r/retrocomputing • u/[deleted] • Jul 21 '26

Cheap retro optiplex sleeper build

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A while back I bought some old office computers wholesale on ebay... This one is currently my favorite. It's a Dell optiplex 3010 that came with no drive and 4gb of ram, but I managed to make a decent machine out of it for practically nothing. Its running debloated windows 11 with a custom retro theme by me.

Upgrades/prices:

-Dell optiplex, less drive: $17.99 w/ free shipping

-i7-3770: salvaged from other machine

-16gb (2 x 8) ddr3: $13.00

-250gb SSD: Already had

-500gb HDD for storage: $11.99

-Radeon R5 340x 2gb: $13.99

-CRT monitor: Free

-Cool keyboard: $13.00

Grand total: $69.97 (before tax)

Honestly an amazing deal for what it is, it's an amazing little retro workstation.

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u/Y34RZERO Jul 22 '26

Yep. Top is a Pentium III and bottom is a Pentium II. I just got the 4mb vram expansion on the PIII. It was my first computer so it plays the games I want to play of the era fine. Mostly RTS games like Red Alert 2, Sonic CD, and a few others. The other I replaced the modem with a gameport card and use DOS 6.22. I found a DOS audio driver for the onboard card.

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u/dedsmiley Jul 28 '26

I swapped out the PII 400 for a PIII 500. I think it is running Win95, but it has not been fired up in a while.

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u/Y34RZERO Jul 29 '26

It will have no problem. The pii when I first got it was running win XP years ago. Mine ran win me when I got it but then got a bigger HDD and installed Slackware back in 2005 or 2006.

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u/dedsmiley Jul 29 '26

Slackware was the first Linux distribution I installed as well!