Can this be put into the Dell precision t1700? (Sorry if it’s a stupid question, asking for my 14 year old son who is new to the build/upgrade world). He is trying to turn our old desktop into a gaming computer. Thanks for any advise you can give me!! null

Question

Jonathan · Accepted Answer

No such thing as a stupid question. Typically though with PCs that are built as home computers and workstations that are mass manufactured they aren't made to be turned into a gaming rig. That seems to be the case with this PC after I looked at the specs. Not only will it NOT handle an Nvidia RTX 3070 it also will NOT be able to be turned into a gaming rig. None of the components with this PC are salvageable nor would they be worth salvaging. Your best bet would be to wait till black Friday where PC components go on sale and trying to build a complete PC by yourself for around 1000$ (give or take due to sales) as a Christmas present. If you need a reference or a guide a youtube named "BitWit" actually has a build guide for a 1000$ which actually contains this card.

Again, please do NOT try and convert this PC. Depending on what is done it could be potentially dangerous with low-end PSU and etc.

Wish him luck on his PC building adventure for me. It's amazing :)

benny · Answer

It’s awesome your son is trying to get into the pc building world, but it would be a better idea to build a system from the ground up. You would need to replace everything in the system. Also no such thing as a stupid question. Ask away.

Answered by benny 3 years ago

Johnny · Answer

***So, the replies told you that it wouldn't work, but I will tell you why and hopefully this will help you in building a PC.***

1. Motherboard. That board does just fine for the components in it. However, it would ultimately fail if ANYTHING else was put in it, such as an upgrade of anything below. If you are going with Ryzen, invest the extra and get an X570 platform, you will not regret it. 

2. Ram. The standard for gaming these days is 16GB at 3200Mhz of DDR4 (typically $60-$80). Anything more is overkill, anything less will drop frames per second. Good brands are Corsair, Gskill, HyperX, Patriot, and Crucial. Anything else is likely no-name (could be forgetting some of the underdogs)

3. CPU. I am going to be honest here, that CPU would surprise me if it could hit 1000 on a Cinebench R20 score. Definitely not suitable for gaming, much less daily tasks IMO. I personally like AMD, and a great processor for gaming right now is the Ryzen 5 3600x ($200), or you could alternatively wait for the Ryzen 5 5600x ($300), which will be a monster. 

4. Graphics card. Hey look at that, you're looking at the best bang for the buck graphics card money has to offer! The AMD Radeon 6800 will likely outperform it, but I would stick with Nvidia as the software and drivers have historically been much better. 

5. Storage. Your current computer has 250GB of storage. To put how minimal this is into perspective, CoD Modern Warfare takes around 380GB. I would recommend installing Windows on an NVMe drive, around 500GB so you can load your favorite game onto it. Then, purchase a 1TB or a 2TB Sata SSD to throw less important games on. HDD's are outdated and I wouldn't bother with them unless you need a TON of storage for cheap, and don't mind waiting a couple of birthdays for Windows to launch. 

6. PSU. Your current power supply is likely 250-350 watts. This graphics card alone will pretty much slap that PSU. I would recommend getting a MINIMUM of a 650W power supply for the current setup I provided. I like to NOT cheap out on the power supply. Cheap ones are likely to fry boards and components. I normally trust EVGA, Seasonic, and Corsair for my PSU's. Make sure they are 80+Gold or Platinum and you'll have a phenomenal build for years. 

7. Misc. So, there's your PC! Don't expect your son to enjoy gaming on that 10 year old keyboard. Corsair makes the best keyboards and always go with mechanical. Test out a few switch types to see how you like them - I personally use Brown for typing and Silver for gaming. Logitech and Razer make amazing mice, and Corsairs aren't too bad either. Fans don't matter as much. Artic makes great budget fans, and Noctua makes the best. Corsair makes the prettiest, which is what I am running on my "show" build. (10x LL120 and 4x LL140)

Do your own research, and build a great PC with your son! It might be expensive I know, but if you can afford it, it TRULY is a great experience.

Tony · Answer

I actually was in the same boat about 5-6 years ago. I bought a dell workstation and sort of successfully converted it to a gaming pc. It had decent specs at the time, i5 processor, 16 gb ram, etc. I was barely able to fit a GTX 970 in there, but it worked. So I upgraded the power supply to a 750 W to handle the GPU and that was it. Seemed like a killer deal at the time honestly, I had a good gaming pc that at the time was at least 2x more powerful than ps4 or xbox one. But its big downfall was that the case and fans were not adequate for cooling the system. It only lasted a year or two before everything overheated. The motherboard and GPU were toast, but I was able to salvage the ram, cpu, and power supply at least. I ended up using those parts to build my first real gaming pc, mainly with a gtx 1070, full size atx case with 3 big 200 mm fans, a new SSD, and a nice motherboard. I caught the big and upgraded to a 1080 Ti when it came out and got bigger, better power supply too. Pretty much the only thing that was left from the original system was the ram and cpu. But they did last me a while, I just upgraded them last year to a ryzen 5 3600 and ddr4 ram (which of course also required a new motherboard). Long story short, you son will be much better off building a pc from scratch.

Answered by Tony 3 years ago

McCloud · Answer

Following the recommendation, waiting for black friday is a good idea, especially if you want to "risk the crowds" (which there probably wont be any) and try to get a pre-built from MicroCenter or Bestbuy. There are countless awful pre-builts out there that the 'advisors' will attempt to get you to buy. Here are my recommendations.
HP Omen: These machines look pretty nice, but you have to pay close attention to their internals. If there is only a single stick of ram, you may want to choose a different system and or purchase a ram kit while you're at the store that totals up to 16 gigabytes. Single channel ram is a huge detriment to performance and may of the Omen computers by me only have one stick of ram. 
 Alienware: Overpriced and use proprietary components, however, the systems look dang cool. If you find an alienware with very good specifications and it looks cool, they're not an awful choice, though id recommend something else. 
Asus: My Bestbuy has Asus pre-builts and they tend to be very nice. High end components that are standard and able to be upgraded over time. Not all BestBuys have them however. 
Cyberpower: Not a bad choice, watch out for the same thing the Omen suffers from. 
Maingear: Maingear makes insanely good systems for a great price. Id recommend buying directly from them and having the machine shipped to your door. 

I would also recommend looking up a PC Build guide from Linus Tech Tips that has been posted within the past 6-ish months. He tends to use good high end parts that are great recommendations for a decent gaming computer. Keep note, water cooling is NOT needed to make the machine good, Linus just likes to water-cool everything. I'd highly recommend watching LinusTechTips "The INCOGNITO Gaming PC" to get a good idea on high end parts for a great gaming experience. 

Hope that helps!

Gary · Answer

The specs on Dell's website for the Precision T1700 says max 150 watts for a graphics card. The 3070 draws 240 watts. The best NVidia you could put in it is the 1660 Super, which is 125 watts.
Dell is famous (infamous?) for putting the bare minimum power supply needed to run the computer as they sell it. And they tend to design their own strangely shaped power supplies so you can't just buy a standard one to upgrade.

Linus · Answer

yes but he needs to check the wattage on his powers up ply to check if it fits the power requirements with wiggle room for power

zhao · Answer

It is recommended that the CPU is i5-10400F and above, and the power supply is above 600w. Low-end CPU will have bottlenecks, causing performance to collapse. This T1700 uses the fourth generation i7, and 1650ti or 1080 is recommended. If you want to change to rtx3070, you must change the CPU and power supply.
Reply in China at 6:35 Beijing time

ca1193 · Answer

The best bet for an older desktop is to get a graphics card that doesn’t use pcie power. Something like a 1650 or around there would be perfect

Answer

I built a computer knowing nothing with my son.. Checkout Joey Delgado on YouTube. Came out great. Otherwise a prebuilt will work.

Kaotabean · Answer

The highest Graphics card for your Dell it can use is a 1050 Ti. You would need to swap out the motherboard and get a higher watage Power supply.

Answer

i had that computer t1700 with a e3-1245 cpu in it but the best card i would get for that cpu and hopefully it has 16gb of ram and a good powersupply , so i would max the card out at like a gtx 1070 gtx 1160 rtx 2060 maybe, gtx 3060 will be a bottlenecking the cpu , but if u can go on ebay and get a r9 fury or rx 580 thats the best card i would put in the t1700 anything pass that and ur card wouldnt be working at 100 percent

hellopeopleoftheinternet · Answer

Roblox is limited to 60fps, so no

Zillion · Answer

It is not good idea for this GPU to be built in T1700 plus motherboard of your Computer might be for PCI Express 3.0. If your son just wanted to build a game computer with no consideration of having good performance (meaning he just wanted to play just for fun for a short time daily), go for cheap GPU which are under $100 such as GIGABYTE - NVIDIA GeForce GT 1030 2GB GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 Graphics Card - Black $85 or XFX - AMD Radeon RX 550 2GB GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 Graphics Card - Black/Red $90. He could play games just for Fun.

Jakub · Answer

Yes and no it matters what motherboard you have the motherboard need to have a PCI gen 4 slot bu I might as well upgrade your CPU don't know which one you have to do not bottleneck the GPU

Klute · Answer

No it can’t but can the T1700 be upgraded? Absolutely as I own two! I play Rust at 100 FPS and could not be happier! Your first addition would be a power supply upgrade to run a 3rd generation PCIe gfx card i.e. gtx 1060 or 1070. Depending on what games your son plays that card can still hang. Look for a Dell power supply around 400 watts with a 6 pin connector. These can be found used as Dell is proprietary for motherboard connections. I have one in my wife’s machine that’s 365 watts. 16 gigs of ram and 2 256 gb SSD set in RAID and my T1700’s have an i7 4790 CPU and your in decent shape. Be sure to supervise any tinkering as the pc needs to be unplugged at all times!
btw I will be using the PCIe 4.0 rtx 3070 on my Dell 3620 even with PCIe 3.0 and the 3070 bottle necking the i7 6700 cpu the gfx will only take 5 % hit in performance. Along with M.2 SSD and the 3070 card total cost will be 610.00. I already had a 750watt power supply with two 6 pin connectors that was sitting in my closet brand new since 2009! 
Always study and read the specs before leaping into such and try green pc gamers website for the T1700 gamer conversion how to and more detailed advise and hardware recommendations!

“Can this be put into the Dell precision t1700? (Sorry if it’s a stupid question, asking for my 14 year old son who is new to the build/upgrade world). He is trying to turn our old desktop into a gaming computer. Thanks for any advise you can give me!!”

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