Hot Rod Optiplex

This was a funny build to make a temporary gaming computer for a little LAN party with some parts I had lying around. The Dell Optiplex had a surprisingly powerful 7th gen intel CPU, and already had 16GB of RAM and an SSD boot drive, so it made sense that it could at least run some games if it had a little more GPU grunt.

I had a spare RX 480 at the time, but with the wimpy power supply in the system, it didn't even have the PCIe cable for a dedicated GPU, never mind the wattage. To solve this, I used a secondary power supply with a jumper on the 24 pin to automatically start the PSU when it was switched on, slotted the 16x slot GPU into the open-backed 4x slot, and it worked!

Mounting was a little sketchy trying to affix a full height card onto a low-profile case, and there was no chance of the side panel fitting, but it worked pretty great and got over 200 fps in some games - not bad for a PC now retired to be an OPNsense firewall.