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I bought a PC for $50. Let’s upgrade it!
I bought a PC for $50. Let’s upgrade it!
#bought #Lets #upgrade
“Craft Computing”
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There’s an age-old tradition of turning eWaste into a usable gaming PC, and I always love a challenge. I bought a Dell Optiplex 3040 Compact Tower for just $50 from a local…
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1:45 – Ah good ol Juan shows up again.
Nothing beats the x99 platform when on a budget….
Isn't there a psu adapter for regular psu to connect it to optiplex mobo?
Regarding the CPU… FAIL stands for First Attempt In Learning. Well put.
Hah, I did the exact same thing the other day with the exxact same Xeon 😛 really dumb on intel's part though, just creates more ewaste
I've been tinkering with an Optiplex 3050 I picked up on ebay for £35. It must have originally come with an I3-7100 but the previous owner replaced that with an I5-6400. I swapped in a 6500. The Kaby Lake board in this one has an NVME slot so that makes for a much more modern feeling system. I dropped in a spare blower style GTX 960 with a sata to 6pin adapter which just fits in the case, the front of the card is pressing against the front of the case with the sata cables stuck in between. fun little project would like to be able to drop in a 7600 or 7700
A couple of years back, I picked up a Lenovo M725s SFF desktop for $125 with 8GB of ram and a Ryzen 5 2400G CPU. I ended up putting in 16Gb of Crucial DDR4 and a Ryzen 5 2600 that I picked up for less than $50. I picked up a Radeon RX 6400 low profile GPU that required no added power connection. The PC had an NVME slot on the motherboard, so I added a 500GB P3 and later added an additional MX500 1TB as a game drive. The thing runs really well and can play most FPS games at medium settings and many at high. I was happy I went that route as an OEM PC with a AM4 socket sure makes things a lot easier.
80 mm fan fits in lol great vid
no sff is the most hated
You could cobble together an external power supply wart for a higher spec graphics card like a 4060 and see how it performs then.
you could replace the core i3s microcode with the micro code for the xeon and get it to post and function that way but thats alot of modding and digging around to find what you need
Often on these desktops you can't see the PCI video card, you have to turn off the power and remove the battery then put it back in and start again
Agree completely, scrap builds are the most fun! A couple cheap suggestions for stashing the 2.5" SSD's: zip ties or detachable Command Strips! Stick it and forget it w/o the rattle! I would only buy the sleds or drive frames for vibration absorption if making a small NAS.
Just for the sake of it did you try updating all the bioses and firmwares? Dells of that legacy usually have 20 revisions out there but they sometimes fix a lot of issues when adding upgraded parts. I usually throw a windows install at it and let dells utility go through updating what it thinks it needs to then install whatever os I am going to use. Do it for servers too. Also 3m double sided automotive tape is great for adding SSDs to dells without sleds. I upgrade tons of them.
They make 24 pin adapters for these machines. This allows you to add an actual power supply, so a modern GPU isn't exactly hard and you can skip the SATA adapters. This also means you can transplant the parts into a better case. The only thing you may have trouble with is the CPU cooler. HP, and Dell both like to screw their heatsinks into the metal motherboard tray instead of a backplate. They also use non standard sizing for them as well so you have to keep the cooler. You'll have to find some bolts that thread onto them to keep the heatsink in place and provide tension. This would also allow you to use the half size units as they like to charge a premium even used for a full width tower machine.
Sell the 6500 and you get an awesome deal….or not…..
Pfft! Optical drive is rendered non-functional. It's now a non-optical Optiplex. SHAME!
I picked up the optiplex 7040, added 64gigs of ram, a gtx1060, and had to hack a 6pin connector into the cpu 12v. The mobo has good performance, but the case thermals are bad. I also swapped the rear fan for one an inch and a half in depth which holds the cpu and gpu around 60c. The only drawback of the system is boot times using sata.
Great timing! I just found a 6700 for $80AUD/$53USD so was looking forward to your xeon results. It's to upgrade a 7100 so glad I didn't gamble with xeon compatibility
You didn't mention the M.2 SSD slot… which would be much better than the SATA SSD.
i was hoping a bios update could support xeons magically
I just built my kids a similar gaming computer. An optiplex 3020 (I think) with 3rd gen i5, SATA SSD, GT 730. I think I have $60 into it plus whatever the SSD originally cost me. Plays XP games just fine. 😂
I have literally been sending these to recycling as they are rubbish systems
Coffeetime – CH314 – i5 8400 (£30)
Thats your cheap upgrade for skylake systems.
I salvaged an OptiPlex 3060 SFF (i3-8100) that was going to be binned. Added a low profile nvidia GT 1030, 32Gb of RAM, and NVMe drive and a spare 1TB SATA drive to it. Installed Windows 11, put it on a vlan where it can't talk with any other machine on my home network and I play stuff up to Diablo 3 with it. Works great.
0:06: 🎮 The video is about attempting to turn a standard office PC into a gaming PC, with humorous challenges along the way.
4:00: 🖥️ The video discusses the choice of graphics card for a low-power build and the compatibility with the power supply.
7:53: 🖥️ The video demonstrates disassembling the Optiplex 3040 desktop and highlights its limitations.
16:28: 🔧 The video discusses the challenges and limitations of building a super budget system using an Optiplex 3040.
20:08: 🎮 A review of gaming performance on a budget CPU and graphics card.
24:05: 🍻 The video is about reminiscing and playing with different platforms while enjoying a beer from Stoop Brewing in Seattle.
Recapped using TammyAI
The Inspirion line is far superior to build on. Not sure why Optiplex is so popular with the size and extra proprietary plugs.
Interesting vid, but I have to disagree with the "this is how we learn" line about the skylake Xeon E3. Research before spending any money is key in my book.
I suppose it stems from me starting off as an enthusiast with very little money and no margin for costly mistakes. This should have been caught before the purchase, period. The information's not hard to find.
The prices on the i7-6700 are wild. I did a very similar build for a friend with an HP mini tower that originally had a 6500 in it. It was actually cheaper for me to get an entire second SFF HP for $40 with the 6700 in it and swap the chips between the two. I was able to home the second computer out as well but it was wild that I could get an entire second computer for less than the price of the loose chip.
I wish Lucy's dad had food for me
That would be nice
Powering the GPU like you did is something I never knew was even possible! That’s pretty trick for a low wattage GPU in one of these OEM systems. Touché
man this is one weird inbetween generation PC. I was looking at these cheap used OEMs for my homelab and these ones with 6th gen can either come with DDR3L and a Sata ssd/HDD or they can come with DDR4 and an m.2 so weird. like they had a mid gen refresh on these.
Man that stinks. Xeons used to be a go to upgrade for the prior Optiplexes.
I just did something similar and made it into a dope retro arcade box. Soooo much fun!!! Respect the power of the quarters!!!!
@CraftComputing
Jeff, 6:37 Absolutely fricken NOT! SSDs are great for boot drives, certainly. They are STILL sub-par for mass storage, full stop. MOST people don't have(or want) NAS boxes or network servers in their home. A lot of of them need more that 1TB/2TB of an SSD. Sure, an external 8TB+ HDD would work, but most people would prefer all of their main drives be INSIDE the PC chassis. I speak from experience. Know your audience good sir.