Discuss what you're doing with old office computers like old Dells, Lenovos, and HPs.
GreenPCGamers.com for guides on turning these kinds of computers into gaming machines.
 |
 |
|
Comfy Optiplex Thread
Discuss what you're doing with old office computers like old Dells, Lenovos, and HPs.
GreenPCGamers.com for guides on turning these kinds of computers into gaming machines.
|
|
|
My optiplex 9020 sff my comfy desktop PC that I also dualboot into to play project diva and genshit.
Also, none of those guides are cost effective anymore since August of 2020.
Any guides you suggest I add to the next thread?
have a Dell Optiplex GX520 for sale for 40 € and nobody wants it, not even if i get a touch screen and make a POS out of it
GX520? It's already a POS.
If it's actually a P4 machine & google's not BS'ing me, that's a decent price & would be good for retro games/light emulation.
yeah but theres barely any market for PC's in my c**t, most everyone uses phones and laptops
i have a few i grabbed from work that i'm going to stick on ebay as """"gaming pcs"""".
I'd rather build a custom system than upgrade bargain-basement shit for my main pc.
i do use one of the optiplex micros as an HTPC.
it's inaudible at idle and doesn't break a sweat doing x265 since it does it natively, so literally never spins up the fans. love it.
i love my cute 3020s so much!!
perfect computer for testing multi-node kubernetes clusters on a budget
It's plugged into my TV with a bunch of shows and movies I will someday maybe watch.
it's my daily driver, it sucks and I can't put a proper graphics card in it, but what am I going to do, build an ATX setup with a 5yo mobo at a premium simply because it isn't dead?
Mini Tower or Small Form Factor?
SFF
What games do you want to play and how much would you spend for a make-do card?
Target is Skyrim at 1440p ultra and I'm not buying an e-waste 6400 until it's half the price
>Skyrim at 1440p ultra
That might be a tough one. I'll do a bit of research and come back.
So far not looking too good. Anything that would fit in the case is either too weak or overpriced as frick. But if you don't mind your right looking a bit ghetto, you might be able to use this card with the side panel off and something to prop it up. I've also seen people cut a slot in the side panel and run a riser through it. https://www.ebay.com/itm/354144631662?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=ln0nuxmgrbm&sssrc=2349624&ssuid=luzia6sbrhc&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY
>with a 5yo mobo at a premium simply because it isn't dead?
It amazes me how much DIY motherboard do cost some time later
You'd figure if they were reliable, they wouldn't be valued so high.
The motherboard in my NAS is worth the same dollar amount used as it did 8-9 years ago
Use an external power supply to get over your power limitations, get one of those adapters used to run a psu without it's main cable being plugged in to a motherboard. Use a pcie extender/riser cable to plug a GPU in from the outside.
Keep the original psu to power everything but the GPU. Using two psus is possible.
Do people do that unironically? If I'm at the point where I'm daily driving a flying spaghetti monster I think I'd rather just swallow the vintage mobo cost to have a case
It's predates mining rigs, but mining rigs use the same setup, secondary+ psus on the side to power all graphics cards while the main board has something else. When I have case constraints I am willing to cut holes and find other ways to mount things.
>Use velcro to stick your SSDs inside a case that has no ssd brackets, or if you run out of ssd brackets don't go spend $12 at bestbuy for a 2" to 3.5" drive bracket. If you have to make a bracket then take one of the ones you already have and use resin or clay to make a copy, or get a tapping set to make screw holes in the case/frame.
I got a sff dell optiplex with an i5 2400 and 8gb of ram. What should I do with it?
To build an emulation machine, the i5 2400 should be able to handle PCSX2 and CemU. For graphics upscaling and some native games, the AMD R7 250 2GB can be found on eBay for around 25-35$ and will fit in the case. It can run Battlefield V at 720p low and will let you upscale 6th gen emulation to at least 720p. Anothing thing you could use it for is a multiplayer game host server.
need help grasping the model numbering scheme
my stinkpad W520 is a comfy shitposting machine
I got an 3rd gen i7, a Quadro k1200, and 16Gbs of ram in a optiplex and I have no idea what to do with it. Not a lot of storage and installing more is near impossible so I have no clue. How much of a security risk would a self hosted website be?
Would you accept user input?
Most of the time hosting a website is fine because you're trusting the security of the hosting software like Apache or nigx which would be huge news if they suddenly had an exploit worth worrying about
just sell it
Main risk would be revealing your IP to the world, but that can be mitigated with a cheap VPS as a reverse proxy. I'm doing it from a mini pc along with some other webapps, very comfy.
what vps provider should I go for?
Not him but oracle has "free" arm servers.
Of course you might as well host your site on those.
Fricking close to 3x the single thread perf of beater x86 CPUs from yesteryear
I use it to compile for an Aarch64 target. Even with the new VS preview software development on WinARM itself is limited.
I just ordered a minipc with a Celeron or whatever Intel calls those cpus and 8gb. I think it uses 20W or something, kind of hoping it can take over from the old Dell. If it can handle basic tasks I might get another and a USB gpio breakout or something and try some Raspberry Pi type shit. My esp32s can handle a lot but it might be nice to aggregate all my sensor data for the house on one box so I can graph it and shit without much data transfer
If you are moving motherboards into regular cases and they fit but you have trouble with the front panels buy some adhesive breadboards to break the wires out and connect them to standard switches. If your computer never had a restart button you can get a normally closed switch (momentary) and splice it on either pole of your power switch. If you can't fit a standard psu in your case then mount it on the outside and drill a hole somewhere you can put electrical knockout gaskets and run your psu cables through that hole.
>bought i7-3770 optiplex for $100 in 2016
>same system is $300 now
>i7-7700 optiplex is $600 now
>$200 i3-10100F+mb+16GB ram destroys both in performance, efficiency, and cost
covid and WFH laptops killed the oem tower market
it's fricking over
The sweet spot in is haswell era systems atm
It's perplexing that Ivy-bridge systems are going for so much.
Feels wrong to even use systems that old
nice dead meme
still gets curbstomped by
The hell are those prices?
>left costs 300% of right
>louder, hotter, more power consumption
>unupgradable SFF e-waste trash
>cant even use a real GPU or PSU
If you wanna be that pedantic
>no hdd caddy
>just leave it rattling around in the case
>a case that's ally been kicked, beaten with a baseball bat, and thrown down a flight of stairs
>just to save $30 and then spend it on higher electricity bills
how to say you're a third worlder without saying you're a third worlder
SFF e-waste
true but their PSUs are 80+ GOLD
That's cheaper than what I paid for an i7-4790 sff 9020, you should go for it.
/thread
I know somebody involved in disposing of those old towers and the market has been in decline for a long long time, covid was just an accelerant for businesses to switch to all laptop fleets.
that means a wave of cheap dell laptops coming up
3 HP 6300 sff. I swap between 2 as I install a new Linux release. This way I have the older to fall back to if there is ever a problem with the new. If I dont then I will format over it. All the HDs are setup the same 120gb ssd for root, 500 gb 7200rpm HDD for Home.
The last one I have as a Media player for my TV with a good old NVIDIA GeForce GT 520 low profile card inside.
this is my z840
420 Euros
Got it from work, don't really know much it was used but it was so fricking cool I had to get it. They are not very common at my workplace but everytime I see some I check them for RAM.
I'd love to fill all the 16 slots of mine.
>420 Euros
>for 10 year old ewaste
lmao
Optiplex 5040. i5-6500. 12GB RAM, p sure. Two SATA SSDs for boot and one VM, a small m.2 for another VM. I use it to run TF2 and MC servers for my friends. Idles at 3W. Wish it had hyperthreading but it's good enough for what it is. Cute little man. Whisper silent. Love em.
You can get a 4c8t Xeon CPU of the same gen and socket for under $50. You would just have to pair it with whatever cheap low profile GPU fits your use case since Xeon lack iGPUs.
Xeon E3 1240 v5
https://www.ebay.com/itm/165444288035?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=GcFXaIbcRlm&sssrc=2349624&ssuid=luzia6sbrhc&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY
GTX 950 (if you are trying to keep compatibility with Windows XP for some reason), 1050 is about the same but drivers only available for Win7+, or a 1630, but the last one only has drivers for Win8+? I think and it costs almost $300 which is the cost of a new pc in some cases.
Zotac and Dell OEM cards are the ones most likely to fit inside the smaller cases, but they can be expensive.
Lately I've been thinking of external gpu enclosures (because of W11.) It would be nice to waste a lot of money on a gaming laptop (even though I think they are a meme), but the idea of having one stolen is off putting. I'm pivoting toward buying one with okish specs, but only if they come with a thunderbolt port so I can use an external gpu enclosure. I already have cards I can use and I figure I can reuse the enclosure in the future with other laptops anyway rather than spending a ton of money on a laptop with an embedded gpu I might not be able to reuse parts from in the future. Dell/HP/Lenovo/Apple already mentioned adding hardware telemetry to prevent booting when using parts from other prebuilts. Hardware DRM is getting stupid.
Any reason not to go with a 6700? I'd hate to waste a GPU, and its extra cost, when it's headless, if I can just grab a 6700. But yeah, I could probably find a trash bin GPU that pushes 1080 and that's it. Might have one on a shelf at my office, so yeah that Xeon does look nice on that condition. I appreciate it, thank you.
I have the full size 5040 case, but yeah, as I said above in the other reply, I might have a useless GPU for nothing but rendering 1080 for remote desktop. Never seen a dell OEM card tbh.
Wtf, hardware DRM? How new is that?
>Any reason not to go with a 6700?
The i7 6700 goes for a bit over $100 on eBay, though you might be able to get it cheaper if you keep an eye on bids. You might come out ahead with a Xeon + dGPU especially if you already have a GPU lying around.
Yeah exactly. I appreciate the link and will keep an eye out though! Not too keen on the 15W higher TDP on the Xeon but still I appreciate it. Thanks!
Sold my old gaming laptop in 2018 for $450 and bought a 9010 MT with a 1060 3GB thrown in. I was 16 at the time and not very knowledgeable on computers, but it's been serving me well
Somebody asked me to throw their Optiplex 9020 out at work, so I just kept it. I put Manjaro on it and now its in my living room and is an entertainment/gaming device. It plays some games fine, but I can easily stream stuff from my main PC with minimal latency. Works great. Putting Linux on it gave it a whole new life. It's much faster than it was in Winblows.
Will a SFF 990 with a 240w power supply take a low profile 1650 without exploding?
Making a sleeper in my 3B Systems large FF Beige case this week 🙂