What's the deal with these old dell OptiPlex? Why are they so cheap? Are they worth it?
What's the deal with these old dell OptiPlex? Why are they so cheap? Are they worth it?
William Collins
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Nicholas Robinson
They're cheap because companies replace all their workstations in a single go, so every now and then there are hundreds of used optiplexes
If you don't do anything graphics intensive they're worth picking up
James Jones
Basically this. They are super reliable MS office machines.
Kevin Rogers
>Why are they so cheap?
Both Dell and Lenovo sold boatloads of these systems to large, profitable and very evil corporations who forced their minimum wage slave labor to use them until they became obsolete. These evil corporations know they are trash but they would have to pay to recycle them so they sell dirt cheap instead.
>Are they worth it?
That is a very personal question. If you want a system capable of running a web browser on a 1080p monitor then yes, I'd say they are absolutely worth it. Your fully functioning computer alternatives below $100, even cheaper sometimes, are limited. But so are these boxes.
You can find Optiplexes with Xeon's that are quite powerful by modern standards and you can find them with old i3's that are dogshit even for modern web browsers.
Oh, one last little detail. They tend to come with weak PSUs (meaning hard to add a GPU) and you can only use half-height PCIe cards (again, hard to add a GPU).
Juan Hill
>meaning hard to add a GPU
It's almost impossible to do this without cutting a hole on the case since they're half as wide as regular cases
Samuel Diaz
Most network cards and some weaker GPUs are half-height and come with a half-height bracket in the box. Of course, if you are buying one of these you're probably looking for a used GPU and those would be full-height and even if they are half-height whoever bought them lost the extra bracket in the box years ago.
..then there's the problem of these systems having a limit beyond spec on the PCIe x16 slot, some of Dell's models have a 35W limit (spec is 75W).
I guess you could buy a Nvidia 1030 and put that in there, I believe there's some half-height versions of those. But.. now you're talking spending as much as you did on the tower on a really weak GPU.
Joseph Evans
You can run servers on them. They work alright for that if you're not expecting much traffic.
Nathan Evans
>old i3's
Like the i3 3220?
Jace Wood
I used to buy these but now go for refurbished or decomissioned lenovo computers in the $100-200 range. can get nice looking pc’s with i5’s and i7’s and toss an SSD in them. i shop on ebay for these.
Levi Adams
They have shitty cases and shity mobos with like 2 sata ports on it and its not worth your time trying to move it to a real case but yeah if you are poor and like 8gb or ram and i5s then sure
Ryan Allen
>Why so cheap ? Are they worth ?
you need to learn your Optiplexes, young Jedi. some are indeed complete fucking trash - these are not 'cheap' they are old doorsteps that aren't worth shit, never mind the postage, not at any price. Others, still get (relatively) good price for, and these are indeed fine machines for office, surfing and general nonsense. Shit for gayming tho, don't bother
>b-but which are good?
get fucked, enough spoonfeeding. You'll soon learn. But if machines are ebaying @ $20-$30, there is generally good reason.
Leo Green
Who makes a post like this
Andrew Watson
Brother in law has one from amazon. It was a little over $100 and came with windows 10. Added a half height 1050ti and it's perfect as a 1080p gaming computer.
Elijah Bailey
I've bought a hundred or so of these for my work place. It's enough for 99% of office work if you pop in an SSD.
Carter Watson
>refurbished or decomissioned lenovo computers in the $100-200 range
>toss an SSD in them
Damn I want this. I love cheap underpowered machines with quick SSDs.
James Jenkins
>99% of office work if you pop in an SSD
Bro you don't need an SSD for office work
Kevin Bell
At one point recently you could get haswell i5 units for under $100 shipped on dell refurbished site.
saw some micro haswell i7 units with 16 GB ram and 256gb ssd for around $250 after coupon yesterday,.
Joshua Lee
I agree, but its usually a lot cheaper to get a $50 SSD than to go back and forth with an attorney on why their computer is "slow."
Anthony Morgan
just got another one last week 3.6ghz quad core i5, 8gb RAM and 860EVO the damn thing rocks for $190 total
Isaiah White
hey im his son lol
that was actually my dad he was a bit drunk desu baka lol
Parker Young
they are perfect for helping speed up lower end systems, and since most companies take the hdd out anyway you might as well replace it with a small ssd.
Ian Campbell
Cool. I'm looking at some right now. I see M73, M92, M83, etc etc. Which ones are good?
Jordan Wood
The mini towers are worth it. Throw a better psu in it and can fit full size gpu. Though gpu length can be a problem.
Asher Gray
I was going to build an HTPC, but instead got one of these with a passively cooled GTX 1030. Cost me $80 for the base computer and then another $100 for the card, completely worth it.
Brayden Miller
Shame those can't fit B I G GPU cards
Juan Roberts
For ~$200 you can get:
8GB RAM
120GB SSD
3.2GHz dual-core AMD athlon processor on par with haswell desktop i3s
B450 Motherboard that can be upgraded with a 6-core 2600 on par with coffee lake i5s and 3000+ DC RAM kits
Said motherboard also supports SATA/NVME m.2 SSDs
400W PSU with 5+8 pin PCI-Express that can handle up to a 10 TFLOP vega 56 GPU
So unless you can find a really really really good $50-100 quad-core i7 optiplex and are okay with not being able to upgrade much (GPU limited to ones that can run off motherboard only) then I'd strongly advise against it.
Matthew Nelson
>buy used desktop off ebay for 70 bucks
>LOL U DUMB BUI 237 DOLLAH GAYMEN MASHEEN
t-thanks
Lucas Diaz
>GTX 1030
Total trash, Nvidia nerfed it hard.
No dual link DVI
NO fucking NVENC encoder (FFS.... worthless for Plex)
There some DDR4 abomination version...
Logan Stewart
It really depends on what you want to user it for. A lot of anons here are fine even with C2D thinkpads for watching chink toons and shitposting in general.
I just think people should be aware of the limitations of buying something so cheap. If you want to upgrade your processor for example you're shit out of luck. Meanwhile that gaymen build can handle up to a 4.3 GHz 8-core processor on par with coffee lake at a similar core count and frequency.
Evan Jones
I work in Ewaste, and tear down at least 30 of these machines a day. They are great for doing web browsing, but dont go overboard, and try to run most triple A gaymes. They will cop out, and then you will be bringing them to me. Most CPUs and Power supplies are fine, but they are known in my field to mess up the RAM at times. Taking these things apart is super easy, and you can sell these as scrap parts for $5-10 each (minus the hard drive). A ton of schools get new ones every year, which is why I go through literal thousands a year.
Daniel Lewis
they are the shit. I put a new PSU and 7870 GPU in mine
Landon Roberts
Their design has no right being so good for how mediocre the hardware is/was.
Andrew Carter
it has a
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2500 CPU @ 3.30GHz
which isn't obsolete my any means
Gavin Robinson
>PCIE 2.0
>Max 32GB/1333Mhz ram
>32nm process
>not obsolete
K
Robert Fisher
I bought a second-hand refurbished SFF Optiplex 9020 on Ebay equipped with an i7-4790, 8gigs of RAM and a 128gig SSD. I've since done quite a few upgrades but it has been a good little machine.
If you can find one that meets your performance requirements for cheap, I really don't see why not.
Joshua Hernandez
>Are they worth it?
They are if they came with i5's or i'7s
Ian Lewis
> They tend to come with weak PSUs (meaning hard to add a GPU) and you can only use half-height PCIe cards (again, hard to add a GPU).
You can move the mobo to a bigger case and put your desire stuff (A GPU and a new power supply)
Juan Barnes
time is money, user
Liam Anderson
the ones at my college have 4770's in them and they sell them off for 90$. They used to have xeon/quadro workstation for our cad labs they would sell off for dirt cheap, but now they just lease them and have to send them back when the years done.
Grayson Martinez
>expecting dell to follow atx standards for mounting
heh
Christopher Sanders
The connectors are standard.
(You) don't belong to Jow Forums
Thomas Thompson
The connectors are standard, the mounting holes on the motherboard are often not. Ask me how I know
Zachary Lewis
>the mounting holes on the motherboard are often not.
> often not
(You) don't belong to Jow Forums
Bentley Morales
I mounted my 790 SFF mobo on a Coolermaster H440 w/o troubles.
Thomas Perez
Are you fucking retarded? I know if I buy a mobo online it will have the holes in the correct place. Companies like dell and hp however follow their own standards, and one thing they do a lot is weird mounting hole configurations. Shit, in some older PCs I had they fucked with the 24 pin connector. Have you ever opened a computer put together by dell?
Michael White
Maybe they've stopped doing it then. I remember I had some older optiplexes where the mobo had mounting holes that didn't align
Joseph Butler
He's right though. Also, good luck getting the front panel of a new case wired up correctly.
Sometimes you get lucky. Other times, you get a motherboard that mounts backwards.
Adrian Sanchez
Also the lenovo thinkcentre is worth buying
They make excellent very cheap file servers, web servers etc. Install a security distro on it. Turn it into one fuckmonster of a router-file server - firewalling - nas drive pumpin - muthafucka
Parker Howard
>these systems having a limit beyond spec on the PCIe x16 slot
Thats true for Dells SFFs and USDTs, not for their towers and desktops.
HP Compaq Elites don't have these problems.
>It's almost impossible to do this without cutting a hole on the case
You can put a mini 1050 Ti in the towers, as they draw their power from the PCI x16 slot.
The latter is also important for the DT version (for the HPs its their SFF version), only difference is that you need a 1050 Ti low profile version.
>hard to add a GPU
Nope, not that hard, it's actually piss easy.
As for the HPs USDTs, Dells SFF and USDTs there's no possibility to put an GPU in it afaik.
Joseph Clark
>old i3's that are dogshit
Yes they are, but you can switch them with an i5 or i7.
Lincoln Allen
Alot of people have already said this, but many companies automatically replace their desktops and laptops every 3 years no matter how good the computers are. That means lots of business class computers with superior hardware are available for cheap.
Alexander Gonzalez
that thing looks tiny, can you fit a full gpu in that?
Ryder Edwards
Look at the equipment inside, not the model name.
Michael Jackson
I think they can take a low profile 1050ti to run games, the PSU is like 250W.
Robert Morris
Atleast my hp elitedesk g1 800 sff with i5 4570 and 16gb 1666mhz ram runs low profiel 1050ti 4gb with a stock power just fine
Jaxson Ward
It makes a pretty big difference. Shit doesn't slow down to a crawl when there's some Windows or AV update running in background, and as a sysadmin I really appreciate when software installs in 30 seconds instead of five minutes and the computer remains usable during that.
Isaac Davis
This works for me. I could build a new system and spend a boat load of money but why? I don't play new games, the only demanding daily tasks I do is internet and e-mail. The only thing that even pushes all cores is the occasional video encode job. So I'd be blowing money for no gain at all, unless you count "bragging rights". After you blow a few thousand on shit one day you'll wake up and realize just how pointless it all was.
Jace Peterson
What kind of tasks require 32GB of memory but run on a 10 year old Phenom and a potato GPU?
Owen Ortiz
stupidest post i've seen on here
Ian Garcia
I really don't think you can beat these old Dells for value gaming right now.
Jackson Rodriguez
It's too small for a normal GPU. The x16 slot is on the bottom next to the PSU so you can only fit a low-profile single-slot GPU in there.
One of the upgrades I did to mine was a GT 1030. Now I'm waiting on Turing for the next GPU upgrade. On the bright side it means the i7-4790 will last a few more GPU generations yet. Not really complaining.
Pic once again related
Charles Lopez
Here's another shot after I gutted it to upgrade the RAM and re-paste the CPU.
The GT1030 which is the low-profile single-slot Gigabyte variant is sitting in the bottom PCI-e slot (16x).
The top slot is only 4x.
Jace Jenkins
You should buy one, I stumbled into a PC recycling center this summer and it was full of lenovo and dell workstations. Many of them were priced at about half the price of the CPU, so yeah, it was worth. Even gave me a mediocre monitor and cables for free.
Juan Moore
Community colleges sell their desktops every couple years. Call and ask if/when they are having a warehouse sale. I buy optiplexes for like 40 bucks and throw an SSD and a 1050ti in them and gift them to neices and nephews to get them into PC gaming.