Anyone build a gaming PC, by buying a cheap OEM quad-core rig off ebay, and thowing in a GPU?

[Jasmin]

"... you obviously can help me considering that you did this almost a year ago."

How can that be if you only have 1 message?

Sorry my English is not the best, i wanted to say that VirtualLarry and others on this thread bought OEM SFF almost a year ago and installed a better graphic card, so they could help me.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Technically, what you described should work fine. Whether that offers a good value for money for you, is something that I cannot answer for you.

Weight the price of doing that, and having to buy a dGPU at inflated market prices, versus buying a brand-new OEM pre-built PC with a "real gaming card" pre-installed. Sometimes, due to the distortion of prices in the dGPU market, you can get entire OEM PCs with decent CPU alone with those dGPUs, for little more than you would pay for the dGPU yourself. Especially for something like a GTX1070 or GTX1080ti.

 

[Charlie22911]

I had a Dell 7010 SFF upgraded to i7 3770 and 32GB ram. It had a MSI 1050ti low profile card in it that worked fine until I re-purposed it to run Ubuntu server and pulled the card. It could even run the lighter VR titles on the Vive with no issues.

One thing to watch out for with that card though is that it uses cheap sleeve bearing fans, they were shot pretty quickly since they were always running in that cramped case. I ended up removing the fan\shroud assembly to replace them with some quality delta fans.

 

[hoorah]

A little late to help out the poster, but I have made quite a few OEM gaming boxes and HTPCs recently from refurbs (or just discards). They definitely work much better than the OEM systems of yesteryear. The biggest problem with gaming on OEM boxes of generations past was that even budget GPUs required 6 pin PSU connectors, and upgrading the PSU had an added cost and compatibility issues.

If you are sticking to the 75W available on the PCIE bus and no need for the 6 pin connector, yes, OEM systems have work out much better than they used to with something like a 1050ti.

Where you will run into problems is trying to go past the 1050ti into the 1060 range with the additional power (and cooling) requirements, necessitating a new PSU and case.

I built an Optiplex 3010 for my son with an i5-2300, 8GB of ram, and a low-profile 1050ti. Hes not that old and mostly plays lego games/minecraft, but it works very well for that and by the time he outgrows it it will be time to build a new system. It would be plenty capable of playing many other AAA games of 2016-2017 at 1080p as well.

Another system I've built is the retired workstation (Dell T3400, T3500, T5400). You can often get cheap xeon upgrades for them and sometimes the ECC ram can be much cheaper than non-ECC counterparts as they are from retired servers with limited market. The power supplies are often 600-800W and have the 6pin PCIE connector. They are nearing the end of their useful life and you'll find plenty of games to be CPU limited, but they are a very good option if you want a low cost of entry into the game.

Plus the front panel of the dell workstations comes off pretty easily and you can do some interesting custom paint jobs.