Optiplex 3090 UFF - Stability Ongoing Issues

Question

Hello,

I work for a school in the UK. We have large amounts of Dell Devices going from 3060, 3070, 3080 and 3090 UFF.

We have had around 90 3090 UFF devices and they have been incredibly unreliable.

Aggressive overheating, crashing, not being able to boot up and now we are seeing a new wave of issues with boot devices not found, error messages in bios the list goes on.

We have had support calls with Dell, sometimes they replace the motherboard and it's all better, but others not necessarily. I researched and discovered that some of the overheating can be due to Dells decision to drop legacy S3 sleep for the new modern sleep S0, disabling S0 has made some improvements to the overheating but the other issues still persist.

Are the 3090s just really flaky? Is there anything more we can do to try fix this?

In general, the 3060s were bullet proof, the 3070s had some strange issues but mostly fine, 3080s had a horrible network driver issue and the 3090s are even worse...

Diplo

redxps630 · Answer

Dell bios update may help, but this may take time.

good to know the progression from 3060/3070 to 3089/3090. I guess the latter using intel 10/11th gen cpu is a quantum leap from older 8/9th gen cpu in terms of cpu cores, tdp, chipset support. Apparently dell has gone too fast trying to capture market share of each new gen of intel right after it comes out. It has been pushing out new models too fast while not being able to thoroughly test oem chipset and driver stability. Lesson is buying brand new Dell of hot new tech is risky. Clients become Dell guinea pigs to expose issues which they themselves do not have the time and patience to wait and test carefully, all because of a primary drive for company revenue growth.

bradthetechnut · Answer

Sorry to read about the problems you're experiencing.

In general, UFF's, AIO's, and micros can be more prone to heat problems due to the tiny fan(s) used to cool them. Also heard about micros not having enough power. Besides the rest of your post, it was interesting to read that you had good luck with the 3060's.

If you have the room for it, SFF is the smallest PC I'd go with. To date, I've never heard of overheating issues with them. It probably doesn't take much for a client's needs/demands to outdo the tinier sizes.

Digression details mentioned by both you and redxps630 are noted.

dinosour · Answer

I know I'm tagging this conversation 14 months late, but we have two of the 7090 UFF units and both have had the same reliability issues you described for the 3090. We used them in conjunction with the Dell 32" multimedia monitor (the C3422WE). Even though a LOT of BIOS updates did help improve the reliability a bit over time, we still have issues where the microphone and/or speakers will cut out in the middle of a video chat.

I will avoid UFF format for future purchases, as we never had this level of frustration with other Optiplex units.

lesbell · Answer

I have just bought a refurbished Dell Optiplex 3090 Ultra UFF i5 11th Gen 16GB 256GB Windows 11 Pro. Is this the one with these stability issues? Are they only due to overheating when sleeping, and might not occur with home use if I power it off instead of using 'sleep'? The original post gave a whole list of problems - Aggressive overheating, crashing, not being able to boot up and now we are seeing a new wave of issues with boot devices not found, error messages in bios the list goes on.  Should I be returning it for a refund if I can? Or will bios updates have solved some of these problems?

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Optiplex 3090 UFF - Stability Ongoing Issues

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