I have enough money for an angle grinder and a new used graphics card. But not a fancy new case.
With prebuilds like this a lot of times you can’t just change the case without also changing the motherboard. Also they could have an angle grinder just laying around. They may even have done it on purpose for the lulz.
I actually just upgraded my Dell Optiplex 990 SFF to a new full ATX case and had to get a new motherboard. Dell does some funky stuff to their motherboard to get it to fit into their custom cases. For instance the CPU cooler clipped into the case through the motherboard This was one of the ways the motherboard was secured into the case. The other mount points were entirely non-standard so no other case would fit. I did consider making some modifications to the case with a hacksaw before deciding to just get a new case and motherboard. The new Motherboard was pretty cheap because I was using a 4th-gen intel i3. Not great specs but good enough for a homebrew NAS.
Yes, from experience, yes. But I used a pair of tin snips.
How did you get a picture of my PC!?
I joke…I at least 3d printed a cover for the card lol
That PLA is melting as we speak.
Pet-G brah, only the good stuff
I did this a number of years back with a GTX 750ti… because that was the last good card that ran without a dedicated power supply connection.
Even if you rigged a power connector, it’s be damn hard trying to keep a modern card stable with the 250w-325w power supply in the Optiplix
I know a guy who spent hundreds of extra dollars on his build to make sure everything was white. I think maybe I prefer this?
This is the dude I’d turn down any 1v1 Starcraft matches against at the lan party.
It was such a good deal bro I had to buy it! 😂
I actually did need to take a hacksaw to a Dell case when the PSU died, because they used a proprietary form factor. It was just removing some of the back panel and it worked fine.
Once upon a time I think they also had custom pinouts on the ATX connector, so just replacing your PSU with a standard one would fry your mobo
What a bunch of assholes.
They did, I was about to say the same thing! I had to buy an adapter to make it work right. This was like mid to late 2000’s. I work in IT for a company and didn’t want to spend money on a new PC yet so I snagged one from work that was no longer used. It got the job done, but yeah it was crazy to see what they did to make it so you couldn’t swap or change some things inside.
Fuckin pricks turning the goddamn cpus 45° so no cooler would ever fit… grrr
Yeeeep. I did this. Very disheartening after spending the time with a Dremel to modify the back panel enough for it to fit.
This looks like a Basic Bitch® office workstation. Surely you could put the same graphics card in a price-comparable gaming rig without having to resort to this…
Most likely. I “reassigned” an old work Dell Optiplex to play about with Linux a few years back, and it didn’t like whatever onboard graphics chipset was on the board. I bought an inexpensive GeForce card… not realising that it would end up looking like this bad boi, and that I had to buy a low-profile card.
A basic bitch office workstation is like $20 at a garage sale to $150 from a refurb shop with a Windows license. Cutting the case is twenty minutes for template and cut.
Nothing fiscally competes with these.
PSU popping noises and smoke…
although a joke, usually oem psus are fairly high efficiency, just low wattage. however the image uses a gpu without a 6/8/12 pin connector, so its highly unlikely the up to 75W load would kill the system when the psus are usually rated for 200, and the cpu usually only uses 1/4 of that
Noice.
“Think outside the box.”
I kind of think more designs should be like that. Let the GPU breathe cold air from outside the case.
There were a lot of experiments with wind tunnels and such back in the day. In the end, the difference wasn’t significant enough to justify the R&D.
??? You don’t wind tunnel test for thermals. That’s for aerodynamics. It’s well known that a GPU outside of a case runs cooler than inside.
It’s why cases are tested by putting a GPU inside and reporting the thermals at idle and load. It is significant.
I mean physical tunnels from the front or side of the case directed at the cooler heatsink to direct outside air directly onto the heatsink. There were tons of different designs for that concept back in the day, but you don’t really see it very often now.
Maybe they didn’t mean wind tunnel, but that they lit a cigarette and checked the airflow 🤷
Imagine if the graphics card’s PCB component legs, as well as the soldering, accidentally touches the metal case if something or someone abruptly moves the PC case while it’s turned on… With the case directly grounded/going to neutral or, even worse, plugged in US power outlets with reversed pins (so 110 volts now runs through the metal case, ready to find circuit with the secondary voltages running through the graphics card’s PBC trails).
Best case scenario is the user’s fingers discharging accumulated amounts of static energy when they touch the case while also touching some card’s circuitry.
3-prong plugs (which computers use) have never been possible to insert upside down, and 2-prong plugs have been required to be polarized (one blade longer than the other, so impossible to insert upside down) since 1962. Aside from this, all voltage rails in a computer are electrically isolated from both sides of the mains. Most connect their 0V rail to the ground pin of the wall outlet, but there is no path from the AC lines to the DC. Touching a PC case has a 0% chance of electrocuting you.
Regarding the graphics card, one side is covered by the fan shroud and the other by the backplate. No part of the bare PCB is exposed to the chassis. Even if it was, there is more than enough clearance to keep anything from shorting out, and if there isn’t, a piece of foam is all it takes to fix that.
plugged in US power outlets with reversed pins (so 110 volts now runs through the metal case
PC power supplies don’t work the way you think they do.
I think OC has a case of the Kruger peak…
ATX power supplies are literally some of the safest power supplies to exist, and a GFCI breaker would prevent this scenario from even happening IMO lol
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Modern US plugs have a wide blade for “neutral” or “return path” and a narrow blade for “live” or “hot” (plus the round ground pin). In my part of the US, we only have GFCI near water (restrooms and kitchen) but always proper circuit breakers and ground to water pipes where the mains AC enters. There still exist many 2-prong appliances, but those will never have the case connected electrically!
If you don’t have a proper earth ground, then tying anything together is bad news. You could have one appliance shorting out and damaging others on the same circuit, or burning your wires in the wall. Regarding the PC switch-mode supply, AC in goes to a transformer which doesn’t care if hot and neutral are swapped.
Sorry if I sounded like a jerk. I’ve been working on PCs and appliances for decades and only once ever had an energized case; not a PC. Touching two machines each plugged into a seperate circuit, got a metallic taste in my mouth, pulled out the meter and measured ~80VAC! Verified my vending machine and outlet were wired correctly and recommended getting their popcorn machine and outlet checked out.
Literally thinking outside the box.
The hole in the side is a speed-hole. It makes the computer go faster.
