[WIP] Dell Optiplex 7040 MT (Q170-Skylake)—i5-6600—OC Big Sur

[craighazan]

My third NVMe heatsink and probably the best at keeping an NVMe in the M.2 slot very cool!, I found this little chestnut on Amazon which, I would like to add, has quite the selection of NVMe Heatsinks!. You can now buy them with RGB, heat pipes and fans!, though very pretty I decided to keep it simple with this one from Yateng. I would say it cools as well as the Inateck which is plugged into the X4 slot, but I noticed that the temperatures when benching with BM and ADM maxed out at the same temp, 37 C.

 

[trs96]

That's a great option for those with an onboard M.2 slot for their NVMe SSD. Nice find Craig !

 

[craighazan]

Nice find Craig !

Going to add this to the 'Deals of the Day', another great little kit that came nicely packaged with extra screws and a screw driver. Also comes in a variety of colors for those who fancy something a bit different!. But most of all I think that temp range is impressive, easily compares to the Inateck adapter!.

 

[craighazan]

While searching for a RX560 I came across this, a sealed brand new MSI AERO for $110 and free shipping on eBay. Everything works in Windows and Catalina, updating to 10.5.7 now and will update with a bench screenshot. No need for a more powerful PSU the AERO is powered through the PCI slot.

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[craighazan]

Having unsuccessfully attempted an update to Big Sur via System Preferences, I created a new USB installer for Mojave and successfully installed. Other attempts at Big Sur and Catalina didn't seem to work, but using Clover 5119 got me the result. I'm using a Netgear AC1200 M#A6150 WiFi USB adapter to connect, and so far it's impressed me, you can download a driver from the website. GB5 Bench revealed a slight improvement in multicore, about equal in single core and metal score lower than in Catalina, see previous post.

 

[craighazan]

And we're up and running!. I've been so impressed with my 7 yr old for not destroying the first 7040 I built, that I decided to have another go using Opencore. Thanks @oldmacharu for sharing your EFI on the Dell 7050 build, it works great on the 7040!.

 

[craighazan]

I believe that the Dell 7010 250W PSU, is the greatest power supply ever made, it's just solid. I have probably used this PSU in most of my builds at some point. I have mine paired with a Dell 24 pin to 8 pin ATX PSU Adapter cable, which means I also get power to SATA.

Also managed to install macOS Big Sur with OC.