Journey of the $20 PC

[Desh14]

Hello!  New guy here.  I thought I'd post my first full PC build.  My PC gaming history started in 1998 when my parents purchased a Dell Dimension XPS R450.  I was really in to it and learned a lot about PC's of that day by adding a CD-RW, Voodoo 5 5500 and maxed out to a whopping 512mb of RAM in those Windows 98 days.  As years went on I got in to cars and what gaming I did was on console.  About 6 years ago I fell back in love with my classic "retro" consoles and started collecting, repairing and modifiying old consoles and games.  None of the current gen consoles (except for the Switch) really do it for me so I decided to get back to PC gaming.  I purchased a Dell Inspiron 15 7559 with an i7 and quickly went to 16GB of RAM and added an M.2 SSD.  Due to my love of old hardware I wanted to purchase/ build an old machine to run Windows 98' and play my old PC games. 

 

I found this Dell OptiPlex 170L on ebay for $10 plus $10 shipping minus hard drive.  I quickly popped in a HDD and installed Windows 98'.  It all ran and worked but Win98 did not play perfectly with the newer hardware because no drivers existed for certain compatibility.  In the meantime I was able to locate that old XPS R450 laying in a family friend's basement.  I ended up refurbishing it and started gaming like it was 1999.  Now I had no idea what to do with this OptiPlex.  After a friend of mine showed me PS4 VR I knew my mission was to build a VR ready PC and I figured using the crappy OptiPlex case would be fun.  My other limitation was I wanted to spend less than the $750 I paid for my gaming laptop.  I also wanted to play around with overclocking as I had never done it before.  I did a lot of research and shopping as well as some of my own trial and error to create what you see below. 

 

Here are the specs:

CPU - AMD FX-8300 clocked at 4.4ghz

Motherboard - Asrock 970m Pro 3 (the weakest link in this build but the best AM3+ micro ATX board I can find)

GPU - XFX Radeon RX 480 8GB clocked at 1350mhz

RAM - G.Skill Trident DDR3 2400mhz (clocked at 1600mhz due to stability issues with CPU overclock)

SSD - Crucial 128 GB (used as a boot drive)

HDD - WD Black 1TB

PSU - EVGA 600B 600W

DVD - Asus DVD-RW 24x

WIFI - Asus PCE N15

CPU Cooler - Corsair H80i V2 (pull fan removed due to space constraints)

Fan 1 - Gelid Silent 5 50mm (mounted in front to pull in air for GPU)

Fan 2 - Noctua NF-F12 PWM 120mm (mounted in top of case as exhaust)

Fan 3 - Noctua NF-A9 92mm (mounted in back, originally planned as exhaust but due to crappy motherboard used as intake to cool board)

OS - Windows 7 Pro 64-bit

 

For the exterior I wanted to go for a "sleeper" look.  It is fitting since I love "sleeper" performance cars.  I did a very half assed flat black paint job on it to keep it sort of old and beat up looking on purpose.  I also wanted to make it as "stock" appearing as possible and keep it looking like something that would leave a Dell factory. 

 

Overall, this has been a wicked fun challenge and performs as well as I had hoped.  There were so many tweaks and changes as I went along to get the best performance from this rig.  The only downfall is the motherboard.  Anything above 1.375 vcore causes the board to overheat and knock back clock speed.  Purely for short benchmarking runs I have run 1.5 vcore and 4.7ghz and still had headroom with the cooler.  In fact, I can't believe how well that little 120mm AIO performs.  Also, after adding that little 50mm fan to the front for the GPU I never see over 65 C in GPU-z under stress. 

 

 

So there it is.  Thoughts?  Questions?  Recommendations?

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

The top fan grill actually looks clean and done properly. Impressive.

[Desh14]

Thank you!  I actually used the piece of front grill I cut out for the radiator fan as a pattern.  I made the diameter of the holes a bit larger then countersunk the mounting screw points so everything would be flush.  Most of the case mods I did over the course of a week during breaks/ lunch at work.  The rear fan grill had to go due to extreme whistling noise once I flipped it to become an intake.  I'm not gonna lie, it's caught my fingers a couple of times when I was reaching around the back of the system.