The Optiplex conundrum

[Voids.sleet]

Hello people's.  

 

(Hell I realised it's a long post so I'll post a shorter thing at the bottom)

 

So as it stands, I'm looking at buying a optiplex 9010 from eBay at the end of the week. I've seen a few between £100 and £200. 

 

I am getting it with the sole purpose of having a play around with a few flavours of Linux along with doing a few things on them. (Thinking along the lines of a email client, Minecraft server, pfsense box, nas box, Plex server to see how it goes). 

 

After i have satisfied my want of messing around with this I'm looking at running it as a retro gaming machine.

 

This brings me to here with you lovely people. When I am content I am looking at putting a low profile GPU into the machine, 2x HDD and maybe a blue ray drive.

 

My question to everyone is as follows, what upgrade path should I take? 

 

The machine will have 4 dimm slots (for possible up to 33gb ram), 3 sata data connections (it comes with 1 dvd and HDD) and 1x pcie x16 and x4 slot.

 

I have not got a budget yet though cheaper the better atm, I am hoping to fill all slots.

 

Tanks for any suggestions

 

(Bit at the bottom)

 

Hoping for suggestions on low profile GPUs (single slot would be perfect) to play retro games and guild wars?

 

Hoping for advice on if I should also upgrade ram to a suitable level? (getting one with 8gb pre installed) 

 

Should I also put extra hard drives and a different dvd drive in?

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Id get nouther 8gb dimm, those vms/continers, should be fine on 16gb of ram, but depends on exact useage.

 

Try the igpu with old games, shoudl work fine for many, otherwise, try to get the full size case. How much do you want to speed.

 

How much storage do you need? Id probably swap the dvd drive for a hdd/ssd

 

Get a boot ssd if you can.

 

Might wanna hunt for other local used systems, you can often find better deals out there.

[Voids.sleet]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id get nouther 8gb dimm, those vms/continers, should be fine on 16gb of ram, but depends on exact useage.

 

Try the igpu with old games, shoudl work fine for many, otherwise, try to get the full size case. How much do you want to speed.

 

How much storage do you need? Id probably swap the dvd drive for a hdd/ssd

 

Get a boot ssd if you can.

 

Might wanna hunt for other local used systems, you can often find better deals out there.

I would like to say around £300 for the thing. Honestly I don't need a massive amount of storage, like I say it's just something to mess around with software wise then turn it into a retro gaming machine. Literally have no idea the Ideal size for that.

 

The ones I'm seeing have i3 3000 processors for around £80 (with 4-8gb ram and 200gb HDD) or i5 for around £120 (with same ram and HDD)

 

@BlueScope819

 

I hear what you're saying with a ATX but for what I'm looking at I'm after something smaller. I'm trying to cut the bulk out if possible, feeling if I start going down the lines of ATX I may as well build one. CPU wise I'm looking at picking up one with a i5-3470s inside. And a SSD is being added to basket right now

[Voids.sleet]

2 minutes ago, BlueScope819 said:

The reason why you want an ATX machine is so you don't lock yourself into a proprietary form factor that you need to keep buying into, and you don't have space if you want to add a lot of stuff in the future.

I see the reasoning, I've had a haf X, bitfenix prodigy and a nuc in the past. For my current use case I feel the 9010 sff with the 2 expansions will suit what I am looking at doing

[Voids.sleet]

4 minutes ago, BlueScope819 said:

Yup, for your current use case. What happens in 3 years when you want to build a NAS and really need to add 10 gig networking (because it's like $30 then) but you don't have enough PCIe slots? It's the looking forward that's important.

Yes, you're right. 

 

Me looking forward, I am using this machine to learn then to turn it into a retro games box I will used every so often. I will cross the other bridges when I get to them