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April 10th, 2025 15:33
Studio XPS 435T/9000, upgrade capabilities beyond design, #2
I can add a few more capabilities:
In a post here I offhand mentioned the possibility of getting PCIe Gen 3 speeds from the Dell XPS 435T/9000, even though it's motherboard is PCIe Gen 2. I now have this working since prices for it are now reasonable.
To do this, I used a PCIe 3 Switch add-in card to upgrade the 435T's x8 Gen 2 PCIe slot to four PCIe Gen 3 x4 slots at their full spec'd PCIe 3 x4 speed (~3200 MB/s). (Note with the approximate doubling of speed between generations, the bandwidth of PCIe 2 x8 = PCIe 3 x4.)
I use the 4 slots for a mix of NVMe SSDs (one or more as boot drives using Clover) and PCIe 3 x4 add-in cards. The 4 slots come as NVMe SSD slots. Using one or more of the 4 slots with PCIe 3 x4 add-in cards requires a separate riser for each AIC. Without the PCIe Switch a NVMe SSD in the 435T will only run at ~1700 MB/s. Since PCIe is Duplex, I can now for example copy between any two PCIe 3 x4 devices (like NVMe SSDs) at up to the full spec'd PCIe 3 speed (~3200 MB/s). Compare this to the 435T's native SATA II speed of only ~280 MB/s.
Other capabilities:
Windows 11 (I plan to do a Ubuntu alternate boot as well).
USB 3.2 Gen 2 add-in PCIe card, 10 Gbps. PCIe slot it's in is running at PCIe Gen 3 speeds since it's using the above PCIe Gen 3 upgrade. (I might consider an upgrade to USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, 20 Gbps in the future).
Also, I'm considering upgrading my LAN to 10 GbE in the future - the additional PCIe Gen 3 x4 slots will allow adding a PCIe Gen 3 x4 add-in card to the 435T for that.
Finnowa
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April 10th, 2025 01:30
@Techgee
Does one need to change motherboard/chipset to get UEFI BIOS
and secure boot.?
Looking at Windows 11 install without by passing their security requirments.
(But I will if I need to!)
Have previouly installed 2TB SSD 24GB RAM.
Hate to see time kill a great machine Studio XPS 435T 9000
Techgee
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623 Posts
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April 10th, 2025 05:42
@Finnowa , Secure Boot really requires TPM, which I don't see adding as feasible/possible. Clover is emulated UEFI, but I don't think the devs ever added Secure Boot. I've since gotten OpenCore 1.0.3 (another UEFI BIOS emulator) to work on the Dell Studio XPS 435T/9000. It does have Secure Boot, but I don't think it supports it on a Legacy BIOS system like the Dell XPS 435T/9000 that doesn't have a TPM. (I'm only using OpenCore or Clover to be able to boot from NVMe SSDs.)
Windows 11 24H2 installs fine by using Microsoft's settings to bypass the requirement checks (Rufus is the easiest way to do this). I'm running 24H2 both with OpenCore (or Clover) and without (Legacy BIOS) on another Dell X58 system. I've only ever done a clean install of Windows 11 (as opposed to a Windows 10 to 11 upgrade).
If, at some point in the future, Windows 11 no longer works on the 435T, my personal strategy is to have a Windows 10 SSD to fall back to if necessary or to go to Ubuntu or some other Linux distro. Or, just try to stay on a version of Windows 11 that still works.
If this happens, I suspect the most likely scenario will be similar to what happened to systems with the Intel Core 2 Duo CPU in them - up until 23H2 was fine, but Windows 11 24H2 started using a CPU instruction (SSE4.2) that CPU doesn't have. So, it's stuck at Windows 11 23H2 (annual releases are supported for 2 years - so like until Fall 2025 for 23H2).