So ever since I got into PC gaming/building I've always wanted to turn a Optiplex or some sort of Small Form Factor business PC into a gaming system. Well, seeing how my previous PC was a bit older and somewhat lacking in the CPU department with an i7-7700 and an Entry level RX 570 4GB Card. I decided to browse Amazon for a "NEW" refurbished Dell Optiplex that had a MINIMUM i7-8700 with no less than 16GBs of RAM, everything else could be ironed out later.
I ended up finding this system for around $370 USD, it didn't come with a GPU. It had the CPU, RAM, 500GB M.2 and some free "e-waste" peripherals.
Next was my choice of GPU, it was either the AMD RX 6400 4GB Single slot card, Intel's Arc A310 4GB Single Slot card OR the small but mighty Nvidia RTX A2000 6GB ECC Dual Slot Small Form Factor GPU. My dilemma was buy a single slot card to fit into the PCIe x16 slot but have a "less" powerful card OR buy the RTX A2000 and have it slotted into the PCIe x4 slot, where I'd lose around 4% to 7% of the cards performance. After looking at tons of benchmarks on YouTube, Userbenchmark, Toms Hardware and Versus; I decided to purchase the RTX A2000 knowing I'd lose some performance but have a beast of a card that has some great features such as DLSS and DLAA. Ray tracing is not something I use as I still game on 1080p and I'm a casual gamer for the most part. The RTX A2000 was $400 Refurbished as well but "Like New" from Amazon. Overall the cosmetic appearance of both the system and GPU are not that bad as you can see from the photos posted below.
Having a six core CPU with a new coat of thermal paste paired with the RTX A2000 and AtlasOS v0.4.0 this system is BLAZING fast as far as using it as a daily driver! Gaming is more than enough for my expectations with CS2, War Thunder, Horizon Zero Dawn, MGSV, and Overwatch 2. I have played Call of Duty Warzone but that does require bumping the settings to minimum OR High/Normal with DLSS set to Quality to achieve my monitors max refresh rate of 75hz.
Well here it is! The, "Dell Optiplex 7060 SSF KNX"
Here are the following specs:
Some images of my set-up.
I ended up finding this system for around $370 USD, it didn't come with a GPU. It had the CPU, RAM, 500GB M.2 and some free "e-waste" peripherals.
Next was my choice of GPU, it was either the AMD RX 6400 4GB Single slot card, Intel's Arc A310 4GB Single Slot card OR the small but mighty Nvidia RTX A2000 6GB ECC Dual Slot Small Form Factor GPU. My dilemma was buy a single slot card to fit into the PCIe x16 slot but have a "less" powerful card OR buy the RTX A2000 and have it slotted into the PCIe x4 slot, where I'd lose around 4% to 7% of the cards performance. After looking at tons of benchmarks on YouTube, Userbenchmark, Toms Hardware and Versus; I decided to purchase the RTX A2000 knowing I'd lose some performance but have a beast of a card that has some great features such as DLSS and DLAA. Ray tracing is not something I use as I still game on 1080p and I'm a casual gamer for the most part. The RTX A2000 was $400 Refurbished as well but "Like New" from Amazon. Overall the cosmetic appearance of both the system and GPU are not that bad as you can see from the photos posted below.
Having a six core CPU with a new coat of thermal paste paired with the RTX A2000 and AtlasOS v0.4.0 this system is BLAZING fast as far as using it as a daily driver! Gaming is more than enough for my expectations with CS2, War Thunder, Horizon Zero Dawn, MGSV, and Overwatch 2. I have played Call of Duty Warzone but that does require bumping the settings to minimum OR High/Normal with DLSS set to Quality to achieve my monitors max refresh rate of 75hz.
Well here it is! The, "Dell Optiplex 7060 SSF KNX"
Here are the following specs:
- CPU: Intel Core i7-8700 (6 Cores, 12 Threads) @ 3.20 GHz
- COOLER: STOCK with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut High Performance Thermal Paste
- RAM: 32GB DDR4 (4x8GB) @ 2133MHz (Planning on upgrading to 2666 MHz)
- GPU: Nvidia RTX A2000 6GB GDDR6 ECC
- STORAGE (OS): 512GB m.2 NVMe SSD
- STORAGE (PRIMARY): 1TB SAMSUNG 860 EVO SSD
- OS: AtlasOS v0.4.0 (W10)
Some images of my set-up.
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