Dell OptiPlex 3010 CPU upgrade.

concur with JOcean.  the optiplex does not support overclocking.  i7-3770k is no better than i7-3770 in the optiplex 3010.  If I were you I would actually avoid preowned 3770k because of two reasons:

you often do not know whether the chip is always liquid cooled or taken care of.  if the chip was abused and cooked all the time, its remaining questionable life span does not justify its cost above the same performance 3770 in optiplex.

the intel 3rd gen ivy bridge cpu is notorious of overheating easily compared to intel 2nd gen sandy bridge.  Intel used suboptimal cooling technique for the core.  you can read about that on Wiki.  what that suggests is even when care is taken the 3770(k) is easy to overheat.

According to Dell specs no BUT this site and this forum thread state that it can and has been done.

Would it be worth upgrading from the 3450 to a 3770?

there is a small performance benefit from i5 to i7.  some people say i5 is a sweet spot not as expensive as i7 but does almost as good a job in gaming.   on the other hand when you resale a used pc i7 sounds more attractive on paper.  whether the upgrade cost justifies depends on your local market pricing and how comfortable you are spending on this upgrade.  at this age (2021-2022) spending on upgrading a 3rd gen cpu may not be worth it unless you are keenly interested in relatively old tech.  If I were you I would spend on ssd if not already having one, or save for a newer model pc, or a better gpu.

Hey Mattrix! I would highly suggest the Intel Core i5-34705 . Since that CPU should fit perfectly fine (also to be into the safer side) but the Intel Core i7   Should fit into the pc perfectly but since the pc is pretty old since it was made from 2012. Also the pins of the back of the cpu could be different from the pins to put into the pc. So yeah I hope this article helps! (Sorry for the late response)

• I, personally, wouldn’t do it. The i5 does a fine job. Plus, you risk bending the pins on your motherboard, which could render it virtually useless.

i7 3770 works fine, currently using for more than 4 months 

Good question, in my opinion its will work fine and give u more performance if ur doing daily gaming, as we know the Optiplex model is really durable and can upgrade a lot of components inside it, upgrading the cpu to i7 3770K is a good idea if u planning to use it longer until maybe 2028 2029 since the i5 3470 from 2012, i also upgrade mine to i7 3770K but the motherboard it self does not support overclocking, but it really isn’t a problem, overclocking it without a good cpu fan would cause damage and risky system, mine use for gaming as well, ask for the fan i still use the stock fan, doing great at 40 to 50 celsius degree. In short u should upgrade it for long time using.