niteman3d Loc: South Central Pennsylvania, USA

I've been looking at the Dell Outlet for the latest Dell refurb builds of the XPS desktop for some time now and never getting around to tripping the trigger. Well, last night I found my incentive. I figured refurb probably meant no Black Friday or Cyber Monday sales but decided to check anyway at around 11 pm. Wow... an additional 18% off saved me almost $300. I7, 32gig of RAM, Win 11, and a decent video card. It's on the way. I was in a big hurry to get it done by midnight, but it goes all week for "Cyber Week", so if anyone else has been looking, here's your chance.

47greyfox Loc: on the edge of the Colorado front range

I waited too long to buy. In the market for a decent laptop that had enough for photo editing, I spied a nice XPS 15 with 32meg of memory, 1tb SSD, a NVIDIA 4060 gpu, decent screen mostly good reviews, awesome price but…. I let it get away. The nice laptops and desktops don’t last too long. Well done! Enjoy the computer! I’ve had pretty good luck with Dell refurbs and scratch and dents over the years. The only exception being an “all-in-one” that I should have known better.

lukevaliant Loc: gloucester city,n. j.

good deal,my optiplex7010 is really fast,i love it. just keep it on auto updates and it runs smoothly. the small size of it is amazing,have fun!

niteman3d Loc: South Central Pennsylvania, USA

Well, my adventure didn't really start until after I had posted this. The charge was declined by my credit union's fraud prevention unit and I had to verify the transaction to make the card useable again. Meanwhile, Dell gets a decline and they need to resubmit my order over the phone. During this process, I discovered that they still (I bought my last one over five years ago) install the OS on the mechanical drive and then use the SSD as the data drive. I'm not going through that again and I also discovered that the one-year in-home service is only on the hardware. If I want to also cover the software, I have to pay $80 more for that coverage, so I'm in limbo. I think I'm going to explore other options before jumping in now that I know the discount is good all week. As I recall from the last time, moving the OS to the SSD was a *major* hassle as it took several hours. Unreal.

47greyfox Loc: on the edge of the Colorado front range

Quick comment on your credit union woes…. I ran into a similar issue with mine. Sparing the details, a CU customer service rep from mine told me that they’ve been been the target of data breaching by those scoundrels out there, so they’ve had to be overly cautious, etc. on your hassle front, I totally agree. I finally bought another SSD, cloned it from the HDD, installed the new SSD as my OS and pgm drive, then physically installed the HDD as my 2nd data drive, and copied the contents of the OEM SSD to it. The order of events is probably a little off, but you’re spot on. A literal PITA.

KillroyII Loc: Middle Georgia

FYI. I believe you will find that the “default” setting will be to use the onboard graphics, and NOT your NVIDIA 4060. When you use your NVIDIA settings it will tell you where to go in Windows settings to select the NVIDIA 4060… which can not be done globally. You select your NVIDIA 4060 to be used by each individual software/app. If your software/app is not in their list… there is a choice to add it.

Hope this helps save you some time. I had assumed my NVIDIA card would be the default for everything.

47greyfox Loc: on the edge of the Colorado front range

Interesting.... I did NOT know that. I assumed that the default would be to use the installed GPU, which in the case of the laptop I was considering, that would be the 4060 since the laptop specifications do not mention any integrated graphics. Did you install the 4060 after buying a computer that already had an integrated GPU? I don't know for sure, but I removed the OEM GPU that my old XPS8700 came with and replaced with a NVIDIA GTX 1050ti and the system found it on bootup.

KillroyII Loc: Middle Georgia

For my laptop (Dell, but I don’t think brand matters) I ordered it with an add-on graphics card (so I haven’t installed it, or anything) but soon realized the default was the motherboard/CPU graphics. I think it’s a power saving thing.

Now the system does see the added graphics card there, just doesn’t use it unless Windows tells it to do so. Does make me think… how about my desktop… so I just looked…

The new desktop (received with motherboard/CPU graphics, and an add on NVIDIA 4070) SETTINGS>SYSTEM>DISPLAY>Graphics default is “Let Windows decide (power saving)”.

It doesn’t list Topaz AI (& I had to search & add it on the laptop) but it “must” be using the NVIDIA 4070 because I had a test case that ) to run… the new desktop took 6 minutes for same Topaz AI test case.

EDIT: just added both the Topaz “.exe” and checked “high performance” just to make sure

niteman3d Loc: South Central Pennsylvania, USA

So I'm in better shape today. I talked to my son about my idea of just getting a single SSD and adding an HDD and he agreed since my selections were getting limited, but out of curiosity, he thought we should run over the options. The one I was looking at would have cost me several hundred for a GPU and an HDD and the time to install them. It was priced at around $900 for the computer totalling somewhere near $1400 once completed. So I started reading to him (on the phone), I didn't have far to go. My second option had both the second drive and a pretty good GPU for a little over $1200. Here's where my reasoning missed the mark. He asked what CPU and I said i7. He said, "Yeah, but which one?" Well, lo and behold there is a pretty significant difference between the two latest i7 generations, which I wasn't aware of and my earlier choice was the slower one. So he is now number one son... oh, wait, he's always number one. He also promised to help me clone the OS from the mechanical drive to the SSD which was my reasoning for getting the single-drive version to begin with.

Regarding payment, I used PayPal this time without a hitch. I just transferred the money from the closely guarded Credit Union account to the PayPal account and it worked like a charm. Assuming all goes well from here, I'm a happy camper until I have to start figuring out what files I can transfer from Win10 to Win11.

They still have four of the build version that I bought... i7 (gen 13), 32gb RAM, 1gb SSD, 2gb HDD, and an Nvidia RTX 4060ti GPU for $1238 including 6% sales tax. If that sounds good, you should still have a couple of days to get the 18% coupon code.

niteman3d Loc: South Central Pennsylvania, USA

Just a follow-up. When I got the new machine, lo and behold, the sales tech didn't share the correct information... Windows 11 was, in fact, already on the boot drive, so now I've got much of the setup complete and am about to change places of the old and the new towers to complete the software transfers or reloads. (Thanks to much help from folks here and elsewhere for many tips that made everything go pretty smoothly. It would appear all is well and I even got a nice 32" curved VA monitor for $150 from a price rollback at Walmart. (that took two tries due to a cracked screen on the first try). Most of the "new computer trauma and drama" should be passed barring the unforeseen. Yay!