First post, by xjas
- Rank
- l33t
Thought I'd do a quick thread about this system since I get a ton of mileage out of it. It's a pretty unassuming little box, but I'm proud of it because of how good it ended up being, and the ludicrously cheap amount I've managed to build it for. I've just done a couple upgrades, so I figured it's a good time to show it off. Without further ado:
I got this little Optiplex 7010 tower about a year ago from a lab that were selling off old equipment for, no BS, $30. It came without RAM or HDDs, but fortunately the original CPU was still present - that being an i7 3770, a mighty capable part for when this was new in ~2015 and no slouch even today.
I quickly found 8GB of G-Skill Ripjaws-X DDR3 1866 for $20 on a local classifieds from someone who was upgrading to a DDR4 system. I dropped in the 500GB HDD + Zotac GTX 750Ti in from my older Q9300 gaming rig, which this replaced. I then added a second HDD I had lying around, and swapped the stock Dell PSU for a Cooler Master 750W one.
The plastic pull-out HDD caddies were missing, so I grabbed two on Ebay for $6 shipped (and later found a 3rd one from a local computer shop for free, so I have a spare if one breaks.) The 750Ti came from a garage sale for IIRC $50, back around when the GTX 1080s had just come out.
So that leaves us with the recent updates. I had a $50 Ebay coupon that I spent on this:
Yep, 16GB of more of the same G-Skill memory. I ended up paying $75 total, which was already a deal in my book, but that coupon was a free bonus from selling things, so I'm counting this as $25 since you can't eat Ebay coupons.
That's 24GB of loveliness right there. It still blows my mind that you can have this much RAM in a consumer PC. And yes, I deliberately bought the blue stuff for visual contrast against the red modules that were already in there.
(The speeds are mismatched - the blue 8GB modules are 1600 and the red 4GB ones are 1866 - but AFAIK this system only supports 1600 anyway and there's no way to tweak the memory speed or timings, so it'll be fine. You can get either colour at any speed, these are just what was available on the day I went looking.)
Also, a 1TB HDD for inline backups of the other two drives. I found it in the cheap bin at my local FreeGeek and snapped that right up, since you guys know I only buy the best.
(FreeGeek put drives that pass SMART but have high run hours out in the cheap bin, so it's actually fine. WD Black are enterprise drives made for a long service life.)
The only place left for this drive was in the 5.25" bay under the DVD, so I mounted it in this random caddy from my junk pile:
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