2 Posts
1
13457
Studio XPS 9100, best upgrades available in 2020?
Hello people, I have a 2010 Studio XPS 9100 which is running Windows 7 =
Intel Core i7 960
Graphics card NVIDIA GeForce 6600
12GB of memory
2TB hard drive
No solid state drive or anything Everything is stock on this pc basically and I want it to be able play games such as GTA 5, Red Dead Redemption, Call of Duty smoothly if I can. I hoping there is someone out there who knows about the newest or best pieces out available, and maybe not the best but at least good enough to make this pc perform nice and smooth, as it is, the fan get pretty loud if I even try to multi task a bit so just some suggestions would be nice.
Thank you!
RoHe
10 Elder
10 Elder
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43.6K Posts
0
January 26th, 2020 16:00
How do I check to see if my PC will run a specific game?
Are you aware that support for Win 7 ended last week? The Studio XPS 9100 apparently can run Win 10 (it may still be a free upgrade) but this OS isn't supported by Dell.
So you should read some of the threads about running Win 10 on the 9100 and any issues other users had before deciding what hardware upgrades to do. Search this forum...
Tesla1856
8 Wizard
8 Wizard
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17K Posts
1
January 27th, 2020 18:00
A SATA-3/600 SSD installed as bootable C-Drive will make whole computer much snappier. A 512gb one should hold all your Windows and Apps (even your 2-3 favorite games). The other large-games can go on the 2tb spinning-HDD.
A Nvidia GTX-1030 should work . Maybe even a GTX-1060 (if it will physically fit and your Power-Supply will handle it).
Upgrade to Windows-10 (for free, while you still can).
RbyRbnsn
2 Posts
1
May 5th, 2020 17:00
HI;
I have a Studio XPS 9100 that I've significantly rebuilt. I wanted to run current games too, and boy did I succeed! Here's my story...
I had upgraded to Windows 8.1 when it was free - that's the highest level of Windows that was officially supported by Dell before things like audio drivers would start to fail. I can't speak to Windows 10 - I've stayed at 8.1 to avoid incompatibilities with the BIOS and motherboard, which is a closed proprietary configuration.
One day my RAID drives started to fail - they were apparently part of a bad batch of Seagate drives from Thailand. So I replaced the RAID drives - that's easy - went for a Toshiba HDWE140 4TB 7200RPM SATA drive. I still had a functioning boot drive, but I wanted fast boot and program loads so I installed a Samsung 850 EVO 500GB solid state drive. It came with a great utility to copy over the operating system and programs - it worked flawlessly and I had a solid-state bootable copy of my old machine. I added a PCIe board to provide two of the blue USB 3.0 receptacles for plugging in high-speed peripherals, and added a plug-in USB bluetooth adapter.
I had 12GM of RAM in my original configuration which seems to be plenty, and I'm not having memory issues so I just left that alone. The limiting factors on a CPU upgrade are the motherboard format, memory speed and the power supply. The Dell XPS 9100 has a Socket B motherboard with an X58 chipset and an Intel i7 930 CPU, which you can't overclock because of the locked-down BIOS. However, that motherboard will accommodate a Xeon processor - so I found a W3690 6-core Intel Xeon CPU on Ali Express for $50US used - no need to overclock that! I spent my money, waited weeks for a slow boat from China, and took my chances that the stock cooling tower would be enough...and it was. After I scraped off the old thermal paste that had crusted over the bottom of my heat sink, applied a new layer, stuck on the replacement CPU and put everything back together, the machine ran great. The CPUID HW monitor program reported six cores running at 3467 Mhz - and 12 CPUs running about 36-40 degrees C. So I had lots of computing power and it wasn't overheating. You take your chances with ordering used from overseas but these CPUs are readily available and my experience with AliExpress was fine. And you can't beat the price.
So, the last part of my story is most important for gaming - it's the video. The old ATI Radeon 5850 with 1GB was ok for light gaming back in the day but I needed something a lot faster than that to run Doom 2016. I decided to stay with the Radeon series but a more powerful video card was going to require more power - the existing 525W supply was, by my calculations, just barely handling the load. So I was looking for an upgrade to the power supply that would fit in the XPS 9100 case, and a video board that was not too long. I waited and watched sales on Amazon and ended up getting a Radeon RX580 with 8GB RAM, and a bonus game (I picked Borderlands 3). For the power supply I chose a Corsair CX Series 750 Watt ATX/EPS Modular 80 Plus Bronze ATX12V/EPS12V 744 Power Supply (CX750M). This power supply is just a bit narrower than the previous one, and left a small space between the edge of the case and the edge of the power supply unit, which I filled with a strip of plastic I trimmed from some old packing material. So now I had plenty of power to support the new Radeon and the new CPU. I don't know if I needed it but I also bought a new high-performance case fan just to keep the air moving.
Anyway, everything is running better than I had hoped. The machine has a new lease on life and I seem to be able to run anything that Steam can throw at it, including Doom 2016 and Borderlands 3. All my old games look way better with all the texture RAM I have now, and everything loads faster because of the solid state drive, and now I have tons of disk space to store stuff. Oh, and doing things that take advantage of multiple cores like video editing and rendering, and audio processing, batch photo processing, all run super fast on that Xeon CPU. And the new power supply and fan keep everything much quieter than it used to be.
I'm happy sticking with my XPS 9100 for many years to come.
mikehood1
28 Posts
0
January 27th, 2020 08:00
Looking at your system windows 7 is gone hardware very old
Best upgrade = A new computer !!!
speedstep
8 Wizard
8 Wizard
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47K Posts
0
January 27th, 2020 10:00
This system uses first Generation Core series and therefore it will have spectre and meltdown issues that will never be addressed.
You can upgrade to WIN10 using the WIN7 COA key and OEM system builder DVD. WIN7 is game over.
https://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/04/sln319861/microsoft-will-end-support-for-windows-7-on-january-14-2020?lang=en
WIN10 is not supported but that does not mean not working on the system. You use VISTA/WIN7 WDDM 1.0 Drivers. All the parts use Legacy drivers which means there will NEVER be any 10 drivers.
http://downloads.dell.com/published/pages/studio-xps-9100.html
WHQLed version with THX supportMore details
http://downloads.dell.com/audio/R266194.exe
This package provides the AMD Radeon HD 6770 Graphics Driver and is supported on Studio XPS 7100/9100 and XPS 8300 that are running the following Windows Operating System: Windows 7 (64-bit).More details
http://downloads.dell.com/video/R303535.exe
This package provides the nVIDIA GeForce GTS450 Graphics Driver and is supported on Alienware Desktop Aurora/Aurora - R2/Aurora R3, XPS Desktop 8100/9100/8300/8300N and Vostro Desktop 460 that are running the following Windows Operating System: Windows 7 (64-bit).More details
http://downloads.dell.com/FOLDER87658M/1/R302955.exe
You will want to make sure the region is set on your DVD before you try to F12 boot from the disk.
https://www.newegg.com/microsoft-windows-10-pro-64-bit-reinstall-recovery-disc-only-no-license-key-included/p/N82E16832350238
https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm
The system uses NON UEFI bios so it will need a newer nvidia card to run most things.
With upgraded power supply you can use up to and including GTX 1080 TI.
Turing based cards and RTX ATI based cards are not working however due to not supporting MSDOS VESA bios video mode 103.
GT1030 will work without upgrading anything else.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y32mBdZHJY
https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/msi-gt-1030-2g-lp-oc-graphic-card-2-gb-gddr5-pcie-30-x16-low-profile-hdmi-displayport/apd/aa362018/graphic-video-cards
This guy used XPS 400 which is essentially the same vintage machine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa9b0TkTsLM
Anonymous
5 Practitioner
5 Practitioner
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274.2K Posts
0
January 27th, 2020 12:00
@Luis V
Agree with @mikehood1 . . . consider looking at the Aurora R8 with liquid cooling. There are some pretty good deals available. Do not skimp out on the liquid cooling!
Luis V
2 Posts
1
February 4th, 2020 10:00
Wow Brother thank you so much for your research and detail you put into your response . I greatly appreciate the information.
RbyRbnsn
2 Posts
0
December 10th, 2023 04:37
Folks,
It's been about four years since the major upgrade of the XPS 9100 documented above and I thought I'd update my situation.
The Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 upgrade blocker was too much for me to handle any longer. Other than the X58 chipset and locked-down Dell BIOS that Windows was complaining about not being supported under version 10, my hardware was fine. But Google Chrome was refusing any updates under 8.1, therefore so was Microsoft Edge because it is just Google inside, and Steam was warning about no longer functioning at the end of 2023 because it uses Google libraries, and they all claimed that there were 'security exposures' under Windows 8.1. I never could find a definitive answer on exactly what would be exposed, but there were reports of other people's attempts to upgrade to Windows 10 on this machine being initially successful but then failing as some security updates bumped into the old BIOS. So upgrading Windows was a non-starter.
I was about to extract all my good components (Xeon CPU, Radeon video, SSD, power supply, etc), and sell them on eBay, and scrap the Dell box when I had an epiphany. I was supporting systems at work that were running Red Hat Enterprise Linux and they were so stable and secure and performant, so I looked into the desktop Linux world for the first time and it was really eye-opening.
I spent a couple of hours partitioning my SSD in half, leaving a smaller Windows 8.1 boot drive, and formatting the remaining partition with the ext4 Linux file system. I installed Ubuntu Linux version 23.04 from a USB drive into the 256GB partition. I was a little concerned about the small partition but it was just an experiment, or so I thought at the time.
I haven't looked back. In the three months since I installed Linux I have only booted Windows a couple of times. My system is running leaner, faster and better than it did under Windows, and I found Linux alternatives to almost all the software I have under Windows, and I haven't bought a new license for anything yet. And it turns out the operating system components and apps are tiny - so 256GB is plenty of room.
The Gnome desktop environment is simple and consistent with an 'apple' feel, to me. The usual commands for copy and paste, drag and drop, and window maximize and minimize are there. It's intuitive and easy to learn the interface. The machine boots really fast and found all my hardware. I was able to mount NAS devices, Google Drive and Dropbox and have those file systems available with a click.
iCloud was problematic; Apple does not seem to support Linux at all (threatened by it, maybe?) so there is no iCloud app. But there is so much information available on Ubuntu forums, although it was necessary to learn some terminal commands to do some installations, and learn about different application repositories, I was able to install just about everything else I had before.
I installed the Epiphany web browser and the Evolution mail client, replacing the default Firefox browser and Thunderbird mail client. Epiphany is a very fast lean browser that is tightly integrated with the Gnome desktop so you can create a 'web app' from any page, including iCloud.com, LinkedIn, and lots of other pages that now behave like apps, running inside a very streamlined browser.
Steam for Linux installed without complaints, and all the games in my library that I reinstalled under Proton (which is Steam's enhancement to Wine that makes Windows programs run under Linux) run at least as well as they did under Windows. No more dire end-of the-world warnings from Steam. Apparently nobody is concerned about the old chipset and BIOS 'security exposures' under Linux, as they were under Windows.
I had been using Adobe Photoshop Elements under Windows for its photo organizer, which I really liked. Turns out Ubuntu comes with 'Shotwell' out of the box, which provides similar functionality. For video editing I installed Shotcut, and it is great, somewhat more streamlined that Adobe Premiere Elements once you understand its paradigm. For photo editing, Darkroom is very effective on my RAW files, but I still boot Windows occasionally to use the SilkyPix editor, which emulates my Fuji camera's firmware. My Plex Media Server photo and music library are supported, and Plex running under Linux is readily visible to my smart TV.
And on and on - LibreOffice for Word and Excel documents, Audacity for audio editing, Google Earth Pro has a native Linux install, Krita for digital painting, GIMP for more advanced photo compositing, ChatGPT client, everything runs really fast and reliably.
I can even Suspend the operating system and there are no mysterious sounds in the middle of the night as some Windows service decides to wake it up for a malware scan or something, which is why my wife would make me shut down my computer at night. This machine is now up 24/7, silently.
And I haven't even begun to explore application development. I have Microsoft Visual Studio Code installed (as a native Linux app, unbelievably) and I'm going to dust off my old C/C++ skills and maybe learn Python. There so much to do, as a retired application developer I can't wait to get started. My old XPS 9100 machine has yet another new lease on life with no end in sight.
Regards,
RbyRbnsn
(edited)