I put my desktop in storage for a year because where I was living, I had no space for one, and was using my E6400 laptop and doing everything I needed except gaming which I don't game much anymore anyway.. Now I got a desk back and was going to plug in my now dated powerhouse desktop ( AMD Athlon X3 445 Rana, 8gb of Corsair Vengence, MSI 7790 video card and a Biostar A770E3 mobo ), and I decided I just wasn't going to use that much processor anymore. It has an XFX 650w power supply and with all the fans, sounds like a vacuum cleaner.. gonna sell it So I pulled an Optiplex 755 desktop from my old sale stuff. I bought 4 or 5 and this is one I never sold. Pulled my desktops hard drives and swapped them in, stuck another 2gb of spare ram in it. Re loaded win 7 ( modded bios ) and been running it for about a week.. I'm dealing with it. it's 'as fast' as the laptop. But I wouldn't mind a Q9650.. Then got thinking about the LGA775 Xeons. wouldn't a 3360 work with another bios mod? they are roughly half the cost and what about video card? I only want to play games I already have. GTA IV, Singularity, Bioshock, Garys Mod and Dirt 3. If I can play them with xbox 360 like quality, I'm ok with it
So, I should be able to run a X3360 processor ( LGA775, no LGA771 conversion ) with the latest bios? currently running an old modded bios that is A19 with Dell SLIC 2.1
Looks like I'll be ordering a Q6700 off Ebay.. According to the Dell forums, a Q9650 has been verified by Dell to work, but $80-100 processor is out of the budget for this old computer. $30-35 is more my budget.. These machines cost me $60 each shipped 3 years ago. So figuring my costs at this point, I have $4 into a 2.5-3.5" drive adapter and $3 into another YJ221 drive caddy. everything else was out of my spare stock.. If I can keep my costs under $125 for the improvements, It'll be pretty sweet.. It is a downgrade from what I had, but the silence of the tower is worth it
Another useful thing to add is a PCI-e USB 3.0 adapter card. Adding USB 3.0 to these machines really speeds up transfers. I added a USB 3.0 card and a USB 3.0 hub to my Optiplex and it really increases backup speeds to an external hard drive or USB flash drive. You can get a USB 3.0 PCI-e card for $20 or $25.
I was planning on a PCI-E SATA III/ USB 3.0 card. there a little more money but, I have a 250gb 2.5" drive salvaged from a dead laptop that I can put in my 2.5" drive adapter since it holds 2 2.5" drives. I have it mounted where the floppy would go, but I'm maxed out on SATA ports without it connected