The Tale of An Optiplex: The HACK3RPLEX 330

Cyb3rst0rm · October 19, 2018

I just watched LTT's video regarding the $69 Optiplex 380. Well, when I was in high school I had a similar, but more powerful (and much more ghetto) setup.

Essentially I took an Optiplex 330 from eBay, dropped in a Q8300 Quad Core CPU, Slammed 2x2GB of PNY Optima DDR2-667 memory into it, stripped the optical drive, added a hard drive, ripped off the entire lower rear panel including the side plastic, shoved a fullsize MSI GTX750TI 2GB into it, broke off half the cooler mount so that the GPU would fit which means the CPU cooler was just resting ontop of the GPU on that side (I had the machine vertical) and it was sheer luck that the GPU cooler was the perfect height for the cooler to be resting directly over the CPU when resting on it, I drowned the CPU in Arctic Silver, and had a USB X-Fi Go! Pro for sound taped to the front of the case using a USB extension cable. The monitor was a 720p Vizio TV i grabbed at a yard sale in the middle of nowhere for $10 (before that it was a 19" CRT).

I used this from 2013 until late 2015. I beat Tomb Raider (2013) and a bunch of other games on this setup. It was pretty decent for its era, Fallout 4 was playable on launch on medium settings, by the time Far Harbour was out with optimization I was running at medium high.

I'll try to find some pics of this setup and post them.