What’s the deal with these cheap refurbished office PCs?
Can i just buy one and slap a 1650 inside? What’s a good model or brand?
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Whats the deal with these cheap refurbished office PCs? Can i just buy one and slap a 1650 inside?
Usually they're pretty cramped. You'd have a hard time fitting an actual graphics card in one.
Pretty much these, in THEORY it should be an easy upgrade but in practice most of these mass produced shitboxes have proprietary parts that make user upgrades a nightmare. It varies from model to model so do your homework, but if you can find one that doesn't have manDUHtory unique parts then they're an easy upgrade. I think HP used to have their own OC donut steel RAM of all things
its a 10 years old cpu used to death
The motherboard itself is often the problem and wont take "good" parts, so you cant upgrade it. Its why they opt to just get rid of them than buy updated parts to fit.
Yes, and Dell
I bought an Optiplex 3010 back in 2017 and threw a 1050 low pro in it
Make sure to get the largest form factor otherwise you're stuck with gimped to frick low profile GPU for it
I retired it in 2019 and gave it to my kids
Threw a 1650 in it in 2020 or so and they're still rocking it
>its a 10 years old cpu used to death
PC was built in 2012 and still has zero issues thank the lord
And what this anon said
They use proprietary hookups for things so you're very limited in upgrades unless you want to Black person rig a secondary PSU just for a non-1650 GPU for it
What’s the wattage on the psu? You added a 1650 with no other upgrades?
On my 3010 its like a 240w PSU in a proprietary form factor with even dumber plugs, thx Dell
And the only other upgrades I did was swap the original HDD out for an SSD and added a second drive on lego stilts on top of that.
I pretty much did exactly that without too much trouble. Stuck in the 1650 and another 2x2TB HDDs inside, only other thing I had to upgrade was the PSU (can't remember the exact modle but it was pretty basic). Was a bit cramped but not unusably so. I think there were some screws that didn't fit in or some shit so I didn't bother lol. It's not as if I'm going to move it more than an inch in any direction for it's entire life. If it's just going to sit there you literally don't need to have a full case, just cut a hole anyway. Still use it as my main since 2020, had like 2 crashes ever.
Second this advice, I probably spent about the same amount of money. Probably much better value options than the 1650 and old i5 nowadays though
>Probably much better value options than the 1650
1650 is the last discrete Nvidia GPU that uses 75W and doesn't need the extra power connector from the PSU. The RTX 3050 and RX 6500 XT are comparable new models, but they're not that worth it imo and they need an extra PCIe power plug, so if your old Dell PSU doesn't have one then you're SOL.
if you're looking for one that runs from pcie power only, yea that's one of the best options even today. i think amd has a newer one that does but i'm still sus of amd for gpus (cpus are diff story these days, zen is solid).
ah ok, yea that's way better lmao. 7th gen is fine. probably a driver issue, try updating your chipset drivers and gpu drivers.
1650 is still one of the best value cards on the market. low- and mid-range stagnation is a real problem.
if you're willing to spend a bit more, a 3060 is also a good option these days, they regularly go on sale for reasonable prices.
Yeah but I just want a 4gb gpu
>Can i just buy one and slap a 1650 inside?
Dells are autonomously mass produced and have integrated/proprietary hardware so no
Search on youtube. There are a bunch of channels about making budget PC's by using old office PC and the cards you can put in it.
~~*mitigations*~~ will rape your performance unless you use linux and disable them
Yeah I just want a shitty beater for windows and anti cheats. I don’t want them on my main machines.
>11 months till christmas of 2024
>i7
>180gb ssd
Hell if anything you only have to wait for the semi-annual Amazon Day ™ sale they have in May and then October (followed by Black Friday). But maybe Jeffy Beezus will try to squeeze in one quarterly now.
Dell's fricking terrible, specially their laptops. They last only 2-3 years, and may randomly die multiple times through their short lifespans. Better have a ProSupport Plus warranty.
You could, but it's not as good as it used to be since CPUs have meaningfully improved since AMD started kicking Intel's ass. Ivy Bridge or Haswell quadcores are getting a bit long in the tooth now. They're also hard to upgrade in the long term, usually due to shitty non-standard motherboards and bottom-tier PSUs. Still, it's reasonably cost effective and easy if you've never built from scratch before and you're worried about fricking it up.
buying a used cpu/mb combo would be a better bet. no need to frick around with proprietary bullshit
>Can i just buy one and slap a 1650 inside?
yes, assuming that the PSU and mobo can handle it.
dell used to solder hardware into motherboards so you couldnt upgrade them
>What’s the deal?
Offices dont care about keeping old hardware and just toss em to resellers. That's it. I'd recommend swapping the hard drive and the ram but the rest is good to keep.
>Can i just buy one and slap a 1650 inside?
Yes. But keep in mind that you need specific cards that can run on the motherboard's power rather than their own, and in the case of the SFF variants of these computers, you need special SFF versions of those cards. They aren't cheap. With a 1650 they're about as good as a PS4 Pro...but also just as noisy.
I have two (one as my media center PC and one as the brains of my arcade machine) and they work great.
>4th gen
i wouldn't get anything older than 6th gen unless you're one of those "i'm never going to update past windows 7" morons
you can actually
I just bought a 7010 SFF because I wanted a small portable build without paying out the ass for one
there are caveats like proprietary parts and limited space, but china makes adapters for most of them (psu, fans, etc.) or you can outright replace them with aftermarket parts (cooler in MT Dells)
I slapped an A2000, 3770 i7 and 16 gigs of memory in mine and it works perfectly
just don't go overboard with ~~*gaming*~~ parts, buy value RAM, check if the CPU is compatible and if the GPU physically fits in the case
>3770
m8 that shit is 11 years old and performs like complete dogshit, a fricking i3-12100 from two years ago DOUBLES it on passmark. i know this because i was using ivy bridge up until a year and a half ago; it performs like TRASH, i upgraded to a T-sku (factory thermal throttled) 11th gen i5 (three years old, from a gen when intel was still putting out complete trash) and it STILL runs laps around my old ivy bridge computer.
there's nothing wrong with buying reasonably old shit, but you should not be recommending people buy shit that is literally over a decade old, it isn't good
op's pic is a 4th gen machine
the thing about dell sff machines is that they can't fit dual slot cards because the 16x slot is closer to the psu
xx10 series are the last that can fit dual slot cards, otherwise you have to use the x4 slot
it's working fine for me either way, playing at 1080p/max/30-60fps, that's what I meant, just keep your expectations realistic and don't overpay for gaming shit because it won't fit/be compatible
"fine" is relative. it used to take like 10 minutes to open starcraft 2 on my ivy bridge system. it would work "fine" once you were in a game on the lowest settings, but actually getting it to load took much, much longer.
also, 4th gen isn't much better than 3rd, there's a reason we used to call them haslels on Ganker.
i personally recommend people try to get an 8th gen or newer intel if they can, 6th gen at the absolute oldest since that was the generation they switched to the newer architecture.
the system i'm using i pieced together from mostly low-cost parts; i snagged the cpu for $50, the gpu for $200, and the motherboard for $50. all together it was about $400, though i was able to bring some parts from my old machine to it. it works fairly well and is a much more reasonable option performance-wise if you can go that route.
they are work computers so they are good deals
>Can i just buy one and slap a 1650 inside?
the power supply can probably handle a 1650 but not much more and the psu on those things is likely to be some custom form factor
>What’s a good model or brand?
you can pretty easily find 8th gen ones (which will be explicitly compatible with windows 11) at your local computer reseller or off ebay. you might have to be patient and keep checking.
>4th gen i7
don't. it's too old. get some shit with avx2 and avx512 or whatever new instruction set is in vogue.
also office PCs often have non-standard motherboards and PSUs, and the mobos often have other downsides (shitty VRM cooling, shitty audio codec, shitty chipset, fewer expansion slots, fewer RAM slots, etc.)
>avx512
not really relevant outside of a few emulators. i think they actually removed support from it in the linux kernel, linus had a hate-boner for it.
i bought optiplex with i5 750p 1660 super for a plex server and temp replacement for my actual pc thati need to fix
its alright
idk if its the optiplex or win 10 but alot of newer games microstutter
for 300 bucks its nuts tho cuz u can play anything up to like 2020 on it on ultra
i wish i had a better cpu tho 4 core is dogshit
it's the fact that you're on a first gen core product, that shit is like 16 years old
lol 7500 not 750
Buy a used workstation
theyre just smaller than you think they are. i had the tear out the handle on the case panel just to fit a proper psu in it and the mobo anded up getting fried anyway
>I7 4th gen
That's a four core processor from 10 years ago, it's wildly outdated.
Genuinely not worth it. You'll end up with a decade old card and a decade old CPU that BARELY hits a stable 60 Fps on the lowest possible settings for even 5-6 year old games. It's better to just buy and assemble in the long run unless you don't care about playing "modern" games.
T. Got suckered into buying one for college years back not knowing bettrt with an i5 3470 and 1030, only to realize I can't upgrade beyond i7 3770 cpu and a 1050