Knoxtane Posted July 17, 2019 Share Posted July 17, 2019 (edited) Hello HG! To start off with, I wanted to say..welcome to my side project! I saw a lot of videos similar to this on YouTube and decided to jump in and do it. [ STARTING OFF ] I went to Ebay and purchased a Dell Optiplex 9010 Small-Form-Factor unit. The item with the following specs cost me $172 USD. Intel Core i7-3770 / 8GB DDR3 1600MHz / 1TB HDD / Windows 7. These systems are older and used but the specific one I got from a re-seller was in almost perfect condition. Besides some scuffs on the casing (mostly on the top towards the back, only one deep gash), the system looked brand new. I opened it up to find everything was seated properly and mostly cleaned. Once I verified everything was all good, I proceeded to clean some of the inside. I used a "Multi-purpose duster air canister" to get rid of some caked on dust on the front small in-take fan. [ UPGRADING ] So once I had the system (in about a weeks time) I started looking for parts to upgrade the tiny little system. However, I was limited by the Super small Power Supply it being a merely 275 Watts. Now for a business grade small form factor desktop, it's not that bad. Now the parts I have upgraded so far are the RAM, Storage and WiFi. Starting with the RAM. I bought a 16GB kit of Crucial 1600MHz DDR3. Next is the storage. I installed a Crucial BX500 500GB 2.5" SSD. Then finally, I purchased a Panda PAU06 300Mbps 802.11/n WiFi USB Adapter. After upgrading, I installed Linux onto the SSD to see how it compares to a windows boot. They boot in similar times around 10 to 13 seconds. The specific Linux "distro" or Distribution I installed is Pop!_OS v19.04. Why did I choose Linux? I wanted an Operating System that I had never used but I knew would be great for gaming. Why Pop!_OS? Well I did a little bit of research and it turns out, Pop!_OS is the primary OS for System76, an American computer manufacturer based in Denver, Colorado, specializing in the sale of notebooks, desktops, and servers. The company supports free and open-source software, offering either Ubuntu or their own Ubuntu-based Linux distribution, Pop!_OS, as the preinstalled operating system. So once Linux was installed it was time to install STEAM. Now, for those of you who don't know, Steams "SteamOS" is a console like experience based and built upon Linux. So I knew multiple games would be supported, in-fact, All of Valves games run natively on Linux. So I installed CS:S and it ran perfectly..well for a machine without a dedicated GPU. So as it sits right now. I have an Intel Core i7-3770 @3.4GHz, 16GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM and a 500GB SSD. No discrete GPU, yet. [ WHAT'S NEXT ] The last thing on my list is the AMD RX 560 4GB Low Profile GPU. Why? I am going with this GPU because I already have Linux installed and it's the Intel/AMD driver version. System76 actually has the drivers pre-installed on their OS with both Intel/AMD and the Nvidia versions of Pop!_OS. With all that said, the AMD RX 560 LP card does not require any power connectors from the PSU, it gets all of it's power from the PCIe x16 lane. Nvidia has a GTX 1050 Ti 4GB model as well, however that is $30 more expensive and more power hungry. The motherboard can only output so much power via PCIe x16 lane that I didn't want to spend all that money and have it not work. Once I have it 100% up and running, I'll post pictures as well as basic benchmarks, mostly real-time Frames Per Second monitoring in games. Edited July 17, 2019 by Knoxtane Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Silly Posted July 17, 2019 Share Posted July 17, 2019 not bad man Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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