[tenebrisalietum]

Those were probably the Dell Optiplex GX280's.

Horrible design, internally anyway. Caps near the power supply or CPU heatsink were prone to failure. At the beginning of my IT career I swapped many of these motherboards. Fortunately the power supply and motherboard were easy to remove and replace.

I think this was a Pentium 4 machine which also was notorious for running hot.

[eitland]

Saw it with Dell Optiplex GX 270 as well. I supported between 50 and 100 of those at some time and we had to swap 30 motherboards in 6 months.

More info used to be available here: https://www.badcaps.net/, haven't verified recently.

One thing I've heard recently though is that Dell still makes batches of bad hardware and their service is stil (or again) bad. In particular a recent xps batch has had a 50% failure rate while Dell support keep blaming the users IIRC. Source: sysadmin friend of mine.

PS: once you get through, their technicians used to be great.