$178 Gaming PC

[Sat1600]

I was leaving work the other day when I found this Dell t3600 headed for E-waste.

 

I asked IT if I could take it and they said no problem. It had a Xeon e5-1603 (sandy bridge 4C,4T),

16gb of ddr3 ecc ram, a 635w PSU a firepro GPU with a very noisy fan. And a lot of dust.

 

First things first it needed a few good blasts of air to clean it out.

 

Next I wanted a better CPU. Best bang for buck seemed to be a e5-1650 (6C, 12T) $15 on ebay.

 

Obviously the hard drive had been destroyed so I needed to replace that. I went with a TEAMGROUP AX2 512gb sata ssd. $30 Amazon.

 

Now the hard part. Choosing a GPU. I have seen RX 470s going for $90 on ebay and that was the original plan. Then I saw a GTX 1070 on ebay for a decent price. I sent an offer of $110 and it was accepted. With the $15 shipping it came out to $125. Not bad despite the likely bottleneck.

 

I also needed a 6pin to 8pin adapter for the GPU. $8 amazon.

 

So I'm $178 in.

 

I also had two more sticks of ddr3 ecc ram in my parts bin that I bought for another project that never materialized. They have been sitting there for 2 years, so I threw them in for 32gb total in quad channel.

 

Time for a hiccup. The MOBO has 2 sata ports and 3 sas ports. Windows 10 installation does not have drivers for the SAS ports (the driver is blocked in windows as well if you try to install due to "known problems") luckily one of the sata ports was open and seems to work just fine. Windows installation went smooth and activated with the sticker on the case.

 

I ran a heaven benchmark

 

I have only had a chance to test out two games so far.

 

Fortnite in performance mode with far view distance averages 180fps. On dx12 low with far view distance I'm getting 150fps average. There definitely seems to be  a bottleneck in this title.

 

Hitman 3 with a mix of high and medium settings got 85fps in the in game benchmark and 90fps average in a playthrough. It was sitting at 98% gpu usage so maybe less of a bottleneck here.

 

I want to try some other games before I flip it but all in all not bad for $178.

[JTS_1401]

Thats a nice deal. I have to say that Windows 7 Professional Mass Distribution Dell OEM had no problem recognising and installing from my 2TB Seagate Constellation 7200 RPM HDD. You have also inspired me to try out my RTX 3070 in my Pentium 4 machine.

[shactheorb15]

21 minutes ago, Sat1600 said:

I was leaving work the other day when I found this Dell t3600 headed for E-waste.

 

I asked IT if I could take it and they said no problem. It had a Xeon e5-1603 (sandy bridge 4C,4T),

16gb of ddr3 ecc ram, a 635w PSU a firepro GPU with a very noisy fan. And a lot of dust.

 

First things first it needed a few good blasts of air to clean it out.

 

Next I wanted a better CPU. Best bang for buck seemed to be a e5-1650 (6C, 12T) $15 on ebay.

 

Obviously the hard drive had been destroyed so I needed to replace that. I went with a TEAMGROUP AX2 512gb sata ssd. $30 Amazon.

 

Now the hard part. Choosing a GPU. I have seen RX 470s going for $90 on ebay and that was the original plan. Then I saw a GTX 1070 on ebay for a decent price. I sent an offer of $110 and it was accepted. With the $15 shipping it came out to $125. Not bad despite the likely bottleneck.

 

I also needed a 6pin to 8pin adapter for the GPU. $8 amazon.

 

So I'm $178 in.

 

I also had two more sticks of ddr3 ecc ram in my parts bin that I bought for another project that never materialized. They have been sitting there for 2 years, so I threw them in for 32gb total in quad channel.

 

Time for a hiccup. The MOBO has 2 sata ports and 3 sas ports. Windows 10 installation does not have drivers for the SAS ports (the driver is blocked in windows as well if you try to install due to "known problems") luckily one of the sata ports was open and seems to work just fine. Windows installation went smooth and activated with the sticker on the case.

 

I ran a heaven benchmark

 

I have only had a chance to test out two games so far.

 

Fortnite in performance mode with far view distance averages 180fps. On dx12 low with far view distance I'm getting 150fps average. There definitely seems to be  a bottleneck in this title.

 

Hitman 3 with a mix of high and medium settings got 85fps in the in game benchmark and 90fps average in a playthrough. It was sitting at 98% gpu usage so maybe less of a bottleneck here.

 

I want to try some other games before I flip it but all in all not bad for $178.

Nice! love budget builds like this

 

[Somerandomtechyboi]

1650 is unlocked, use throttlestop to oc, expect 3.8-4ghz on measly stock voltage, that will allieviate some of the bottleneck, if you can run higher volt via throttlestop then run 1.25-1.35v depending on the freq you are aiming for (4.4-4.8g), higher volts have diminishing returns and absudly hard to cool, 1.55v max for 32nm

[Sat1600]

5 minutes ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

1650 is unlocked, use throttlestop to oc, expect 3.8-4ghz on measly stock voltage, that will allieviate some of the bottleneck, if you can run higher volt via throttlestop then run 1.25-1.35v depending on the freq you are aiming for (4.4-4.8g), higher volts have diminishing returns and absudly hard to cool, 1.55v max for 32nm

Thanks. This is Interesting. I didn't think there was a way to overclock on a Dell.

 

I'm flipping the PC though so I want to be able to advertise performance without an overclock. 

[JTS_1401]

6 minutes ago, Sat1600 said:

Thanks. This is Interesting. I didn't think there was a way to overclock on a Dell.

 

I'm flipping the PC though so I want to be able to advertise performance without an overclock. 

I would recommend mentioning to the buyer that they can overclock the computer in the way @Somerandomtechyboi mentioned.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

Just download throttlestop, put it in the program files x86 folder and run, you can adjust the multi and on some platforms can also adjust volt (like 775)

 

May aswell take a screenie of throttlestop on the thing to see whats possible tweaking wise