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tevion5

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jul 12, 2011
1,967
1,603
Ireland
My university has thrown out some great stuff for me this year, including a fully specced out Power Mac G4 Quicksilver (2002), complete with monitor! Every so often they put all their garbage bound stuff in a heap under the stairs in the Computer Science building where I attend lectures, and I am allowed to take whatever I like!

Anyway, this week, they were throwing out around 20 Dell PC's. I don't usually get excited about early 2000's Dimensions, but there was some gold hidden in there. The only two things that caught my eye were a Dell PowerEdge 2600 enterprise server, and a Dell Optiplex 780 (The fat one).

As a networking nut, I was eager to get the old but formidable PowerEdge back to my room. (My friends helped me carry the 45KG beast balanced on my bike!). However, while most everything I get from "The Pile" is outdated and only interests me as a tinkerer and collector, the Optiplex 780 was a very late Core 2 Duo PC with 8GB RAM, PCI-E and Windows 7. They had even left the 500GB drive inside, unwiped! (I will do a fresh install of Windows).

It is still a very useful computer in an office in 2015, being only around 4 years old. I am wondering now what to do with this machine. In my college room, my main setup is my MBP hooked up to an Apple Cinema Display. I do my work, audio production and general entertainment with this. However, my MBP is no gaming machine in the slightest. At home I have a powerful gaming PC, but up in college I'm starved for a steam library.

What do you think I should do with this thing? It has a weak Radeon HD 3450 in it for now, but with 8GB RAM and 3.0GHz Core 2 Duo, pairing it with a cheap second hand albeit more modern card (say, €50-60 at the most?) could turn it into a machine well suited to Counter-Strike:GO or other medium tier games. Plus, it might be handy to have a Windows system at my disposal for development purposes. Or do you think it would be better to sell it?

I still can't believe I got such a modern machine for free!
 
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An old dual core PC isn't worth anything really in terms of resale. However, it sounds like for cheap money it could provide a nice value for you. I'd keep it and toss a midrange video card in there which should open up plenty options for games on Steam that aren't too demanding.
 
An old dual core PC isn't worth anything really in terms of resale. However, it sounds like for cheap money it could provide a nice value for you. I'd keep it and toss a midrange video card in there which should open up plenty options for games on Steam that aren't too demanding.

I was pretty much leaning this way alright. Half to hear the same idea from someone else. PC's don't have Mac resale value of course. It can be a gaming rig away from gaming rig. :)
 
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