What is the best GPU for an OptiPlex 755?

[Guest]

I have an old Dell Optiplex 755 MT with the following:

• 
  8GB of PC2-6400 RAM
  Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650 CPU
  Q35 Chipset

It's actually really fast, but it has no GPU. What is the fastest graphics card I can throw in there to saturate (optimize for minimum bottle-necking) the CPU?

 

[13thmonkey]

750? something around there. my 9550 was a slight bottleneck on a gtx470.

 

[Christian Thomas]

I'll be interested to see how this thread goes because I also recently got an Optiplex 755 - and am thrilled with it. Mine has a Q9550 but is still the quickest machine I have ever had. It has a Dell DVI card, which does 1600 x 1200 on each of two screens in the PCI-e slot. It has no fans or heatsinks and it seems can be found for as little as £6 on eBAy (though the one I saw wanted £50 postage from the US!) Unfortunately it is not showing up in Device Manager since I'm using the SVGA Q35 chipset onboard graphics at the moment, so I can't tell you exactly what it is is. I just don't have a DVI cable here at the moment.

I'm running Windows 10 on my machine and have grand plans for it. A fiver will get me hooked up to the current 22"screen and a 17" screen - which is how I like to work; on two screen and one staying for output while you work on the other. The first purchase will be an SSD - a Crucial MX100 under £50 and giving me an Acronis license that I badly want and which will help elsewhere. While waiting for that I am trying to overclock it (since apparently these chips are fab for doing that though you either need to fool the Dell into changing the chip recognition or use SetFSB to get some speed). And then later I'll need a 1TB drive because my external Lacie of the same size (with its usual blown power supply, and now running off the PSU of another Dell) is starting to be used too much as an everyday disk rather than as a fallback.

You will be thrilled to hear that these machines can apparently take 16GB or RAM. I know this just because someone said on the Dell site that they are running 12GB. The extra 8GB, for me, isn't cheap but it is part of my plans to have various levels of cache. Fancy/Primo cache to begin with, while I just have 6GB of RAM (or which the 2x1GB are Crucial sticks at 667 - the others Hyundai at 800). Then a Ramdisk separate from that, for Chrome and Opera because my habit is to have 30 tabs open,, so SoftPerfect can do that. Then finally, before the SSD arrives, I'm going to play around with ReadyBoost (assuming it's available in Win 10 Tech preview).

I'd be very interested to hear a critique of my intended course from people that know better than me. It's a very long time since I could say that I was at the leading edge of what was going on in computers. I will first of all say that I think you have got yourself a cracking machine and it seems to me, in my couple of weeks of ownership, that it is pretty hard to match economically, even today. Either of our chips are in the £50-£70 region by themselves and, for all their limitations I am grudgingly appreciating what Dell did (maybe still does) with these machines. I have an early MacBook, a later Satellite Pro, and a Dimension that this is taking over from that I bought new. This is by a margin the clear and outright winner.

And for those that think it is still not that economical I'll just point out that I paid £15.50 for it on eBay. (Sure, it wasn't very well listed - and I expected it to have a Core2Duo - but add £50 t the price and it's still a bargain.) Do please let me know what you end up doing, and what your thoughts are on this equivalent of a hot-hatch classic car.

 

[Christian Thomas]

On a more objective level I meant to mention that my chip already got a benchmark of 4300 using a download of Passmark, unclocked and untouched. The Q9650 should do significantly better. (For fairness, I should also say that around, I think, 3D graphics the machine scored about 18 where others had a mean in the thousands, so it's not all perfect, though I'm not yet using the card available even). The fact is that it is only a factor of 3 until one gets into the $1000 nominal region (it's a shame they don't do completely current prices in a second column), and a factor of four before we we get right outside the band of what is reasonable to spend in anything other that an IT professional capacity.

A question I wouldn't mind knowing the answer to is "What is the next best bargain up, that has power and value, using better RAM, USB 3.0. SATA3 and that really will make a machine that will last as long as this one has?" 2007/8 is when this came out - right in the middle of Vista. That's not bad to make it valid on a Win 10 preview with only 3 drivers not showing as understood. And two of those are parallel and serial ports, IIRC. Maybe the other is the video card, but the setup in the machine is that you use one and lose the other, so that may not even be fair. Incidentally Win 10 has proved pretty good so far; very clean and nothing that actually falls down, though the Start button can be annoyingly slow from time to time.