Help me upgrade this old rig

I meant the brand specificness. I knew you preferred nVidia when i suggested the cards, because i didn't see you say anything about actually needing or even using any of the nVidia features.

Hopefully updating the rig gets everything running smoothly

Whats the i3 of the Dell? It will probably not fit on a Z77 board. Your DDR2 will definately not fit too.

It's an i3 Dell Optiplex, it has an i3 3220 in it which is an LGA 1155 part.

The DDR2 RAM has to be scrapped though. Your 4GB of DDR3 will do fine for gaming until you can afford to upgrade to 8 for multitasking.

Thanks for the information guys!

I ended up getting the PNY GTX660 and an ASUS mobo from fry's for 3 bills. After some hours of work, some jiggling and pressuring of components and a night of sleep, I got the mill to fire up! Cpu fan error! Turns out that Dell heat sink is incompatible with the board so I had to go back to fry's and buy an aftermarket unit. Installed and working great!

Now in the BIOS. It's recognizing the dvd drive in whatever SATA port I put it in but wont pick up either of the 2 hard drives I have hooked up. Can't boot up an OS at all! The drive from the Dell has Win 7 on it and that's the one I intend to use for OS. The other is my old drive, has a lot of stuff I wanna keep, it has Win XP on it. I'm going to attempt to update the BIOS via flash drive today. Hopefully then it'll pick up those drives and I can load up Windows!

Will update. Thanks again guys!

You often can't just swap drives like that when using wildly different hardware (specifically the motherboard). You're probably going to have to backup your files and reinstall.

ASUS was a good choice by the way. I have a Z77 Sabertooth and its circuit protection recently saved all of my parts from a water damaged PSU.

I bet you're right on the money. Bad thing is, now I don't have a functioning PC to boot and back up the drives on. Sadly I'm probably gonna turn it over to a shop to get it the rest of the way there at this point. I'm never trying to build a frankenputer again. It's been a huge hassle!

Got a laptop hard drive, or a PS3 hard drive laying around unused?
Wipe it, install windows, backup as much as you can from one of your main drives onto it, wipe main drive, install windows on main drive and re-backup from temporary to main drive. Or you could just leave the laptop/ps3 drive in as some extra storage space for movies/music.

Or maybe... just maybe, if I plug the POWER cord into the drives the BIOS will see them! ;)

I'm up and running folks, about to get back on some PoE to try out the new 660, then downloading Titanfall over night to really see what this thing can do!

Thanks again folks! It was intense but I've learned so, so much.

Preemptive warning: Titanfall has uncompressed audio. Because of this, the game takes up 50gb of space.