Dell Optiplex Micro Form Factor pros and cons

Back in 2008 we had all Dell Vostro PCs which are like regular desktop form factors.

We started replacing PCs last year with Optiplex 5050/7050 MT(mini tower), SFF(Small Form Factor).

We picked MT(mini tower) for most of them. The mini towers are lot smaller than older generation PCs.

The reason we picked MT was it gives us more ports if needed.

Got our first SFF(Small form factor) and it was also OK, with 1-2 less USB ports.

Now we are looking to get more of them and was looking at the Micro Form Factor(MFF).

MFF is very tiny, but seems to come with the same exact specs as SFF/MT, but with fewer USB ports.

We are not really worried about desk space, we are OK with MT,SFF,MFF.

But the question I have is about any future upgrades or repairs for MFF(Micro Form Factor).

Is it easy to get parts (power supply,RMA) for the MFF ?

If you already have been using MFF models please let me know your experiences.

Thanks

We’ve been using MFF PCs for a couple years now. We started with a few Dells and then around 150 HPs. We are switching back over to Dell OptiPlex 3060s though and they are fantastic. The only problem we’ve had is that we find ourselves having to replace the motherboards way more frequently on these (Micro Form Factor HP and Dells). Aside from that though, they work really well and fit snuggly anywhere we need them to.

Edit: Sorry, also sometimes it’s just the power supplies that go bad and it was pretty easy for us to just buy the standalone PSUs and distribute those when needed. Haven’t had any problem with the RAM though so we haven’t had to order any.

The problem will always be heat. With that being said dell’s warranty replacement is great.

I’ve been running my little 7050 as a Hyper-V server since 2017.

It’s in my home lab running my second DC,a VM with my security cams, and my VPN test VM for work. She does get hot and spin up, but I’ve had no troubles yet, it’s the i7-7700T version upgraded with 32GB of RAM and SSD.

We’re rolling them out at our HQ office and haven’t seen any issues over that past year. My office will be getting some this year as we do desktop replacements.

No real issues truthfully. Although, we had quite a few Dell 3020M’s have crappy HDD’s and a few (out of 50) had motherboards die after 2 years. Lenovo’s & HP’s have been rock solid for us though. We have just a handful of the HP’s Prodesks 400 but haven’t had to touch anything on them in 2 years. Parts are just laptops components so it isn’t hard to upgrade or replace anything. We swapped out about 70 HDD’s to SSD’s this last year, as well as baselined all of our memory to 8GB with zero issues. We have been running almost 200 Tiny’s for 3-4 years and I don’t believe we will ever go back.

So far from above replies.

Dell Optiplex MFF have Motherboard and Heat issues sometimes.

I know Dell will replace it within warranty (2-3 years). But most things fail after the warranty

We just received our first order of 20 5060MFF’s

I can’t comment on reliability yet, however 5 USB-A ports and and USB-C port should be enough I think.

If you need more, most screens now have a USB hub in them so you can multiple 1 Port into 2 or 4.

I don’t think USB availability is going to be an issue.

Dell Optiplex MFF

We’ve just received a few of these for meeting rooms (to mount behind TV’s on the wall)

I obviously cna’t comment on reliability, but bear in mind the PSU is external, so no issues if that fails.

The only limiting factor I see for my use case is the display options - it comes with 1 x HDMI and 1 x DP, whilst that’s not in issue with soe modern screens, we have many monitors that are VGA/DVI only. Additionally most of the new Dell monitors we get have VGA/DVI and 1 x DP, (no HDMI), so will almost certainly need HDMI-VGA adapters.

Thanks, I didn’t know the PSU for MFF is external,like a laptop power adapter ?

The power supply is external on the HP MFF, just like a laptop power adapter. StarTech has the VGA or DVI to Display Port adapter parts I needed to reuse old monitors with the new teeny PCs.

Can’t say anything about the Dell MFFs, but they’re probably similar to our older HP ones. The only real downside I see is that they don’t have PCI-e slots. Plenty of power for my users needs. And yes, as others have said, the power supply is like a laptop power adaptor. We don’t have any heat issues either. The little things are easy to service too, if you will be doing that.

We’ve deployed a lot of the micro form-factor Dells and a few of the Lenovo Tiny PCs (same basic size, but not exactly). The micros are basically laptop guts with no monitor. You have an external power supply that is a bit smaller than a laptop power supply (again, no monitor) but it has a much longer cord on it.

Laptop memory, 2.5" HDD, and teeny, tiny fan/heatsink in it. Be sure to order the model with the correct video ports on the back. We got a few that didn’t have display port or VGA and that didn’t work for some of our monitors that only had VGA, DVI, and display port connections. (AFAIK, none of them come with DVI ports.)

We’ve had very few of them die on us.

Mounting them can be done with either a custom stand that they slide into on the back of the monitor or an under-desk mount that takes up no room on the desk. If you have monitor arms, they also make a VESA mount that can clamp it between the monitor and stand or mount on the wall directly (which is what we do for ones we put in conference rooms.) The original one we used had awkward stands that clamped them under the monitor stand and held them at a 15 degree angle (or similar odd angle) and had horrible cable management. The new stands are much cleaner and easier to use.

Actually looking again, they DO have a standard VGA port. I wish dell would stick with the rest of the industry and make them blue though. I mistook it as a serial port as it was black - doh!

We’ve got less than a dozen in production, but a bunch more on the way. I’ve been using a 3020 MFF for almost 3 years, never had a problem with it, performs well. I wouldn’t worry too much about reliability as we are an all Dell shop and have very few problems with Dell hardware in general, and our failure rate with Dell desktops of any form are near 0. In almost 3 years I’ve had one Dell desktop repair under warranty, and about 4 failures (all involving a specific Dell Optiplex Model) that were out of warranty (failed MB), that we just replaced.

We have over 60 of the Dell Micro’s in service. Mostly older Opti 7040M models. Only had issues with one so far. Onboard NIC port went bad and that was pretty much right out of the box on that one. Replaced by Dell next day. Ordered ours with dual display ports. We use the VESA mount to mount the PC up under the users desk. See picture here: Amazon.com

Keeps everything nice an tidy off the floor. I got tired of the MT tower units being vacuum cleaners and sucking in tons of dust. These micro still pull in some dust but it seems a lot less with them off the ground. There is also a dual VESA mount that you can mount between a monitor and the monitor arm.

The power cord is like the ones for laptops (external). In the photo of the VESA mount I linked above the power brick and cable is stored in the black box that slides onto the mount.