repair Acer Aspire TC-780 - Upgrade Video - RAM - SSD - GPU - Fan

How to fan control ?

Since this video is very old i was wondering if you would recamend anything diffrent cause i just want to get decent frames on fortnite and want to know if i could do better in todays market🙏😅

Can you add nvme in it?

Just wanted to drop an update for 2023. I bought one of these towers back in 2018 on Prime day for $379 (Acer Aspire TC-780-ACKI5). It sat basically dormant for around 5 years because I didn't end up using it for what I though I'd need it for. Now that we've moved and I have a dedicated office to use it in, I've got it running and I've been following this tutorial (which is AWESOME, by the way - thank you) so I though I'd share my experiences going through these upgrades in today's market, 5 years after my initial purchase. My machine is spec'd a little differently than the one shown, so here's what I've found so far:

1. My rig didn't have the Molex connectors inside, I had to utilize the SATA cables. No big deal, just something to check before you order any parts.
2. My DVD drive didn't have that all-in-one mini connector, it had separate power and data cables. I popped the data cable off and put it directly onto my new SSD and it worked fine.
3. I used a 500GB Samsung Evo 870 SSD (less than $40 at Best Buy right now!!), worked perfectly. Download the new Samsung Magician software (which includes the Data Migration tool) and it will easily clone windows onto the SSD. Massive improvement in boot time and overall program responsiveness, while I still have 2TB of storage at my disposal on the existing HDD. One big difference to note is that the Samsung software did everything for me, with the exception of one thing which I'll explain in a second. It automatically shut the machine down after the data migration to the SSD, at which point I swapped the cables as shown in the cloning video. Upon restart, I was...underwhelmed with the speed. In fact, it seemed like it was no faster than booting from the HDD! Come to find out, that's exactly what was going on - it was still booting from the HDD despite swapping the cables. I had to go into the BIOS menu at startup and select which drive to boot from, which actually worked...so apparently the BIOS version on my machine is a little different and allows you to do this, despite the conflicts mentioned in the other videos in this series. After another restart to ensure it was booting from the SSD, I expected to have to go in and mess with the drives/partitions as shown in the cloning tutorial video...but it was already set up and ready to go when I restarted the second time. No signature conflicts or anything like that, it all worked fine and I didn't need to do anything else. With the exception of that one BIOS issue that threw me off, the process actually went about as easily as you can imagine. The updated Samsung Magician software is basically plug and play/point and click when it comes to setting everything up properly. Very slick, and I can't speak highly enough of Samsung for this reason (I've been a Galaxy/Android user for a long time and also have one of their standalone SSD's that I use with my phone for video storage, so I've come to expect this kind of smooth user experience from them).
4. I ordered a refurb version of the EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB video card for only $140 on NewEgg, which is the current price as of September 2023. In addition to the space limitations inside, for a prebuilt tower this old I felt no need/desire to spend more than the entire value of the machine on a new video card. The only downside is that they ship directly from the refurb place in Hong Kong, which can take several weeks; I don't have it in hand yet but should be here some time next week. Hopefully it works ok and does the job.
5. I ended up ordering a different version of the case fan for cheap on Amazon (Pure Wings 7-blade fan, p/n BL038), but any 92mm fan will work. This one is extremely quiet and moves plenty of air for a case this small, especially considering both the video card and processor have their own cooling fans built in. Since this is purely a heat extractor fan, it's more than powerful enough. One thing to do is check your motherboard before you order, mine has a 4-pin fan plug rather than a 3-pin. I ended up ordering the three pin version by accident; it still fits and works just fine, there's just one extra pin off to the side that isn't being used. Not a problem, just something to keep an eye out for.
6. I ended up putting 32GB of ram in it; I got a pair of 16GB Vengeance LPX chips from Corsair for a decent deal, $89 for the set. I probably could have gotten them cheaper on Amazon, but the sudden influx of fake components on Amazon over the last few years gave me some pause and I didn't see an official Corsair store on there. Ordering direct from Corsair took a couple extra days, but shipping was less than $5 with no tax so it was less than $100 delivered. Not a bad deal at the time, but they've been marked down significantly - only $69.99 right now, both on Amazon and Corsair's website, and they appear to have an official Amazon store now.

That's all I've found that differs substantially from the video, but so far the improvements have been huge. The upgrades by themselves can be done for around $300 for everything right now, including 32GB of RAM, the graphics card, the SSD, the case fan, the cables, a computer hardware set with the M3 screws needed to mount the SSD, etc. Not expensive at all when you think about it, and the extra speed from the SSD alone is worth the upgrade, even if you don't want to drop the coin on the graphics card.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end - hopefully this helps out anyone looking to do the same thing even though these machines are quite outdated now. That said, they are still plenty usable with a few tweaks!

I seem to recall there was an online tutorial webpage related to this tutorial with additional options for the various new components. Does anybody know where to find that web page or have recommendations for related ones?

Edit: I will say, I avoided losing the DVD drive in mine because I used a 4tb SSD mounted in an aluminum 2.5" to 3.5" drive adapter shell and placed it where the old POS Toshiba 2tb HDD drive went (the installed HDD that came in these stock are refurbished recalled Toshiba HDD's manufactured in the early 2000s that have read/write issues as, apparently, mine has been broken since day one and the 32mb/s read/write speed always ran at 3mb/s or less for as long as I have owned this thing so I'm glad newer models opted for 256gb SSDs starting 3 or 4 years ago). System runs way better, and the previously 5 minute boot time is now sub 10 seconds with the new SSD. Next on my list is upgraded RAM and adding a graphics card, shame those cards have went way up since COVID.

good yes

And for some reason my country doesn't have amazon or ebay 😕

I have the same computer but with an i3 no wifi and 4 gigs of ram

A fan sounds fantastic! Although on one hand it sucks ... and on the other hand kind of exhausting. But I guess that's just how fans work.

Greetings . .
I have this PC and a question. The link you have for the 1060 video card @newegg is DDR5 ram, but my system has DDR4 - Is there a DDR4 video card upgrade?
Thanks . .

could i use a zotac LP 1650 instead?

Great guide. I love my Acer.

Does gigabyte geforce rtx 3050 eagle 8 gb fit with this pc? Or is this video card also to large

I'm not too computer savy and I recently moved and after being packed up for about 30 days I can't get my monitor to connect and the screen stays black when I turn on my lynx.

i have acer t3-780, include slot ssd m2. nvme on motherboard. but when insert the ssd..i get warning ssd locked. how to unlock this ? can you help me ?

You are a good teacher

I find that these Acer prebuilts often won't allow you to use a discrete graphics card these days. (Other than the one they put in IF it comes with one.)

Can the Ascer Aspire XC-840 handle two 16gb ram cards?

Hi, Great vid, which is the most suitable GPU for this system in 2022 please

Hi, solved the problem wit Video card. Now I bouht a new cpu with heatsink, of couse same socket and supported, but the holes to fix t heatsink doesn't fix. Where can i find a manual/help/video to understand where I did a mistake ? Thanks