Testing a free Dell Inspiron 620 (2012)

A free computer was dropped at my doorstep. Let's see if it works, and what kind of potential it has.
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[@Mirra2003-f9s]

That Radeon card wouldn't have worked in this system even if it fit. Those old Inspiron computers do not have a UEFI BIOS and those newer AMD cards require you to have a more modern motherboard. A GTX 1650/1660 Ti won't work either because they require a new bios too and i think the max you can go on this system is a GTX 950. This computer could also support 3rd gen processors because the socket is the same and many systems could upgrade after a bios update,but Dell never released an update for this to make it support 3rd gen processors either. Dell really wanted to make this system very limited in terms of upgrades

[@themaritimegirl]

I've used that card in a legacy BIOS system in the past. But I had no idea that modern GPUs can have issues with legacy BIOS systems (although it's not universal, based on what I've read), so I'm pinning this comment.

[@Mirra2003-f9s]

@@themaritimegirl Yeah i think it's just OEM systems that were affected by this issue because of their already limited bios.I had an Acer of the same period with same chipset and all and my R9 270x would not work,and while searching for the issue online i found Inspiron 620 owners having the same issue aswell. Someone explained that it's mostly PCs that came out in 2011-2012 that are affected,because at the time they were transitioning from legacy to uefi and some manufacturers integrated uefi booting support on legacy motherboards so they could support the upcoming Windows 8. Some GPU vbios will detect what kind of bios the system is using and will switch to legacy/uefi but since those legacy boards have UEFI booting support but the bios is still based on legacy,it will confuse the card into thinking it's UEFI and the vbios will set to UEFI resulting in a black screen due to the bios not actually being full UEFI. Sorry for the long comment but i tried my best into explaining it as simple as possible :)

[@GLXTCHYY]

Ive gotten cards like a GTX 1050TI and a RX 470 to work in an Old Dell Optiplex 790 with a I5-2500, so idk

[@themaritimegirl]

@@GLXTCHYY The Optiplex 790 has a UEFI BIOS, so it wouldn't be an issue anyway.

[@t.a.p4554]

what is the max gpu for this 620... ?? anyone with the 620 list your gpu below.... ??

[@vwestlife]

That monitor stand looks like the one Radio Shack sold for the Tandy 1000EX. I have one supporting my 20" LCD TV, which you may have seen in the background of my videos.

[@themaritimegirl]

It is! The only surviving part of my childhood EX.

[@kyoudaiken]

I'm using Manjaro with KDE on a Ryzen 7 5700G APU that is passively cooled in an AKASA MAXWELL case with an ASRock B550M-ITX/ac motherboard. It has a 1TB Kyocera PCIe Gen 3 SSD and it can do some emulation in 4K and Tuxcart in 4K. I got a 4K60 Philips HDR 43 Inch VA Panel screen on it via HDMI. But I don't use HDR, my eyes are very light sensitive. So I don't know HDR it even works on Linux. But I am happy with this thing. I am watching YT mostly on it and use Telegram and Discord.

[@BBC600]

One knows things update and change but it is quite surprising to see just how much what we now call Windows 10 is different from an earlier iteration. At 24:51 that's the shock of the century right there. A giant scandal... front page of all the daily papers. 📰 😉 (Teasing) Actually, I am starting to get curious about Linux myself. Looking forward to seeing which distro you chose for yourself. 😊 Also, the editing on this video with the side by side view of direct hookup and the view of you at the keyboard is superb!

[@EastAngliaUK]

thats nice of him. my free pc I got some last year is an i3 6100 pc its quite fast with an ssd.

[@blakebechtel5192]

Always gotta love free computers. I have been daily driving a Dell Optiplex 755 with a core 2 duo (I forget what model) with Linux Mint and I have never had any major slowdowns. It is a computer I got free and it even came with an AMD GPU.

[@WalterKnox]

My main PC is an OptiPlex 9010, which has a core i7-3770. I run XP on it, and all of the drivers and everything are natively supported. It is even in the list of officially supported operating systems by Dell.

[@kyoudaiken]

Dell VOSTRO from these times had the issue of the onboard Ethernet disappearing. Clearing CMOS sometimes fixed it for a while but the issue came back. I wonder what this problem is...

[@kyoudaiken]

This thing is a perfect candidate to try Linux on. I recommend Manjaro Linux with a light desktop environment or KDE if you decide to put in a dGPU. Windows is starting to make itself obsolete anyway. Only my main PC due to a few tools I need is still Windows but my other PCs are all Linux.

[@eDoc2020]

I believe this is the same model as my grandfather's last PC, although he had a Pentium-branded CPU and probably 4 gigs of RAM. Yours is certainly fast enough as is, my daily driver craptop has a 1.4GHz Sandy Bridge (2nd gen) i3, 6 gigs of RAM, a spinning 640 gig boot drive, and I think it's still usable. As for Windows versions, I think my ThinkPad T410 (i5-540M) is the most recent I've used XP natively on.

[@ShieyV2komputroniks]

Dell psus are honestly really solid , i have one from a gx270 still working

[@WalterKnox]

It really depends. For the most part, they are. However, even the ones that are marked "dell" are made by other OEMs. I work with hundreds of retired Dell office Pcs every day, which I take apart, clean and inventory the parts, and sell them if in good working order. The common OEMs I have seen in 2010s-2019 or so OptiPlex machines are Liteon, Delta, AcBel, HuntKey, Hipro, and Bestec. Out of those, they are all pretty reliable, although I see the occasional issues with the Hipro models which use Teapo capacitors which sometimes fail. I have also seen several dead Delta power supplies in the OptiPlex 780 machines (I am not sure of the failure mode of them, but the machine will simply flash a red power light when they fail.) The Bestec power supplies are by far the least common, but also the least reliable, so they sort of stick out... They use CapXon brand capacitors and they are almost always bad. They seem to be pretty common in 390,790,990,3010,7010,9010,3020,7020 and 9020 machines. They are all branded Dell, but say somewhere in small print the actual OEM that made them. My guess for the GX270 would be Hipro, but I can't say for sure.

[@robd1365]

I used to be keen to update to the latest version of windows but I can’t abide windows 11, I might like it after a few more updates and I workout how to tweak it to look less like windows 11. Windows 8.1 to 10 were trouble free. My old laptop from 2013 is stuck at the same point of windows update. I only use it for older games that run well on its hardware now and don’t need to use it online. Linux does most things well unless you’re a gamer and you need to be a proper geek to get it running

[@RetroReviewYT]

I also beta tested it back then too!

[@GaryBeltz]

You're not the only one who doesn't have them optimism for Windows anymore.

[@zeroturn7091]

With some imagination you can go nuts with SATA drives on these. Right now I have 6 SATA SSDs and 4 3.5” HHDs.

[@zeroturn7091]

I should add that due to the legacy BIOS, all aren’t bootable.

[@themaritimegirl]

There are SSD's that require UEFI to function now??

[@EyrthWyrmJym]

i happened to have gotten the same pc, also for free lol

[@glenslick2774]

Tried posting this comment a couple of times and it seems to have gotten hidden or deleted. If you look up the service tag on the Dell support page it shows the original specs of the system as containing the 6GB of mismatched memory that it contains now. That seems odd.

[@themaritimegirl]

That is odd! I'll have to look at the RAM again and see if they both have date codes.

[@glenslick2774]

@@themaritimegirl The original specs also show that it came with a DW1502 802.11BGN Mini PCI-E Wireless Card, so that is what would have been in one of the empty PCI-E slots as originally shipped. It's nice that Dell provides a database of systems going back over 10 years where original system specs can be looked up via their service tag.

[@Jon-hx7pe]

donate it