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Topic: The 'Build Me A PC' Thread (Read 871704 times)
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Chimpy
Terracotta Army
Posts: 10619
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I believe that Dell has stopped selling the Optiplexes, based on my recent search for a PC to fit my needs which I didn't also have to build. When it came down to it, I just decided that 16GB RAM and a spindle-drive was good enough and went for the employee discount.
OptiPlex are only sold to business/government/education. They don't put them on the "home" sales site.
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'Reality' is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes.
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Salamok
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2803
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I believe that Dell has stopped selling the Optiplexes, based on my recent search for a PC to fit my needs which I didn't also have to build. When it came down to it, I just decided that 16GB RAM and a spindle-drive was good enough and went for the employee discount.
Maybe they just don't show up on the "For Home" section, New Haswell model optiplex's hit in the "For Business" section about a month ago. Prety sure they are not discontinueing that line, instead they just gimped it.
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Hammond
Terracotta Army
Posts: 637
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Dell still sells Optiplex's and you can still customize it although there are not a ton of options. They are incredibly easy to work on with no tools required. For a simple desktop they are pretty nice and inexpensive also relatively small / quiet. We buy the 7010 series for work and the upgrade to the 2.5 inch drive is totally worth it because they ship a adapter which allows you to install a SSD drive down the road (If you want). Oh and you can buy it with windows 7 if you want which is a nice plus :).
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Phildo
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My office is a Dell partner and we often buy Optiplexes for our clients. I can confirm that you can customize some models, although the website is clunky as hell and sometimes it can be hard to find the option if you don't know exactly where it is.
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Engels
Terracotta Army
Posts: 9029
inflicts shingles.
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Small correction: The Optiplex All-In-One is NOT easy to service. It is essentially based on a Mac all in one chasis style, and has dozens of screws. Also, the motherboard is a laptop motherboard and has a very dubious power supply. Source: Me, having to maintain 20 of them.
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I should get back to nature, too. You know, like going to a shop for groceries instead of the computer. Maybe a condo in the woods that doesn't even have a health club or restaurant attached. Buy a car with only two cup holders or something. -Signe
I LIKE being bounced around by Tonkors. - Lantyssa
Babies shooting themselves in the head is the state bird of West Virginia. - schild
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Chimpy
Terracotta Army
Posts: 10619
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All in ones are terrible to service in general. Just like laptops.
Thus why we buy complete care on laptops. If it ain't a HD or battery replacement, Dell sends a tech.
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'Reality' is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes.
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Lantyssa
Terracotta Army
Posts: 20848
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All-in-Ones are also loud as fuck. I put in a quote to order a customized Optiplex and my boss at the time put one of those monstrosities on my desk instead. He thought it was better because it had a higher price tag.
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Hahahaha! I'm really good at this!
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Yegolev
Moderator
Posts: 24440
2/10 WOULD NOT INGEST
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It's almost a given that I'm not always great at performing searches on different sites. Also I dumped most of the brain-info once I decided to go with a HP desktop. I am pre-de-volunteered to put it on the network, which makes me happy. I'm in danger of learning the workings of a Dell R720. Hopefully nothing will come of it. EDIT: if anyone wants a HP desktop for some reason, I'm getting a noticeable discount; the one I ordered was something like 23%. Less so on popular devices.
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Why am I homeless? Why do all you motherfuckers need homes is the real question. They called it The Prayer, its answer was law Mommy come back 'cause the water's all gone
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Chimpy
Terracotta Army
Posts: 10619
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R720 is not bad, though it has some quirks.
If you don't need UEFI for some specific reason, I highly highly recommend that you switch it to BIOS boot mode otherwise you can't boot from CD or USB devices easily as it will only boot to I think FAT32 formatted devices in UEFI mode.
Also, the R720 takes a long time to boot because of all the separate firmware initialization steps.
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« Last Edit: March 07, 2014, 03:08:35 PM by Chimpy »
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'Reality' is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes.
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Yegolev
Moderator
Posts: 24440
2/10 WOULD NOT INGEST
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That's for the peons to worry about.
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Why am I homeless? Why do all you motherfuckers need homes is the real question. They called it The Prayer, its answer was law Mommy come back 'cause the water's all gone
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Stormwaltz
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2918
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« Last Edit: March 21, 2014, 03:58:38 PM by Stormwaltz »
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Nothing in this post represents the views of my current or previous employers.
"Isn't that just like an elf? Brings a spell to a gun fight."
"Sci-Fi writers don't invent the future, they market it." - Henry Cobb
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Chimpy
Terracotta Army
Posts: 10619
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PCIe is backwards compatible.
Unless you do a ton of 1080p video encoding (or some other extremely processor heavy multi-threaded tasks) save the cash and buy an i5.
Don't get too hung up on ASUS unless you feel you absolutely have to buy them through brand loyalty. You can get good (sometimes better) boards from Gigabyte, MSI, etc. and save a good chunk of dough. I still like Tom's Hardware guides for comparison of the pros and cons of boards in a set price range.
You will need to buy new DDR3 RAM if you buy a whole new setup so take that into consideration.
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« Last Edit: March 21, 2014, 06:46:19 PM by Chimpy »
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'Reality' is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes.
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Hoax
Terracotta Army
Posts: 8110
l33t kiddie
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Dead mobo really means new cpu+mobo+ram, everything else you can carry over if you want to.
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A nation consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual's morals are situational, then that individual is without morals. If a nation's laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn't a nation. -William Gibson
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Lantyssa
Terracotta Army
Posts: 20848
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My last board was a P5E Pro as well. I loved it, but I had serveral intermittent problems at the end, too. Probably some of the capacitors going bad because pinning it down had been a royal pain.
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Hahahaha! I'm really good at this!
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Lantyssa
Terracotta Army
Posts: 20848
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The system I got back in October.The motherboard might be more than you need, but overall its been running like silk. Very happy with it, and the I5 over the I7 has been fine. Either is way more processor than my old quad-core.
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Hahahaha! I'm really good at this!
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satael
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2431
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I just ordered a new mobo (and processor etc) to replace my current (which is p5ql pro so almost p5 pro). I also decided to go with sabertooth (just one for a am3+ processor). Unfortunately I got greedy with a new tower which ended up being too exotic and even the importer couldn't say when it would be available so I had to go for a more normal one (phantom 530) and the parts will still come too late for me to enjoy the full ESO headstart (though I'm not really that sad about it)
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Stormwaltz
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2918
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Lantyssa, today you are my hero. EDIT: Out of curiosity, did you use the SSD for OS install? If so, how's performance? I was given am old-ish 256GB SSD when I thought my HD was failing, but I wasn't sure it would fit Win7.
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« Last Edit: March 22, 2014, 03:24:48 PM by Stormwaltz »
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Nothing in this post represents the views of my current or previous employers.
"Isn't that just like an elf? Brings a spell to a gun fight."
"Sci-Fi writers don't invent the future, they market it." - Henry Cobb
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Lantyssa
Terracotta Army
Posts: 20848
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Yes, the SSD is for OS and programs. All my Steam games are on the other disk. Boots fast and otherwise it's smooth as silk. I'm glad I went with it.
Purchased around the same time was an NAS with 12 TB of disk (well, 6 TB since I made it RAID 10) for backup and storage of anything I'm not immediately using. It doubles as my media server.
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Hahahaha! I'm really good at this!
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Chimpy
Terracotta Army
Posts: 10619
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Win7 will fit easily inside any drive 40GB or larger. Put all of your stuff like music, pictures, and video as well as programs where load times are not an issue on a larger spinny drive.
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'Reality' is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes.
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Abagadro
Terracotta Army
Posts: 12227
Possibly the only user with more posts in the Den than PC/Console Gaming.
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Question for the cognoscenti:
I have a 3(4?) year old system and am debating whether to get a new one or just upgrade the graphics card. Don't know enough about this stuff to know if an upgrade would be pointless as there would be some other bottleneck that means it wouldn't mean much. So here are the specs, let me know if throwing in a 660 or something similar (or heck even a 760 if I can find it at the right price) would be worthwhile or a waste of money.
Asus P7H55 2.8 GHz i5 760 4x2GB RAM
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"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
-H.L. Mencken
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23628
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What resolution is your monitor?
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Hoax
Terracotta Army
Posts: 8110
l33t kiddie
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My immediate thought is that a GPU upgrade should be enough to get you by surely. Will you get the absolute most out of the card? No but it should still improve a lot of things, run a lot colder with its fan on a much lower setting etc.
But I also would ignore anything I say in favor of anything Trippy says.
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A nation consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual's morals are situational, then that individual is without morals. If a nation's laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn't a nation. -William Gibson
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Abagadro
Terracotta Army
Posts: 12227
Possibly the only user with more posts in the Den than PC/Console Gaming.
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I rarely run anything at 1920 x 1080. So mostly 1600 x 900 or 1280 x 720.
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"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
-H.L. Mencken
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23628
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Okay, what GPU do you have now?
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Lantyssa
Terracotta Army
Posts: 20848
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Do you have any trouble running the games and apps you like to use?
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Hahahaha! I'm really good at this!
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Abagadro
Terracotta Army
Posts: 12227
Possibly the only user with more posts in the Den than PC/Console Gaming.
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I have a Gtx 560 Ti.
I've had to turn down my world of tanks settings to keep my FPS from dropping too low as the graphics have been improved.
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"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
-H.L. Mencken
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01101010
Terracotta Army
Posts: 12003
You call it an accident. I call it justice.
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I just swapped out my 460 GTX which was holding up fairly well but wasn't quite cutting it for the newer stuff. I grabbed a PNY 760GTX off newegg for $235 on some special. That goes along with my i5 2500k clocked @ 3.7gHz and 2x4g RAM. Running @ 1680 x 1050. Can't say I am unhappy at all.
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Does any one know where the love of God goes...When the waves turn the minutes to hours? -G. Lightfoot
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23628
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Lantyssa
Terracotta Army
Posts: 20848
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I have a Gtx 560 Ti.
You can always upgrade your card, and if it doesn't perform well enough, buy the rest of the system.
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Hahahaha! I'm really good at this!
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Abagadro
Terracotta Army
Posts: 12227
Possibly the only user with more posts in the Den than PC/Console Gaming.
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Thanks for the input. Very helpful.
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"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
-H.L. Mencken
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23628
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Stormwaltz
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2918
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Nothing in this post represents the views of my current or previous employers.
"Isn't that just like an elf? Brings a spell to a gun fight."
"Sci-Fi writers don't invent the future, they market it." - Henry Cobb
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23628
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Unlocked meaning it's super easy to over clock.
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Stormwaltz
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2918
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Fucking sold, then. Thanks for pointing that out. :)
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Nothing in this post represents the views of my current or previous employers.
"Isn't that just like an elf? Brings a spell to a gun fight."
"Sci-Fi writers don't invent the future, they market it." - Henry Cobb
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Salamok
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2803
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Unlocked meaning it's super easy to over clock.
I deeply regret purchasing the K series for my CPU: intel-outs-quad-core-haswell-cpusWorst of all the K-Series parts are utterly crippled. Yes Intel gifted us with unlocked parts for about 10% more, or should we say that they didn’t remove the overclocking features for a steep price. Unfortunately what they removed is much more than clock locks and definitely more useful to the buyer. If you read the chart, vPro, TXT, VTd, and SIPP are removed, as is transactional memory but they don’t tell you that. If you get a K-Series device you can’t use virtualization, none of the management features are there, and neither is the hardware security that they said you absolutely needed last generation. This generation you don’t seem to need it any more though but you are definitely better off without Intel “security” features. Removing transactional memory, TXT, and VTd are just dumb, plus the K-Series SKUs are so crippled you should avoid them abusive price premium or no. He is overstating the virtualization slightly, you can still run a VM it just runs in a gimped software emulation mode (no hardware acceleration).
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