Dell Optiplex 780 Upgrade?

[judilore]

Hey guys,

I know there are lots of questions similar to mine and I've looked through them all but I can't make a whole lot of sense out of them (I'm really bad with computers). Basically I just bought a refurbished Dell Optiplex 780, I'm not sure what the name of the model is but it's one of the smaller ones.

It works great in almost every respect- it runs windows 10, I use photoshop and Lightroom quite a lot and they work great.

My issue is when I try to play any game? I'm not a super hardcore gamer but I play the odd thing, and I'm more than okay with running things on their lowest settings but whenever I try to play anything recently made it's slow as hell, the audio runs out the visuals and it's just a mess. I know it has something to do with the graphics card which most likely needs updating. I looked into overclocking it but found out that it's not possible to do that on this particular machine.

Is there anything that I can add in here to help? I've included a picture of the innards, and from looking at other questions something low profile (e.g. GeForce GT 1030 Low Profile 2G GDDR5 64 Bit) looks most plausible, but again I'm not actually sure what I'm looking at.

Thanks in advance

 

[pete_101]

It might be possible to put in a low profile, it's hard to get a good idea on the depth from the photo. See below the HDD there are 2 slots, the bottom one is an old fashion PCI slot, but the one above it (which I can't see properly) says "PCIe x16", that's the one that will take a graphics card if it can fit in the case. If you measure the width of the case, I'll be able to look up which case you have and if there is enough room for a low profile card.

 

[Rexper]

You can refer to the technical guidebook for specifications:
https://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/optix/en/optiplex_780_tech_guidebook_en.pdf

No PCIe connectors, the motherboard PCIe slot is power limited to 50w or lower, maximum allowable gpu length is 167mm

You first choice was pretty accurate.

These would be the best GPUs for your system: https://pcpartpicker.com/products/video-card/#l=69,167&w=15,30&sort=price&c=396&page=1

Though I'm not sure about gpu height interfering with hdd cage.

 

[judilore]

It might be possible to put in a low profile, it's hard to get a good idea on the depth from the photo. See below the HDD there are 2 slots, the bottom one is an old fashion PCI slot, but the one above it (which I can't see properly) says "PCIe x16", that's the one that will take a graphics card if it can fit in the case. If you measure the width of the case, I'll be able to look up which case you have and if there is enough room for a low profile card.

Hi, thanks for your quick response!

I measured the case and it's 31 x 9.5 x 34cm
And here's another picture of the area in case it helps:

Thanks again!

 

[william p]

https://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/optix/en/optiplex_780_tech_guidebook_en.pdf?dgc=ba&dgseg=dhs&cid=238169&lid=27867&acd=123092381692786723c101842149&VEN3=812004113162299572
I don't see any reference in the manual to a 50W GPU limit. The PCIe16 slot provides 75W.
The PSU provides 235W. The maximum CPU is 95W. so 95+75+ 160W. Q9650 =95W , 2 cores are 65W or less. 65+75=140W.
Single slot cards up to 6.6" in length should fit. Many single slot cards have 2 slot wide coolers which will run into the HDD area.
Some people relocate the HDD to the 3.5" card reader bay by using 2.5" laptop drives.
The usual suspects for this are GT730 1GB DDR5, GT1030 2GB DDR5, and GTX750 1 or 2 GB DDR5,
if you can find a GTX1050 that fits that would be king of the hill.
The GTX750 is 65W, the 1050 is 75W. the 30 series cards are under 40W.

 

[Rexper]

All Dell Optiplex DT, and SSF models have a power limited PCIe slot. It is just the 2011+ models that actually provide that as a specification.

OP, thank you for photo. These two cards should be the only ones physically compatible, and are the best performing your system allows.

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/compare/XQH48d,nRmxFT/

 

[william p]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVR07KLBcgI