Awhile back I got 2 Dell Optiplex 755 SFF PCs for free from a business that was gonna just throw them in the trash. I didn't know what the specs were but decided to take them anyways since well, free stuff... LOL! They turned out to be pretty old & under powered with both rocking Core 2 Duos (e4600 in one, e6550 in the other), 4GB of DDR2, & Win7 Home 32bit, so I didn't do anything with them right away.

Fast forward to this week when I ended up having a couple days off work & boredom got the best of me. I had a spare XFX R9 390 8GB & 1000w CM V1000 PSU sitting unused so I wondered if I could make a "frakenputer" out of the 2 PCs & those. Sure enough it worked out & actually is performing a lot better than I expected!

Tomb Raider 2013 was hitting an average FPS of 67 on it's in game benchmark at 1080p with all graphical settings maxed! I thought the e6550 would be a much bigger bottleneck than it actually is. Played some Skyrim, FO3, & SW:BF2 classic on it also. They all performed very well & pretty damn smooth so I know believe this can still be a viable gaming PC with some upgrades.

The specs of it right now are, Mobo - Dell Optiplex 755 SFF OEM LGA775 mobo CPU - Intel Core2 Duo e6550 2.33GHz GPU - XFX DD R9 390 PSU - Cooler Master V1000 1000w PSU Storage - 2, 3.5" 7200rpm 80GB HDDs & 1, 2.5" 5400rpm 500GB HDD Obligatory pics - https://imgur.com/a/G6PJt

Now I know the GPU & PSU are way overkill for this setup but since I already had them I figured why not. Better than having them sitting on a shelve IMO. The point of this post though is to show that older PCs like these can be easily & fairly cheaply turned into a competent gaming PC.

I already ordered another 4GB of RAM for it & will be upgrading the CPU to a Core 2 Quad 9XXX or 8XXX next week when I have the extra cash. The RAM cost me about $14 used & looking on eBay I'm thinking the CPU will run me somewhere in between $15 & $30 depending on what model I go with. After I get 8GB of RAM & a quad core CPU into it I believe it should be able to run all games pretty good.

My reasoning (other than I was bored LOL) behind building this is to have a competent Win7 gaming rig for older games that don't play nice with Win10. I figured I would share though since if you have a similar PC laying around or can get one for free or really cheap it could make a decent gaming rig at pretty low cost.

Say you don't have anything but the PC & what it came it with. The CPU can be kept even if it's a dual core as the e6550 is much less of a hindrance than I thought it would be. A decent cheap PSU can be gotten for around $50 & you can get a something along the lines of a GTX 1050ti or RX 560 for around $100 to $150. Which would get a serviceable gaming PC for $200 or less. Just make sure you get a GPU that can be powered by the PSU since the mobo's PCIe slot only delivers 25w which will not be enough to run a GPU that only takes power from the PCie slot.

Anyways hopefully this post can help someone get into PC gaming on the super cheap. For me this just was project born from boredom, but since the results were much better than I expected I thought it was worth sharing here.