In May this year, I picked up a Dell Optiplex 3070 SFF at a work charity sale for £50, which is a bargain for this model. It came with a Intel i5 9500, 8GB RAM and a 250GB NVMe SSD. My intent for this machine is to see whether I could turn it into a cheap but viable gaming PC to replace my elderly desktop PC built in 2009 around the Intel Core2Duo E8400 CPU.
You can probably surmise by the fact my PC is now 15 years old that my demands are not high when it comes to gaming PCs. I'm more of a vintage gamer and even the more modern games in my library are likely to be 2D platformers than any AAA shooter. That said for a the past few years I've foregone a few games that simply don't run well enough on my old PC (No Man's Sky, Doom Eternal, Cities Skylines to name a few) so an upgrade was becoming inevitable, but I'm not at a time in my life where I can justify slamming down hundreds on the latest gen hardware because chances are I might get to use it a couple of hours a week, if I'm lucky. #dadproblems
The Optiplex was an opportunity not to be missed though, it was cheap and with a few choice upgrades it might bring my gaming stance forward a few years.
The first upgrade was to double the RAM to 16GB, I picked up a matching used module from eBay to populate the empty slot. I then added a Sapphire RX6400 4GB GPU. This card was chosen for two main reasons: it's low profile to fit in the small form-factor case and its TDP is only 53w, which helps keep the power draw down on the modest 200w PSU it came with. The 250GB SSD was never going to be big enough so I installed a 1TB SSD from my old PC as a second drive and use this purely for games storage. r/sleepingoptiplex was a very useful resource in selecting these upgrades.
New upgrades, new problems
At this point the PC was running all the games I was interested in better than expected. Even heavyweights like DOOM Eternal and Fallout 4 ran great, though they highlighted the next issue, noise.
Installed in my living room this PC needs to be quiet and normally it is silent, but once the heat started to build the CPU fan started to sound like a vacuum cleaner. To address this, I installed two Noctua NF-A8 fans, one replacing the CPU cooler, one as a front case intake. This did improve the noise considerably but under high CPU stress, the CPU temps now climb to dangerous levels at nearly 100C. This is a problem still to be solved but I think the issue is recirculation of hot air now the CPU fan is no longer vented, so I need to find a way to replace the hood that was part of the original CPU fan. For now, the problem is rare as gaming workloads don't usually stress the CPU that much, ironically it is downloading games at 500Mbps that does!
Overall I'm happy with the results, I've spent £237 in total, plus a recycled SSD, and achieved a PC with enough grunt to play any game I care about; doesn't take up much space, or make too much noise. At this point though I don't want to spend more money on it as this would take it into Steam Deck territory and that would arguably be a better investment. Besides solving the heat problem, the games SSD is getting full now so I may end up replacing both SSD's with a single 2TB NVMe drive but at least things like that are easily recycled into other projects should I decide to go all-in on a new purpose built gaming rig, so it isn't technically a project expense, right? =)