I bought a PC for $50. Let's upgrade it!

Very nice of Lucy’s dad.

Solid Dell flip! Now I'm kind of sad we didn't have you in the $400 budget build off earlier this year. "This coulda been a contenda!" Great results for such an affordable PC!

Really smart and thoughtful choices on this one. I think a lot of people including myself appreciate that you do these kind of budget builds that are a lot more relatable and realistic for someone watching to undertake themselves. Even if there was the setback of the CPU not being compatible, you learned from the mistake and it wasn't a costly one as you could still sell the CPU and at most it's a $10 loss. Great video!

The only propriety aspects to the more recent Dell PSUs are the modified 12VO motherboard connector, a slot on the side for mounting, and the custom cable lengths. Other than that it's just a TFX12VO unit, and adapters are readily available from standard ATX to Dell 12VO, allowing the use of a standard TFX.

The prices on the i7-6700 are wild. I did a very similar build for a friend with an HP mini tower that originally had a 6500 in it. It was actually cheaper for me to get an entire second SFF HP for $40 with the 6700 in it and swap the chips between the two. I was able to home the second computer out as well but it was wild that I could get an entire second computer for less than the price of the loose chip.

Actually an SFF PSU fits perfectly and there adapters to make it work.

13:04 v2 Xeons are actually 3rd gen Ivy Bridge, v3 are 4th gen Haswell etc. Sandy Bridge (2nd gen) was called either 0 or v1 First gen Core i (Nehalem and Westmere) still used the old naming. Xeon 55xx and 56xx for LGA1366 and Xeon 34xx for LGA1156

Craft! I've never done it for a dell board but if you feel like taking a look into the coffeemod process, you can abbreviate most of the steps and v5 and v6 xeons will work in at least retail 100 and 200 series boards.

Just updated a similar computer for a blue iris server. You can 3D print the sleds if they are missing. There are a lot files for different dell models. They were on printables or thingiverse FYI.

I've done this kind of build several times starting back in 2016 and I discovered, using 4th Gen, 7th Gen and 8th Gen off-lease business pre built platforms of various configurations and sizes, that "newer" didn't mean "better" or more capable. In their stock configuration there wasn't much performance difference between the three systems with the 8th Gen only slightly better in synthetic benchmark tests. Lack of power was usually the issue. One thing I'd like to add to this discussion is that one can sometimes "offset" the cost of upgrade components by selling the part that they remove from the system. For example, I wanted to upgrade the 7th Gen Core i5-7500 to the better Core i7-7700 but, like you mentioned, the cost of the i7 was, at that time, just outside my budget so after finding a relatively good deal on the i7 I sold the i5 and offset the expense of the new chip by quite a bit. Even a little bit helps. Thanks again for a great video.

With old Skylake, you'd usually want to use a Chinese QTJ2 or like you said, find a Q170 chipset board and use the Xeon E3 v5 chips. Keep in mind, the H110 boards in many HP and Dell prebuilts do NOT support the Skylake or Kaby Lake Xeons. You need to add the microcodes and remove the IME from the BIOS to make those work.

In regards to that low FPS aiming down sights, I found in Destiny 2 that there's usually some depth of field and aiming vignetting that only turn on when aiming down sights (iron sights and scopes) and at least in D2 you could turn it off and performance would recover. I'm going to guess that's a similar issue to the Borderlands games to why it slows down when aiming or when it transitions between hip and sights. Such a fun puzzle to see how to get modern games running on salvaged hardware.

FYI for anyone building in a Dell case StarTech makes a 3.5" to dual 2.5" drive adapter that drops right into a standard blue Dell drive cage. It's about $8 at most retailers.

This video came just in time! This is my work pc and following days will take it home instead of going to the garbage... thanks for the usefull tips!

Hahaha, well I built a new PC with all top shelf hardware, lets sell it 2 months later for more than it cost to build.... This is the 1 and only time in my history with PC's that I can recall, where if you bought the right parts at the right time you can use the hell out of it and still sell it for more than you paid 2 months later! My GPU alone went up $500! The CPU is up $160, Ram up $30, Mobo up $40, SSD's up $20 minimum x4 drives...... The only thing I overpaid or could have gotten a better deal on is my PSU. I paid $284 and its now $250. I spent $3989 to build a system that is now worth $4500 minimum 2 months later! When is the last time in your lifetime where that's ever happened?

Agree completely, scrap builds are the most fun! A couple cheap suggestions for stashing the 2.5" SSD's: zip ties or detachable Command Strips! Stick it and forget it w/o the rattle! I would only buy the sleds or drive frames for vibration absorption if making a small NAS.

One of the big things I recommend with Dells (Lenovos and HP's too), is to head to their sites and get the compatibility lists/service manuals for the laptop/desktop/endpoint. This will show what the motherboard will support. Normally, this will list the CPU types, as well as memory, storage etc. And the service manuals normally are detailed enough to work through some solutions with.

Great video and love the build on the low end side! Continue to upgrade this build as costs drop down! Would be very interesting if someone ever gets CoffeeTime working on these dell OEMs. It would open up the possibilities for hacked xeons and extend a ton of usage onto what ultimately will become another generation of ewaste

My father-in-law gave me the small form factor version of that system. I installed a low profile rx550 and 16 gigs of ram and turned it into a pretty decent ChimeraOS box.

The form factor of the power supply is not proprietary per se. Only the power connectors are. They use flex ATX power supplies.