So, to begin with, some of you may be wondering:

Q: What the heck is an Optiplex?

A: I was wondering the same damn thing, until my uncle lugged one from the back seat of his car and dumped it unceremoniously on my kitchen table. "Optiplex", you see, is a name that Dell has concocted to christen an entire line of their computers, although I had previously only been aware of their "Dimension" and "Inspiron" monikers.

The Optiplex line seems to be targeted directly at businesses that require cheap workstations for their cubicle-drones to wither away at in weekly, forty-hour increments. I've never seen the marketing materials Dell used to push the Optiplex line, but I'm thinking it's a pretty safe bet that words or phrases such as "fun" or "the way it's meant to be played" were not included.

Pic 1: The machine as originally delivered to me.

Q: Okay, so what does any of this have to do with gaming, then? You're going somewhere with this, right?

A: Indeed! You see, my uncle is rather poor, and while he would love to be able to afford an Xbox 360 or a PS3 for his two sons, ages thirteen and eleven, such luxuries are a bit beyond his financial means at the moment.

The company my uncle works for, however, recently upgraded the majority of their office computers and pawned off the old systems on any employees who could be bothered to cart them off of the premises, which is how my uncle came to be in possession of a Dell Optiplex GX270 configured as such:

- Pentium 4 @ 2.8GHz
- 2 x 256MB DDR 333 RAM (512MB total)
- DVD-ROM / Floppy / 80GB HD
- Gigabit Ethernet
- On-board audio and graphics
- 4 PCI slots
- 8X/4X AGP slot

The company also tossed in a few bones in the form of a mouse, keyboard, and a 19" Dell CRT monitor with a Trinitron flat-face tube. My uncle was excited at the idea that, by his estimate, he was now the proprietor of a PS3-proxy that would placate his pestering progeny's pleas to "play Playstation." I just couldn't bear to tell him at that moment that the pinnacle of gaming his children were hoping to reach would plateau somewhere just past Minesweeper and Solitaire, unless his household is a bridge to some alternate plane of existence where children enjoy playing Excel Spreadsheet Madness!

Ergo, my Uncle Johnny brought this system to me—I'm the "computer guy" in my family—with the hope that I could pull a magic wand out of my nether-regions and transform a workstation that had been feared and loathed by the people who had been chained to it for eight hours a day into a wonderland of entertainment to be enjoyed by children.

I was able to impress upon my uncle that, with its given specifications, the machine was not going to perform as he was hoping; an upgrade analogous to multiple-organ-transplant surgery was going to be required, and it was probably going to cost at least as much as an Xbox.

"Well, here's two-hundred-dollars. See what you can do." And with that request, my uncle departed, leaving me to stare down at the mini-monolith of monotony on my kitchen table. Certainly, there was no way to make this work—(cue dramatic music)—or was there?

After visiting Dell's support site and determining what might be possible with the GX270, I went to my favorite online geek-retailer and began filling up my virtual shopping cart while opening other browser tabs to search for reviews and performance results for the products I was considering (particularly the video cards). After two hours of bumping my head against the two-hundred-dollar budget-ceiling, I finally reduced my cart contents to the following:

- Sapphire Radeon HD 2600 XT 128-Bit 512MB GDDR3 AGP 4X/8X @ $98.99
- Creative SoundBlaster Audigy SE @ $26.99
- 4 x pqi POWER Series 512MB DDR 400 @ $15.99 ea. (2 GB total) = $63.96
- Eagle Tech Cool Power 550W PSU $24.99
- S&H $13.88
Grand Total: $228.81

Pic 2: The pretty Sapphire Radeon Box.

In addition, I donated from my stash of spare parts: a 40GB HD (for the OS), a pair of speakers, and DVD/CD burner.

And yes, I went over budget, but this is family we're talking about, and it only seemed right that I should cover the additional expenditures so that my impressionable young cousins would have the opportunity to exercise their freedom of choice by playing excessively-violent video games before guys like Jack Thompson take that choice away. (Random Bumper Sticker/T-Shirt Idea: You Can Have My Logitec G5 Laser Mouse When You Pry It From My Cold, Dead Hand.)

Three days later, a big brown truck pulled up to my house and deposited a little brown box on my doorstep. After inspecting the contents, I was glad that I elected to take shop instead of photography when I was in the eighth-grade, because:

1) I didn't pay close attention to the SFF (small form-factor) designation for the sound card while I was shopping. Since the version of the GX270 I was working on was a mini-tower, the card wouldn't drop into the slot until I removed the tabplate and used a metal grinder to whittle away the tab that would have secured the card in place...

Pic 3: The shortened audio card leaves a nice gap.

...and 2) I didn't pay close attention to the fact that the power supplies on most Dell machines don't have an on/off switch and, therefore, the backplates don't have an opening for an on/off switch. Since the power supply I purchased does have an on/off switch, I had to use a drill and a metal file to make a hole in the backplate so that the PSU could be safely secured.

Pic 4: My not-so-handiwork with a drill.

Pic 5: All guts, no glory.

I then proceeded to take a long, hot shower because I felt so dirty after violating so many warranties.

The first moment of truth—will it play games?—was inevitably delayed by a couple of hours spent installing the OS, drivers, updates, etc., which gave my nerves the opportunity to settle down enough so that, by the time I inserted my copy of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion into the drive for installation, my hand was only slightly shaking.

I configured the game to run at 1024 x 768 with detail settings at a mix of Medium/High, no AA or AF. The end result, according to Oblivion's in-game debugger, was an average of 30 FPS—absolutely playable! Half-Life 2? 75 FPS! I had to fight to suppress my Dr. Frankenstein-like urge to run outside naked and scream, "It's alive! IT'S ALIVE!!"

Pic 6: A screen shot from Oblivion generated with this rig.

But the second—and real—moment of truth came when I delivered the system to my uncle and cousins the next day, along with a small collection of older games that I donated myself and/or talked some of my friends into donating, including Oblivion, Half-Life 2, Doom 3, Command & Conquer 3, and Civilization IV. The expressions on my cousins' faces as I demonstrated their new toy by playing from a particularly dramatic save point in Oblivion made the entire effort worthwhile, but it was their questions that really made me happy: questions about what I had done to get their machine up and running, and questions about whether I'd be willing to let them "help out" the next time I was going to tinker around with the insides of a computer. If that's not a sign that the seeds of hardcore PC-gaming have been planted, I don't know what is.

If my uncle had had the money to begin with, believe me, I would have been steering him towards the purchase of an Xbox—but now I'm glad things didn't work out that way. I don't take sides in the PC vs. Consoles debate because I believe it's a matter of personal choice, and many people happily play both sides; I would probably invest in a console if I had the time and extra cash.

Pic 7: The finished product (with new DVD drive).

Nonetheless, when I think back to the Days Of DOS—those days where I paid my dues by fooling around with HIMEM.SYS and .BAT files just so I could get a game to run—and when I get a game up and running on a system I built myself instead of something that I simply unpacked from a box and plugged in, I experience a deep sense of satisfaction, a feeling that I've earned the right to play the game, and I'd like to think that maybe my cousins will someday share in those types of experiences.

It's not about PCs vs. Xbox vs. PS3, and it's not about your system specs—God only knows what an authorized Dell service center or an nVidia SLI power-user would say if they cracked open the case to inspect my handiwork—it's about playing the game and having fun.

Game on!

This baby's ready to roll.