed at the average consumer. Local site support will rock up to your desk and stick a new display adapter in for some extra monitors or take them away and swap out broken parts and have the same PC on your desk next day. Big enterprises buy these machines precisely because they're repairable and upgradable and getting stock typically isn't an issue.
That only applies to a large corporation with contracts.
If it's not something that can go in a slot for Dell HP and Lenovo there is no upgrade. They aren't going to swap an upgraded CPU because Dell doesn't do official bios patches to upgrade old PC's to cpus that come out later. Nor can you get a new motherboard dropped in an old Dell/HP/Lenovo chassis because of the power supply requirements/changes.
Edit: I couldn't even put a modern GPU in my old Dell Xeon because the power supply didn't put out the watts. I had to find a weird Dell to ATX converter cable off of eBay and Dremel the Dell case a little so the regular ATX would fit.
The name is Gamers Nexus, not Corporate IT Nexus.
Not trying to pick a beef with Steve at all, very much respect his work. Or you for that matter. The question here is about workhorse PCs not gaming PCs. Gaming is a niche. Dell will absolutely sell you parts, or eBay or third party resellers. You've mentioned in your own post you can absolutely upgrade the GPU and PSU with standard consumer parts (even in a custom build you'd need cables specific to your modular power supply), even CPUs are upgradable within limits (again, with the exception of modern Ryzen when have you been able to upgrade more than 1 generation of CPU for a given socket?)
I'll 100% agree Dell don't conform to typical consumer standard parts that custom/small run builders use in a lot of cases, but to say they're not upgradable or repairable just isn't true. If someone was complaining their BMW gearbox wouldn't bolt onto their ford engine without some modification they'd struggle to find anyone who finds that a remotely strange situation.
I don't think you understand the problem. The power supply Dell included with their standard Xeon wasn't regular ATX so it couldn't work with a regular GPU. I replaced the 10 year old Dell power supply with a 15 year old standard ATX.
Buying unsupported hardware to make it work and dremeling the case wasn't your original claim that Dell etc are an easy phone call to upgrade your PC. They absolutely will not upgrade it.
The OP didn't make any reference to their buying a PC for a large corporation. So extolling the large corporate benefits of support contracts isn't relevant. For a user without a support contract, a regular PC will be easier and cheaper to maintain.
Edit referencing your car analogy:
If every other car manufacturer let you drop in an engine from any other car without even buying a different screw except BMW, everyone would rightly criticize BMW for being proprietary.
Regular PC's, which makes up around 70% of the desktop PC market, are completely interchangeable right down to the screw sizes. It's only Dell/HP/Lenovo that are a minority of the desktop PC market and are incompatible.