Repurposing an old Dell Optiplex GX110 tower

Hey folks. This isn't really a support or technical question but rather a couple of projects I thought I'd share with you folk. I took a GX110 tower and stripped it down. Cleaned it inside and out and retrobrighted the case. The original parts I sent to a friend who wanted them for retro gaming. The case is proprietary and was never designed to house mATX or ATX motherboards, so I used a combination of a cutter wheel and a dremel to cut away the rear end and do some internal work. https://i.imgur.com/Gf2hUnV.jpg

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There were little metal tabs which the original board slid into... hammered or cut those away, along with this long metal strip.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This was a cheap ATX case I bought on eBay for $25 shipped. I cut it in half to reuse the motherboard tray and rear end of the case. A bonus, it even came with a 256GB SSD in it! Lucky.

Not the best cut but it will do. I grinded down the edges to make them less sharp. Ended up drilling holes in the original case and fixing the donor case in with screws.

Here it is all completed! Specs are as follows:

Dell Optiplex GX110 case modified to ATX layout
Corsair CX750M 750W PSU (cheapest semi-moudlar name brand PSU microcenter had at the time)
ASRock B450M Pro4 mATX motherboard
AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8 Core processor
be quiet! Pure Rock Slim cooler
Arctic F9 92mm PWM rear fan
MSI ARMOR RADEON RX580 8GB PCIe video card
Samsung 970 EVO 512GB NVMe SSD
2TB Seagate ST2000DM001 7200RPM HD
Teac DV-W524GSB DVD burner
2xUSB 3.0 ports front
2xUSB 2.0 ports rear
4xUSB 3.0 ports rear
USB 3.1 port rear
USB Type C port rear
Ethernet
Audio in/out jacks
PS/2 port
DisplayPort
HDMI
DVI
Steelseries Rival 110 mouse
Rosewill RK9000V2 Cherry MX Brown mechanical keyboard
25" Dell UltraSharp U2515H 2560x1440 monitor
Altec Lansing ACS495 2.1 speakers

The side panel comes off with a push of a button on the bottom of the front bezel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rather janky but functional rear end.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reused the original drive cages and everything ended up fitting just fine. You can see how the donor case is attached.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Everything works fine. Figuring out the front panel was a bit of a pain but I used Arduino male to female pins and extended them from the original front panel connector. You can find these on eBay for around $2-3 shipped. It took a lot of guesswork to get the HD LED, power LED, and power button to work.

Windows 10 desktop

Machine runs quite cool and quiet.

Here it is as it sits. The build quality of the older Dell cases are amazing. This thing is quite heavy. The donor case was pretty cheap and flimsy (and was very easy to cut through, unlike the GX110). Thanks for looking.

Also as a bonus, here's a similar build I did with an older Dell Dimension XPS T500. https://imgur.com/a/RmYuoII