Inspiron 5675 motherboard design fail - rant

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@The_Coolest wrote:

I want to start by saying that yes, I know that this is an OEM machine, but still. What the heck, Dell?

* I have the model with Ryzen R7 1700X CPU.

1. I decided to upgrade the RAM on my machine, so I bought a kit of 2x16GB G.Skill TridentZ. This RAM has heatsinks preinstalled. Apparently, the way Dell has engineered this board, doesn't allow memory with heatsinks to be installed at all. The spacing between the two memory slots is very narrow and so you can't install both sticks of RAM at the same time.

2. To add insult to injury, the left slot is so close to the CPU socket, that the memory touches the CPU cooler.

3. So instead of having 32GB of RAM, I'm currently running 16GB + 8GB, using the original 8GB stick for dual channel and extra ram.

4. Needless to say that this board does not support XMP profiles (which I knew it didn't), and so the memory is now stuck at 2133MHz, instead of 3200MHz.

5. Now to the next item on the list, which is ridiculous. Every motherboard with M.2 slots that I have seen have a screw in the "mounting stud" for the M.2 drive. I am grateful that Dell at the very least have installed the stud, but they forgot to install the screw in both of the slots available.

I also bought a Samsung Evo 970 SSD to go along with the memory upgrade, and since I had no screw to secure the drive in the M.2 slot, I had to dig deep and wide in my collection of old stuff until I found a screw that sort-of fit and allowed me to secure the SSD in the socket.

6. And after running a quick performance test, disappointment has stricken again, when the results indicated that this board only routes 2 PCI-E lanes to the NVME slot instead of 4. Reads peaked at 1800MB/s (instead of 3400MB/s) and writes peaked at 1600MB/s (instead of ~2250MB/s).

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1. I never would have even thought to check for that (so thanks for the heads-up). I know my heat-sinked 2x8gb Kingston Furys fit fine in my Aurora-R6, but to get dual-channel, the proper (color matching tab) slots are staggered. 

2. Yeah, that's lame. Are you sure those DIMMs are within spec? Maybe there is no "heat-sink spec"?

3. Are you sure the proper ones are a "matched pair" so you get true Dual-Channel operation?

4. Yeah, mixing DIMMs is tricky. Which SPD does it follow?

5. You are the 1,000,001 person to complain. :Smile: All PC-makers do that. Remember, "screws" always come with drives. Remember the old days?

6. We could explorer this more if you want. Some of these "rated SSD speeds" are only for the larger-capacity models. Also, sometimes, these high speeds are obtained with "controller tricks" (Samsung has something like that). Anyway, here is mine:

https://www.dell.com/community/Alienware-General-Read-Only/Aurora-R6-Hard-Lockup-and-crash-while-gaming-SOLVED/m-p/5504121/highlight/true#M6097

Samsung PM-961 512gb SSD (M.2 PCIe NVMe) 

If it was broken, how can your writes be like mine ? It is strange your reads are off-base.

1-2. I have checked the G.Skill website, they specify the height of the sticks, but they don't specify the width, nor the minimum distance you need to have between slots to make the memory fit right. This is 'enthusiast' grade memory, but most non-bottom of the barrel dimms are sold with some sort of heatsink today.

3-4. It is working in dual channel, but I haven't tried to benchmark the memory performance yet. It's not a matched set, but it should still provide better throughput than single channel, plus it has more capacity. The BIOS says the memory is running at 2400MHz, but it's actually running at 2133MHz, the spec of the G.Skill stick.

5. This drive did not include a screw in the box, it's a retail drive. So I don't know who's fault this is, Dell's or Samsung's. I seldom bought new retail drives, so it's hard to remember if they came with screws or not.

6. It's possible that your system does have x4 NVME slot. My drive under-performs compared to benchmarks I saw on other websites. Here's my results:

You can compare to the results obtained in this review, mine are way off however you look at them.

https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/samsung-970-evo-m-2-500gb-nvme-ssd-review,15.html

And here's another small rant:

I decided to install a GTX1050 and move the RX570 to a different system.

So after switching the GPUs and powering up the system, I got the Blinking Amber LED treatment from it until I cleared the CMOS. What system requires clearing the BIOS in order to switch to a different GPU?

It also seems that the Win10 Pro key I added to the system was removed as well, but that could be related to the GPU change, I guess.

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@The_Coolest wrote:

 

1. I decided to install a GTX1050 and move the RX570 to a different system.

2. So after switching the GPUs and powering up the system, I got the Blinking Amber LED treatment from it until I cleared the CMOS. What system requires clearing the BIOS in order to switch to a different GPU?

3. It also seems that the Win10 Pro key I added to the system was removed as well, but that could be related to the GPU change, I guess.

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1. A little "small" but yeah, I prefer green-team now-days.

2. Yeah, that's weird. Good troubleshooting though.

3. Might have de-activated it, but not removed it. If should be in BIOS, and anything above that should have been an "Anytime Upgrade".

As for the 970-SSD. Yes, I see what you mean. At least those numbers are respectable and many times faster than SATA. I doubt you will notice a difference (maybe 1 second at full-boot time).