@@GregSalazar C'mon, we need it. It would change from "very dumb build" to "it's not THE dumbest build". Because that 4 lane solution is very VERY bad.
My Dad works IT at his company. Every 2 years they "Upgrade" Their PC's. He gave me a 9th gen version of this same PC. I ended up doing something similar. Instead of using the upper 4x slot, I bought a low profile RX 6400. It Runs great pretty good actually. I added a little front fan as well to help give it some more air.
I've done the same thing. So far no problems, but I'm a little concerned about the 200W PSU my Vostro has. I think it's fine, though. How big is your PSU? The rx6400 is an amazing card, really. I got it for $120 off of Newegg. a DDR5 1030 was $100. I had bought a DDR4 1030 for $65 off of Amazon, but it was only about 20% faster than the iGPU.
I bought a Dell Optiplex 3040 SFF with the intel core i5- 6500 for $50 or $60. I swapped out the i5-6500 for the i7-6700, upgrade the PSU from 180w to the 240w PSU, upgraded the ram to 16GB (DDR3L though. Blasted Dell!), bought a 2TB SSD and had bought 1 RTX A2000 and an AMD RX6400. I bought 2 gfx cards because I wasn't sure if I wanted to have a gfx card pouring out of the case or if I wanted to keep the SFF theme going. I ended up choosing the rx6400 because it keeps the build clean. It is my daily rig and is plenty capable of gaming. It handles 1080p gaming like a champ. With AMD's Frame Gen and/or Super Resolution enabled, it puts out over 100fps in the games I play. It is "loud". But, that's where the compromise is. Only thing I wished I would've looked for before purchasing the 3040 was maybe looking into the 3050 or 5050/7050. I would've had m.2 and DDR4. If I come across a 3050 MB for super cheap, I think that'll be the last thing I do to it. I play Minecraft with kids, Path of Exile, PUBG, GTA5, SCUM and EVE Online. The RX6400 handles everything very well. Albeit, Hot and Loud on some of those titles.
I did something very similar with an HP slim i had laying around for my son. Upgraded his CPU to a i7-8700 of eBay for $80, & got a rx580 off AliExpress for $85 cut hole in side of case & attached it with riser cable. We dubbed it Frankenstein,, runs Minecraft, Roblox & Warzone @1080p he loves it..
I’ve bought a good number of these ssf Optiplexs, various models, from my local university surplus store. Most come without storage or an installed OS, and they have been a good source of RAM and processors for other builds. One I turned into an Internet browser for my parents - so they didn’t need to spend money on a new machine for simple tasks - and another I use as a game server for my close friends.
Same here, I live in a huge tech sector, the local market place gets flooded with them when the business upgrade. I usually keep 1-2 as a basic PC and harvest the Ram/CPU's for budget gaming builds...Case with RGB and a GPU that will play fornite....it will sell
I picked up a HP EliteDesk 800 G3 SFF to use as my backup NAS, and have been impressed with it. i5-7500, 16gb, i threw a 128Gb NVMe into it for the OS, and the 2 14Tb drives for the backup. The x16 slot is in the top position so you could put a GPU in there without it getting choked by the PSU. no connection for supplemental power, so a PSU upgrade would be needed. i got mine for 60 bucks, but they are on eBay for 85 pretty easily. add in a 3050 for under 200 bucks, and you have a solid 1080p gaming system for under 300 bucks.
VERY cool! I just bought a Dell Vostro 3471 that was very similar. Got it locally from Facebook for $50! (It only had an HDD and 4gb of RAM, so I upgraded it with a 1TB SSD and 32gb of RAM, just because I had it lying around. So it ended up costing about the same as yours!) 200W PSU, as well, so I put an rx6400 (max 53 tdp) in it and it's an AMAZING retro gaming machine. I love it!
I actually have a SFF OptiPlex 990 MB sitting in my testbench right now. I rescued it from the recycle bin. The case makes no sense so it's getting re-cased. I have to rewire all the fans (thanks dell), so I am using that same cyclone cooler right now, it's loud but it's the same loud at any load. I had to use a PCI-E extender fit a 1080 in it, as the GPU hit the ATX 24pin, so again limited there for GPU's. I am glad there is video that makes as much sense as my test bench franken build. It sort of fun to see how much you can do with a basic office PC that had no dreams of doing much more.
I worked on a upgrade project for a major hospital and their clinics where we were moving them off Windows 7 to Windows 10...and these were among the machines we used. 😁 We also had the 7080's for specific areas like radiology...because that is what these PC's are for.
Moddiy makes adapters for 24 atx to dells proprietary 8 pin so in theory you could use any PSU that fits. So looks like flex form factor. A small diy spacer would take care of sagging.
There is a 500w PSU from the NUC extreme going for 30 if you make an offer. If I remember rightly it is an FSP. Might even be smaller so you can use a the graphics x16 slot 🤷🏼♂️.
I think you could use that power supply externally like a laptop power brick as well to free up the correct PCIE slot if you don't use a riser cable. Curious how it would do. Fun idea for a video, Greg. Always enjoy your content.
We have hundreds of these things where I work and while I'm not a Dell fan (Dell IS a four letter word after all), it's impressive what they can put up with in a manufacturing environment and just keep working. If Raymond thinks that's small he ought to take a look at the ultra small form factor OptiPlexs. We have a BUNCH of those too, and like them because they are so compact you can mount them anywhere. Now if Greg want's a real challenge turn one of those into a gaming PC!
Unfortunately, Dell has been doing that with the x16 slot since the 4th Gen systems... which is why I generally tell people to avoid them. HP has much better option in the SFF systems, granted they aren't as small as the Optiplex and Lenovo systems, but you can fit any GPU in most of them. If you really want to stick with an Optiplex, a Flex ATX PSU will give you the room you need to be able to install a dual slot card in the x16 slot. Also worth noting, that x4 slot is a Gen2 slot.
HP does a different crappy thing than Dell does; sometimes they current-limit the slot. To 35W or some BS. Or so I've heard. If you ask me that would be deviating from the PCI Express specification, if they limited the current. But why would they do this? I guess because of the stock 180W power supply. I can't confirm or deny; I've never owned an HP and I lost my multimeter anyway but you can't measure load without creating it so I'd have to insert a card and measure the voltage at the gold fingers... anyway... so the FlexATX PSU is much smaller? Like a slot's worth? And of course it is... so it's a 2x4? (thwack) and the card is PCIe 4.0x8? so... we're working with an EIGHTH of the bandwidth it could, optimally. Ouch. Definitely would be a good idea to try (no, do - or do not; there is no try) and do a riser somehow. If only to get it to 3.0x8... too bad you can't adapt 4.0x8 to 3.0x16... I guess with a double-buffer/relay circuit you could?
@@SeeJayPlayGames Lenovo and Dell have both done that as well, and they really only do that in the consumer models. They don't do it in the business systems like the 600/800 series and the Z workstations. As for the Flex ATX, yeah... they're a server 1U sized power supply, so about 1.5 inches. It leaves just enough space to have a dual slot card in the x16 slot and having the shroud be about as close to the PSU. I need to test it with the 4060, but the x4 slot versus the x16 slot is about an 11% difference in performance, so I'm not sure it's really worth it either way.
Nice build. Next time you could take the power supply out of the case, drill some additional vents in the case and cut the sidepanel so a wide card fits, see if it works. Proper Sleeper rig needs at least one hand made part 😉 or parts from different eras of computers. you have it already with the power cable 😊
I have a small stack of those from when we closed down a branch of our library. They are a nightmare to work on and have very little upgradability. That said, they do have 8th gen i5 chips and as such are fairly fast. I set them up when I need to rip a bunch of DVDs. One keyboard and mouse and then just remote in.
you did what I did too. Well, I have gone a little bit bigger CPU i7 6700K, don't think it make a bit better, bigger heatsink. I use RTX- A2000 GPU and a 240Watts PSU, works fine not trottling, happy to be there.
Ditch the hdd mod the case use a riser cable get the gpu to fit laying fan side up where the hdd caddy was. Then possibly vent the side panel it will be much better and more in line with what people are actually doing with these systems.
Two more low profile (single slot) video cards: VisionTek Radeon RX 560 (~$80.00 used on eBay); Radeon Pro WX 4100 (~$70.00 used on eBay). Both should work with macOS Sonoma, as well as Windows.
Bought a slim 4570 PC for $30, seller couldn't find it and gave me a slim with a 8500 instead (weird but later makes sense). Only 1 memory channel worked (that wasn't disclosed). Troubleshot, removed CPU, fixed bent pins and is all well and good. Bought a RX550 4gb for $20 (no ext pwr), should be here tomorrow. Just looking for low end performance and some fun emulation.
Another thing to consider, is that often the slots on this Ultra SFF are reduced to 45w, and not the full 75w. I'm not saying this is the case for this specific model, but something viewers should consider.
You can tell how young Greg is because he doesn't know what a blower is, he calls it a wind tunnel and assumes it's loud! I had one of these Optiplex workstations I got used for cheap, and that blower is great. The pressure lets it pull air effectively through the dense heatsink fins and the air goes straight out of the case. Also the reason blower graphics cards are beneficial. They've only gone out of style due to the prevalence of cases with many giant fans
There's a 24 pin to 6 pin adapter from comeap for like $20 which allow you to use any PSU that fits the case with dell PC's or other pc's that have proprietary connections. Only bad thing is that the PC is "always on" unless you turn the PSU off manually. I used one in my Dell G5 5000 to put a SF750 inside so I could run a 3080ti in it and it's been working well. I wanted to get a SF850L, but wasn't sure if that would fit.
I'd like to see a performance comparison between a lower end LP card with a full 8x or 16x PCIE lane vs the crippling 4x and 4060 here. See if it balances out. Something like a 1660lp super, maybe a Radeon Rx6400lp? RTX3050 lp\A2000 or even or the newer Slim ARC 3xx cards, then compare to the CPU bottleneck etc, actually find the best price/performance than can be had with an SFF system like this!
I'm running i5-4590 + RX 6400LP + 16gb RAM. Solid 60fps on Ultra on most common titles from 5-10 years ago. A few hiccups with BG3 and Kingdom Come, but overall, you can't beat it for the entire $322 it cost me total.
RX 6400 is PCIe 4.0x4. It fits in a whole 16x slot but don't be fooled, it's only a 4-lane card. The RX 6600 is only 4.0x8. You need at least a 6700 before you see a full 16 lanes used. Same can be said of the RTX 3000/4000 series... the lower-end cards have limited lanes. The RTX 4060 is only an 8-lane card. You want a 16-lane card, you need at least a 4070. By comparison, the whole Pascal (GTX 10 series) line (with GTX branding, not the GT models) were 3.0x16. The GT 1030 (and 1010) was only 3.0x4. The rarer Kepler based GK107 variant of the 1030 actually did have 16 lanes, as well as NVENC (albeit 1st gen).
I use a 5040 for my virtualization server running casaos dockers controller with pinhole, unbound, plex, an a310 arc for transcoding, 32gb ram, q28gb nvme and 3x 4tb ssd for storage crammed in the 3.5inch spot lol. Not bad for a server that pulls 10w at idle, 130w when plex is loaded, and can do networking stuff while running 4 plex transcodes....
I overbuilt a SFF OptiPlex 7010 by adding an RTX A2000 GPU. It gets all of it power from the PCIE rail and is able to run all of the games in my Steam library at moderate settings, so it was worth it for me.
I would have gone with an HP SFF instead. Although a little larger physically, the x16 slots are in the correct spot unlike these Optiplex PC's. I have two Dell SFF's with Core i5-6500T CPU's and the best option I came up with for one of them was to make a OPNSense firewall by adding a 4 port 2.5 Gbe card. The other one just sits doing nothing because there are no good single slot GPU options with pci-e 3.0. ETA Prime did create a single slot intel Arc 380, but that requires Above 4G decoding and ReBAR to make it worth installing and those older PC's do not support it or the ability to mod the BIOS/UEFI to enable those options.
do some internal modding to make it into a bit of a sleeper - riser cable to mount the graphics card vertically into the correct slot, could maybe stuff an SFF PSU in there. I love seeing how creative some of the SFF PC guys on reddit get.
It could make sense if for example you got a used RTX A2000 (on par with a 3050) in that thing. That way you could keep the existing PSU and not deal with cable shenanigans since it's only a 70w card. Worth noting that it also has a full PCIe x16 bandwidth.
Greg channeling his inner Dawid Does Tech Stuff We have quite a few 3070s at work in SFF guise. They come with i5-8400s. I've thought about throwing a Core i7-9700k and a LP GPU in one.
Not with the overkill 4060, but it would make a nice Media PC for your home theater. Small foot print, decent core count pair it with an older GPU and you'd get some good movie/streaming on your tv.
I'm still using a slightly bigger and much older HP dc7900 SFF as a HTPC. Core2 Quad Q6600 @ 3.0GHz (tape modded), 8GB DDR2, Radeon HD 6570, 240GB SSD + 3TB HDD
@@Pasi123 my current media PC was found in the trash. It's an HP office machine with a AMD A4-3420 (dual core) with 6gb ram and a gtx 1050. Runs Pop!OS and streams/plays local stored movies just fine. Old PC's are great media boxes
here's a stupid idea, while we're having them... when you had the new power supply outside of the case, just next to it, it dawned on me - you could locate the power supply externally; on the other side of the "bottom" of the case, creating that much more room inside the case. That might let you put the card into the 16 lane slot?
theoretically, I think those Skylake and Kaby Lake motherboards can be bios hacked to support Coffee Lake processors without too much effort for just a bit more of a boost.
happy to see you make "weird" videos...keep it up, i'll keep watching. I wonder if you could "extract" that 4x pcie port and run a riser from the 16x to the correct spot. eh, good stuff.
Im surprised you didn't just custom fit a pico psu, with an adapter for the 24 pin to that dell motherboard, then you would have had loads more space to play with for the GPU and could have put it in the 16x slot.
I have a lot of these things laying around from various generations. I generally put P1000 or T1000 Quadros in them for any video upgrade purposes. I wonder how those compare to a 4060 running at PCIe x4...
I have been watching your videos since Science Studio. You usually ask for what your viewers want to see? I have an good idea for a boring video - Metrics. Step 1: Make a spreadsheet of all of the Fix or Flop PC's. + in house Parts Inventory for yourself. Specs, Customer states, Fix, Estimated parts cost, Hours = Labor cost, etc. Step 2: Analysis. Look for trends. What needs fixing most often? What part / SKU fails often?
From time to time I deal with Optiplex, the 5050 and up SFF are troublesome because I like to but them to pull a cheap i7 to upgrade a gaming PC, and end up putting the F SKU i3 or i5, and then have to put a single slot low profile GPU in, I normally use an ancient Quadro or Fire Pro card, but it seems like there should be something better for under $200.
That pci slot location is sooooo stupid! I got burned when i bought one of these along with a gtx 1650 sff and didnt think to look at where the slot was because why would it be there!?
Systems like these are perfect for the simple older games or some esports playing casual with something like a GTX1030. For the "bare" system you should pay more than something like 130-150. Id say makes perfect financial sense if you want something that sits out of the way
I think you should Frankenstein it by 3D printing an enclosure for the PSU then drilling a hold in the case with a rubber gasket for the edges of the hole for the cables to snake through and rivet the 3D printed enclosure to the outside of the case. Then you would have plenty of room for the GPU to go into the correct slot.
I dunno, I'm running basically the same thing as an everyday driver, except HP flavored instead of Dell (the PCIe slots are better laid out, for one). I have one with a 1050 slimline card plugged into my TV as a media PC, and this one, which has a Quadro A2000 for the GPU. And I can't say I do a lot of gaming, but I do a bit of AI work for graphics design, and it handles it - slowly, but it can't be beat for the budget.
would like to see using this gpu with some kind of riser cable and utilising lower slot and maybe adding some noctua small fans to help cool it a little bit
@GregSalazar Interesting note, If you had bought an HP Elitedesk G3 or G4 SFF, you would have had a better experience as the PCIe 16x slot is next to the CPU socket. I have one of them, G4 with a 6core i5 8500, 32GB of RAM, a 512GB NVMe drive+2TB 2.5HDD and a GTX 1050ti low profile(which fits in perfectly). It makes for a very decent 1080p/720p experience. I'm thinking of upgrading the 1050ti to a 3050 or 4060 because why not?
Those silicon power ssds are kind of ticking time bombs. Wasn't a huge percentage of them but we had enough of them do the satafirm s11 error of death that I'd not fuck with them in my own machines.
Skylake 6700K isn't supported by Windows 11. Just saying. I wonder if you could have gone with a pico power supply with a supplemental 12V external power supply for the graphics card. That would give you a lot more space in the case at the expense of an external power brick.
Nice build! Maybe you should try installing an RX6400 instead of the 4060. The RX6400 is a single slot GPU, very low power consumption and it would fit in the x16 slot.
Use a riser cable to connect it to the correct slot and give us a before and after test results. 😁
I'd be very interested in those results...
Really thought about doing this! Wish I had in hindsight.
@@GregSalazar C'mon, we need it. It would change from "very dumb build" to "it's not THE dumbest build". Because that 4 lane solution is very VERY bad.
Yeah, I would definitely desolder that PCI 3.0x4 slot off the board and use a riser cable to go over to the 16x slot.
@@GregSalazar I was thinking about it as well, but would you have to break out a Dremel and still have nothing to screw the card too.
My Dad works IT at his company. Every 2 years they "Upgrade" Their PC's. He gave me a 9th gen version of this same PC. I ended up doing something similar. Instead of using the upper 4x slot, I bought a low profile RX 6400. It Runs great pretty good actually. I added a little front fan as well to help give it some more air.
I've done the same thing. So far no problems, but I'm a little concerned about the 200W PSU my Vostro has. I think it's fine, though. How big is your PSU? The rx6400 is an amazing card, really. I got it for $120 off of Newegg. a DDR5 1030 was $100. I had bought a DDR4 1030 for $65 off of Amazon, but it was only about 20% faster than the iGPU.
That LP RTX cards its the best card Gigabyte could have made considering this is very demanding for SFF computers like that.
Awesome work Greg.
A few years ago I build my father a PC in an old Optiplex. Runs great even today.
I bought a Dell Optiplex 3040 SFF with the intel core i5- 6500 for $50 or $60. I swapped out the i5-6500 for the i7-6700, upgrade the PSU from 180w to the 240w PSU, upgraded the ram to 16GB (DDR3L though. Blasted Dell!), bought a 2TB SSD and had bought 1 RTX A2000 and an AMD RX6400. I bought 2 gfx cards because I wasn't sure if I wanted to have a gfx card pouring out of the case or if I wanted to keep the SFF theme going. I ended up choosing the rx6400 because it keeps the build clean. It is my daily rig and is plenty capable of gaming. It handles 1080p gaming like a champ. With AMD's Frame Gen and/or Super Resolution enabled, it puts out over 100fps in the games I play. It is "loud". But, that's where the compromise is. Only thing I wished I would've looked for before purchasing the 3040 was maybe looking into the 3050 or 5050/7050. I would've had m.2 and DDR4. If I come across a 3050 MB for super cheap, I think that'll be the last thing I do to it.
I play Minecraft with kids, Path of Exile, PUBG, GTA5, SCUM and EVE Online. The RX6400 handles everything very well. Albeit, Hot and Loud on some of those titles.
i love taking older platforms and upgrading/retrofitting them to make "sleeper" style builds. super cool.
great vid GS!
Glad you liked it!
I did something very similar with an HP slim i had laying around for my son. Upgraded his CPU to a i7-8700 of eBay for $80, & got a rx580 off AliExpress for $85 cut hole in side of case & attached it with riser cable. We dubbed it Frankenstein,, runs Minecraft, Roblox & Warzone @1080p he loves it..
the GPU is not only running on x4 PCIe, but it's running on 4 PCIe Gen 3 lanes, so basically x2 PCIe gen 4.
Surprised it did so well, considering!
I’ve bought a good number of these ssf Optiplexs, various models, from my local university surplus store. Most come without storage or an installed OS, and they have been a good source of RAM and processors for other builds. One I turned into an Internet browser for my parents - so they didn’t need to spend money on a new machine for simple tasks - and another I use as a game server for my close friends.
Same here, I live in a huge tech sector, the local market place gets flooded with them when the business upgrade. I usually keep 1-2 as a basic PC and harvest the Ram/CPU's for budget gaming builds...Case with RGB and a GPU that will play fornite....it will sell
I picked up a HP EliteDesk 800 G3 SFF to use as my backup NAS, and have been impressed with it. i5-7500, 16gb, i threw a 128Gb NVMe into it for the OS, and the 2 14Tb drives for the backup. The x16 slot is in the top position so you could put a GPU in there without it getting choked by the PSU. no connection for supplemental power, so a PSU upgrade would be needed. i got mine for 60 bucks, but they are on eBay for 85 pretty easily. add in a 3050 for under 200 bucks, and you have a solid 1080p gaming system for under 300 bucks.
VERY cool! I just bought a Dell Vostro 3471 that was very similar. Got it locally from Facebook for $50! (It only had an HDD and 4gb of RAM, so I upgraded it with a 1TB SSD and 32gb of RAM, just because I had it lying around. So it ended up costing about the same as yours!) 200W PSU, as well, so I put an rx6400 (max 53 tdp) in it and it's an AMAZING retro gaming machine. I love it!
I actually have a SFF OptiPlex 990 MB sitting in my testbench right now. I rescued it from the recycle bin. The case makes no sense so it's getting re-cased. I have to rewire all the fans (thanks dell), so I am using that same cyclone cooler right now, it's loud but it's the same loud at any load. I had to use a PCI-E extender fit a 1080 in it, as the GPU hit the ATX 24pin, so again limited there for GPU's. I am glad there is video that makes as much sense as my test bench franken build. It sort of fun to see how much you can do with a basic office PC that had no dreams of doing much more.
I worked on a upgrade project for a major hospital and their clinics where we were moving them off Windows 7 to Windows 10...and these were among the machines we used. 😁 We also had the 7080's for specific areas like radiology...because that is what these PC's are for.
Please give Raymond a spending spree in micro centre!! We would love to see how he spends a budget. And he definitely deserves it!
Moddiy makes adapters for 24 atx to dells proprietary 8 pin so in theory you could use any PSU that fits. So looks like flex form factor. A small diy spacer would take care of sagging.
There is a 500w PSU from the NUC extreme going for 30 if you make an offer. If I remember rightly it is an FSP. Might even be smaller so you can use a the graphics x16 slot 🤷🏼♂️.
These Bots make NO sense
I think you could use that power supply externally like a laptop power brick as well to free up the correct PCIE slot if you don't use a riser cable. Curious how it would do. Fun idea for a video, Greg. Always enjoy your content.
Thanks for watching!
Wouldnt a pcie riser work? Ig you could make custom mounting holes etc with some effort, and it would make for some great content in my opinion!
We have hundreds of these things where I work and while I'm not a Dell fan (Dell IS a four letter word after all), it's impressive what they can put up with in a manufacturing environment and just keep working.
If Raymond thinks that's small he ought to take a look at the ultra small form factor OptiPlexs. We have a BUNCH of those too, and like them because they are so compact you can mount them anywhere.
Now if Greg want's a real challenge turn one of those into a gaming PC!
Unfortunately, Dell has been doing that with the x16 slot since the 4th Gen systems... which is why I generally tell people to avoid them. HP has much better option in the SFF systems, granted they aren't as small as the Optiplex and Lenovo systems, but you can fit any GPU in most of them. If you really want to stick with an Optiplex, a Flex ATX PSU will give you the room you need to be able to install a dual slot card in the x16 slot.
Also worth noting, that x4 slot is a Gen2 slot.
HP does a different crappy thing than Dell does; sometimes they current-limit the slot. To 35W or some BS. Or so I've heard. If you ask me that would be deviating from the PCI Express specification, if they limited the current. But why would they do this? I guess because of the stock 180W power supply. I can't confirm or deny; I've never owned an HP and I lost my multimeter anyway but you can't measure load without creating it so I'd have to insert a card and measure the voltage at the gold fingers... anyway... so the FlexATX PSU is much smaller? Like a slot's worth?
And of course it is... so it's a 2x4? (thwack) and the card is PCIe 4.0x8? so... we're working with an EIGHTH of the bandwidth it could, optimally. Ouch. Definitely would be a good idea to try (no, do - or do not; there is no try) and do a riser somehow. If only to get it to 3.0x8... too bad you can't adapt 4.0x8 to 3.0x16... I guess with a double-buffer/relay circuit you could?
@@SeeJayPlayGames Lenovo and Dell have both done that as well, and they really only do that in the consumer models. They don't do it in the business systems like the 600/800 series and the Z workstations. As for the Flex ATX, yeah... they're a server 1U sized power supply, so about 1.5 inches. It leaves just enough space to have a dual slot card in the x16 slot and having the shroud be about as close to the PSU. I need to test it with the 4060, but the x4 slot versus the x16 slot is about an 11% difference in performance, so I'm not sure it's really worth it either way.
Nice build. Next time you could take the power supply out of the case, drill some additional vents in the case and cut the sidepanel so a wide card fits, see if it works. Proper Sleeper rig needs at least one hand made part 😉 or parts from different eras of computers. you have it already with the power cable 😊
I have a small stack of those from when we closed down a branch of our library. They are a nightmare to work on and have very little upgradability. That said, they do have 8th gen i5 chips and as such are fairly fast. I set them up when I need to rip a bunch of DVDs. One keyboard and mouse and then just remote in.
You could use a riser cable to connect the graphics card to the full pciex16 slot, and basically keep it in the same spot.
Hi! Greg! I watch your cool videos every day, and learn so much new things about PC that help me a lot. Ivi from Croatia!😃😃😃
you did what I did too. Well, I have gone a little bit bigger CPU i7 6700K, don't think it make a bit better, bigger heatsink. I use RTX- A2000 GPU and a 240Watts PSU, works fine not trottling, happy to be there.
Ditch the hdd mod the case use a riser cable get the gpu to fit laying fan side up where the hdd caddy was.
Then possibly vent the side panel it will be much better and more in line with what people are actually doing with these systems.
Two more low profile (single slot) video cards: VisionTek Radeon RX 560 (~$80.00 used on eBay); Radeon Pro WX 4100 (~$70.00 used on eBay). Both should work with macOS Sonoma, as well as Windows.
Bought a slim 4570 PC for $30, seller couldn't find it and gave me a slim with a 8500 instead (weird but later makes sense). Only 1 memory channel worked (that wasn't disclosed). Troubleshot, removed CPU, fixed bent pins and is all well and good. Bought a RX550 4gb for $20 (no ext pwr), should be here tomorrow. Just looking for low end performance and some fun emulation.
Another thing to consider, is that often the slots on this Ultra SFF are reduced to 45w, and not the full 75w. I'm not saying this is the case for this specific model, but something viewers should consider.
You can tell how young Greg is because he doesn't know what a blower is, he calls it a wind tunnel and assumes it's loud! I had one of these Optiplex workstations I got used for cheap, and that blower is great. The pressure lets it pull air effectively through the dense heatsink fins and the air goes straight out of the case. Also the reason blower graphics cards are beneficial. They've only gone out of style due to the prevalence of cases with many giant fans
1:03 I think his brain would fall out if you showed him the Optilex Mini, 3000 series.
I had an old optiplex as a workstation/gaming capture machine. Used a PCIe riser cable for my gtx 750.
There's a 24 pin to 6 pin adapter from comeap for like $20 which allow you to use any PSU that fits the case with dell PC's or other pc's that have proprietary connections. Only bad thing is that the PC is "always on" unless you turn the PSU off manually. I used one in my Dell G5 5000 to put a SF750 inside so I could run a 3080ti in it and it's been working well. I wanted to get a SF850L, but wasn't sure if that would fit.
I'd like to see a performance comparison between a lower end LP card with a full 8x or 16x PCIE lane vs the crippling 4x and 4060 here. See if it balances out. Something like a 1660lp super, maybe a Radeon Rx6400lp? RTX3050 lp\A2000 or even or the newer Slim ARC 3xx cards, then compare to the CPU bottleneck etc, actually find the best price/performance than can be had with an SFF system like this!
I'm running i5-4590 + RX 6400LP + 16gb RAM. Solid 60fps on Ultra on most common titles from 5-10 years ago. A few hiccups with BG3 and Kingdom Come, but overall, you can't beat it for the entire $322 it cost me total.
@@OGDweeb Nice! I have a i7-4790s with 16gb and a 1660 super does all I need for a compact Mini itx bedroom gaming PC!
RX 6400 is PCIe 4.0x4. It fits in a whole 16x slot but don't be fooled, it's only a 4-lane card. The RX 6600 is only 4.0x8. You need at least a 6700 before you see a full 16 lanes used. Same can be said of the RTX 3000/4000 series... the lower-end cards have limited lanes. The RTX 4060 is only an 8-lane card. You want a 16-lane card, you need at least a 4070.
By comparison, the whole Pascal (GTX 10 series) line (with GTX branding, not the GT models) were 3.0x16. The GT 1030 (and 1010) was only 3.0x4. The rarer Kepler based GK107 variant of the 1030 actually did have 16 lanes, as well as NVENC (albeit 1st gen).
Excellent info!!!
I use a 5040 for my virtualization server running casaos dockers controller with pinhole, unbound, plex, an a310 arc for transcoding, 32gb ram, q28gb nvme and 3x 4tb ssd for storage crammed in the 3.5inch spot lol. Not bad for a server that pulls 10w at idle, 130w when plex is loaded, and can do networking stuff while running 4 plex transcodes....
I overbuilt a SFF OptiPlex 7010 by adding an RTX A2000 GPU. It gets all of it power from the PCIE rail and is able to run all of the games in my Steam library at moderate settings, so it was worth it for me.
I'm slightly suprized that the GPU delivered an Output fitted into a (4) Lane PCI(E) Slot vs the Standard (8) Lane Slot ???
I would have gone with an HP SFF instead. Although a little larger physically, the x16 slots are in the correct spot unlike these Optiplex PC's. I have two Dell SFF's with Core i5-6500T CPU's and the best option I came up with for one of them was to make a OPNSense firewall by adding a 4 port 2.5 Gbe card. The other one just sits doing nothing because there are no good single slot GPU options with pci-e 3.0. ETA Prime did create a single slot intel Arc 380, but that requires Above 4G decoding and ReBAR to make it worth installing and those older PC's do not support it or the ability to mod the BIOS/UEFI to enable those options.
You can also get a 240w psu for that machine. I plan to order a flex atx for my optiplex.
do some internal modding to make it into a bit of a sleeper - riser cable to mount the graphics card vertically into the correct slot, could maybe stuff an SFF PSU in there. I love seeing how creative some of the SFF PC guys on reddit get.
Nice. It's always interesting to see how a system like this works.
It could make sense if for example you got a used RTX A2000 (on par with a 3050) in that thing. That way you could keep the existing PSU and not deal with cable shenanigans since it's only a 70w card. Worth noting that it also has a full PCIe x16 bandwidth.
13:24 I’m curious how frame gen would carry the 6700k
you should heat shrink wrap that power cable. electrical tape wears off, gets sticky. my many years of audio work has seen it
It would be interesting to see a comprehensive comparison of what difference 16x vs. 4x PCIe makes, given everything else being equal.
Greg channeling his inner Dawid Does Tech Stuff
We have quite a few 3070s at work in SFF guise. They come with i5-8400s. I've thought about throwing a Core i7-9700k and a LP GPU in one.
Even at x4 that wouldn't matter at all for emulation so that would make an awesome emulation station
Not with the overkill 4060, but it would make a nice Media PC for your home theater. Small foot print, decent core count pair it with an older GPU and you'd get some good movie/streaming on your tv.
I'm still using a slightly bigger and much older HP dc7900 SFF as a HTPC. Core2 Quad Q6600 @ 3.0GHz (tape modded), 8GB DDR2, Radeon HD 6570, 240GB SSD + 3TB HDD
@@Pasi123 my current media PC was found in the trash. It's an HP office machine with a AMD A4-3420 (dual core) with 6gb ram and a gtx 1050. Runs Pop!OS and streams/plays local stored movies just fine. Old PC's are great media boxes
here's a stupid idea, while we're having them... when you had the new power supply outside of the case, just next to it, it dawned on me - you could locate the power supply externally; on the other side of the "bottom" of the case, creating that much more room inside the case. That might let you put the card into the 16 lane slot?
I'd be interested to see what it would look like with the more sensible ARC 310 single slot SFF. Probably wouldn't even need to upgrade the power.
theoretically, I think those Skylake and Kaby Lake motherboards can be bios hacked to support Coffee Lake processors without too much effort for just a bit more of a boost.
Where did you get the replacement dell psu? I am looking to bring to life an old Dell Optiplex with a 6pin motherboard power connector
happy to see you make "weird" videos...keep it up, i'll keep watching. I wonder if you could "extract" that 4x pcie port and run a riser from the 16x to the correct spot. eh, good stuff.
Im surprised you didn't just custom fit a pico psu, with an adapter for the 24 pin to that dell motherboard, then you would have had loads more space to play with for the GPU and could have put it in the 16x slot.
Would be a nice value add to have a breakdown of prices for each part you added. Just for informational purposes. :)
I put an RX 260 with 3:41 riser cable sideways in an optoplex
I have a lot of these things laying around from various generations. I generally put P1000 or T1000 Quadros in them for any video upgrade purposes. I wonder how those compare to a 4060 running at PCIe x4...
If it wasn't double boxed, just wow on the single layer bubble wrap pack.
I have been watching your videos since Science Studio. You usually ask for what your viewers want to see? I have an good idea for a boring video - Metrics.
Step 1: Make a spreadsheet of all of the Fix or Flop PC's. + in house Parts Inventory for yourself.
Specs, Customer states, Fix, Estimated parts cost, Hours = Labor cost, etc.
Step 2: Analysis. Look for trends. What needs fixing most often? What part / SKU fails often?
From time to time I deal with Optiplex, the 5050 and up SFF are troublesome because I like to but them to pull a cheap i7 to upgrade a gaming PC, and end up putting the F SKU i3 or i5, and then have to put a single slot low profile GPU in, I normally use an ancient Quadro or Fire Pro card, but it seems like there should be something better for under $200.
the best card you could use in that x16 slot (as far as im aware) is an a2000 with the slim cooler mod
Anyone know the specs for that portable monitor?
That pci slot location is sooooo stupid! I got burned when i bought one of these along with a gtx 1650 sff and didnt think to look at where the slot was because why would it be there!?
Yay Optiplex content!
Systems like these are perfect for the simple older games or some esports playing casual with something like a GTX1030. For the "bare" system you should pay more than something like 130-150. Id say makes perfect financial sense if you want something that sits out of the way
The PSU said auto switching so it shouldn't matter if it was set to 230V.
I'm a huge fan of seeing e-waste trash being put back into active duty! Great video. Very surprised at the final result!
I think you should Frankenstein it by 3D printing an enclosure for the PSU then drilling a hold in the case with a rubber gasket for the edges of the hole for the cables to snake through and rivet the 3D printed enclosure to the outside of the case. Then you would have plenty of room for the GPU to go into the correct slot.
I dunno, I'm running basically the same thing as an everyday driver, except HP flavored instead of Dell (the PCIe slots are better laid out, for one). I have one with a 1050 slimline card plugged into my TV as a media PC, and this one, which has a Quadro A2000 for the GPU. And I can't say I do a lot of gaming, but I do a bit of AI work for graphics design, and it handles it - slowly, but it can't be beat for the budget.
Would the RTX 2070 Super mini fit in this? Seems like it should, but I haven't checked the dimensions to be sure.
How did you get windows 11 on that cpu? I have an i7 7700 but I can’t update to windows 11
I have an optiplex 5050 running my home server. It's a great budget option
Dell Optiplex are pretty neat I use one which is an Ultra small form factor so MINI pc for my CCTV
would like to see using this gpu with some kind of riser cable and utilising lower slot and maybe adding some noctua small fans to help cool it a little bit
@GregSalazar
Interesting note, If you had bought an HP Elitedesk G3 or G4 SFF, you would have had a better experience as the PCIe 16x slot is next to the CPU socket. I have one of them, G4 with a 6core i5 8500, 32GB of RAM, a 512GB NVMe drive+2TB 2.5HDD and a GTX 1050ti low profile(which fits in perfectly). It makes for a very decent 1080p/720p experience. I'm thinking of upgrading the 1050ti to a 3050 or 4060 because why not?
We have those pc case in our office and they're being swapped out for smaller ones
Does a Silver Soul 110 CPU cooler fit?
Asus lauched a 4060 LP graphics card that require only a 6-pin connector. no schetchy adaptors needed :)
Add a piece of packing foam because no one will see And it will raise it up a little.
Those silicon power ssds are kind of ticking time bombs. Wasn't a huge percentage of them but we had enough of them do the satafirm s11 error of death that I'd not fuck with them in my own machines.
Are those psa graded yugioh cards on the wall or magic cards?
Skylake 6700K isn't supported by Windows 11. Just saying. I wonder if you could have gone with a pico power supply with a supplemental 12V external power supply for the graphics card. That would give you a lot more space in the case at the expense of an external power brick.
For GPU just use the Low Profile rx6400 it is a single slot gpg.
Didn't you realize you can install hardware when the "majority if its golden fingers are just kind of chilling there"
could you use a very short pcie riser and do a diy vertical mount there on the back grill?
Why a HDD?
Games?
Why not an ssd?
Optiplex with a good Ryzen and good Ryzen igpu would have made so much more sense.
For a second there I thought you were going to bust out the almighty 3050 6 gb LOL
Greg: "We're gonna tighten it up from the rear". OK.......🤨
For $150 you were taken for a bit of a ride. The i7 K is an OK CPU, but arguably you could find an 8th-10th gen for those prices nowadays
Windows 11 is NOT officially supported on that CPU I believe? How stable is the machine going to be with Windows 11?
Nice build! Maybe you should try installing an RX6400 instead of the 4060. The RX6400 is a single slot GPU, very low power consumption and it would fit in the x16 slot.
What about heat buildup in something that small?
Totally horrible.
Gregg, you know what you need to do, get a riser cable and plug it into the real PCIX slot! DO IT!
Then I couldn't close the case and it wouldn't be a tiny sleeper rig.
That 4060 fit so perfectly it looks like it was made mainly with the optiplex on mind😂
Arc a380 would've fit in the full slot
Need to find a way to pipe some air into the GPU, lol. Even just cutting some air holes at that spot might help.
If the extra pins are just ground and you can "jump" em... why the 8pin even exists?
Lucky you. The top pcie slot is not deadended.
I think the GPU would get hot with the side panel on during gaming