Hey guys, I wanted to update you on the video card. I have since upgraded the 9020sff to an i7 4790 and that works well.
I bought my brother a 750ti that he installed in 9010sff (i5, pcie x16 slot) and noticed that his framrates in rocket leauge are better than mine (i7 gtx1050 in pcie x4 slot). Even though the internet says that the gtx1050 is not fast enough for it to matter I was a annoyed by this. I ran some heaven bench tests and tried to come with a solution.
My first idea was to get a pcie 16x riser and mount the video card outside of the case. After reading how many failures there are with those cables without buying the nice 3m branded one for $90 I decided I needed another solution.
It turns out the 9020sff only has 2 groups of cables that power the motherboard, even the drives are powered off of the motherboard.
My next idea was to run an external power supply which would leave me enough room to put this video card in the pcie x16 slot.
I found some extension cables for the power supply
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I had to do some case cutting, but nothing too bad. Below is the album for the project.
The results are questionable, it appears in the heaven benchmark software I picked up very little (one test at ultra with techceleration, one at high without techceleration). However in playing rocket league gave me different results. Either that very little bit was just enough to show me an improvement or from the fps counter to me it looks like I picked up about 20fps.
Based on my benchmarks I would say this was not worth it, Based on rocketleauge I would say this was worth it.
I still have more games to play to get a solid feel for how this all went.
Either way I still wouldn't hesitate to buy an msi gtx1050 for for an optiplex 9020sff. Its enough of an improvement either way to warrant the $120 I paid for the card.
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