Buying used dell optiplex

[Amaides]

Hi. I have been planning to buy a used oem pc from ebat with a sandy bridge processor to be a budget system like I have seen many others do. My question is how much should I pay for one? The one I am looking at is a optiplex 790 with an i7 2600,8gb ram, and a 500gb hd. The price is asking for $170 while I have seen others get one for way less. So I was wondering how much you would pay for. Thanks!

 

[captaincharisma]

it depends on how it configured but i would say 150-200 for a tower like that

 

[Kerry Lourash]

A Dell 7010 desktop system with an i5 3.2 Ghz or 3.4 system should be available at that price. i7's are pricey and not that much faster for a budget system.

If you are willing to get a hard drive and re-install the OS with the COA # on the PC, total cost could be cheaper. You can get the Win 10 installation files on the 'net and upgrade to Win 10 with the Win 7 COA. I have done it several times.

 

[cat1092]

I agree with Kerry above, am considering one myself with the i5-2400 for less than $100 shipped, as long as I select no drive & just 2GB RAM. I have many unused matched pairs of DDR3 RAM & a few unused 2.5" SSD's, since most of mine are on NVMe now.

The Optiplex 990 was $1,905 when new in 2011-12, and being Sandy bridge means a soldered on IHS, although some says it'll run Ivy Bridge chips, I don't want to go there.

BTW, there's a trick published that can emulate UEFI to allow for the install of a NVMe SSD on a x4 card, the 2nd GPU slot is x4, although PCIe 2.0. Have a couple lower capacity ones from 2-3 years back, the original MyDigitalSSD with Phison E7 controller (too hot for notebooks!). Have the adapters & fan, to include double ball bearing replacements, as the stock fan on the card squeals on boot for a minute.

While I've not tried this yet, just ran across it today, will surely give a shot. Worked on some older MB's than the Optiplex 990. Believe it's easier with Linux, as both Ubuntu 12.04 & Linux Mint 13 64 bit had NVMe support, long before most Windows users had heard of the tech. Plus wasn't included with Windows until Windows 8.1.

https://mrlithium.blogspot.com/2015/12/how-to-boot-nvme-ssd-from-legacy-bios.html

Would run at the same speed as my AMD FX-990 chipset MB's (also PCIe 2.0) & even so, are (still) 3x faster than a 2.5" SSD, provided it works & some has stated it does.

Now for the hard part, finding the Optiplex 990 from the seller with best reviews!

Cat