Author: aztpg8

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Turning a dozen bad things into one great donation.

How did we get here?

The donation in this case, is a half dozen Optiplex PCs. I acquired these at a yard sale for the whopping sum of just ten bucks, and was convinced I could make something of them. Unknown at the time, there were going to be several factors that would keep most of that from happening. There is a link to the original blog, here.

I made progress in some areas, but soon found out why these machines ended up abandoned. The first issue is that they are very old by PC standards. In an age where consumer PCs work on 16 or 32 cores or threads, most of these had two. I also discovered that these were a BTX design instead of the now standard ATX. This means that the board was an inverted design, and the case was as well.

I couldn’t use the cases for anything else, and the PCs worked off of a nearly twenty year old design. Even trying to create a custom sleeper PC would be very difficult. Still, I managed to salvage a couple for upgrade and began repairing others by cannibalizing. It wasn’t what I was looking to do, but it got several working. It was then that the thought of a donation came to mind.

How did you fix them?

To answer that, I have to explain a bit about some of the actual issues. None had drives in them, but I got HDDs at the same yard sale. Several had bad power supplies and were missing memory, and still one other had a bad memory module. A bad stick of DDR2 tied me up for an extra hour or so of troubleshooting, but the donor PCs had plenty.

I also learned that older PCs are finicky about which port SATA cables are plugged in, and the Bios is not helpful at all. It seems that these older systems want you to plug things in in order. I couldn’t use SATA port 0 and 2 for instance, I had to use 0 and 1. That meant some cables weren’t long enough. Some had floppies, some didn’t. This was going to take a while.

I methodically moved through several steps including new batteries and testing SATA cables, until I got a PC working for every good HDD. That meant six working PCs, all with working drives, and all with a copy of windows 10. I wanted to use an older OS, but don’t have a copy of Win7 or XP to use, and they can always change it. The important part was to get everything working together and gut as few as possible.

It was long, and tedious, but by the end of a day and a half, I had six machines. All of them worked, all had good parts, and all were in good shape, even if they were old. The most important part in my case, was that all of them were off my shelves. I also had one PC that was a donor, but it cleared a lot of room.

You said a donation?

I did. Partially for selfish reasons, but it was also practical. They were taking up space, as were a lot of clothes. For that matter until this morning, so were a lot of boxes and packing material. The boxes, etc. could be recycled, but so couldn’t the PCs and clothes?

I determined last week, that one of the things that would happen in my mini break form work would be catching up on the stuff lying around. The pile of PCs ranked high on that list, so did the mail on my dining room table, and some other stuff, but that’s a different blog.

In the end, I had six working PCs, one that didn’t, and a box of clothes. There is also a Salvation Army donation center not far away. I loaded the car, drove down and I hope helped more than just myself. My goal is not to shift my burden, but to benefit someone besides myself. These are still useable and someone will get a decent computer to check email, or web games or file their taxes. The can’t serve that purpose for me.

I still do have a couple of the PCs. One, upgraded (in a way), one got turned into a sleeper build, video here, and at least two will be for an experiment. If the experiment succeeds, I’ll write about it. I also imagine there will be pics on the custom build page and at least one YouTube video. Speaking of that, here it the link to this story. Enjoy.

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When ‘sold broken’ turns out to be great.

How did we get here?

Part of this started when I managed to snag a Dell Optiplex for less than fifty bucks listed as not working on eBay. I could clearly see the issue from the pictures in the description, and grabbed it. As it turns out, this wasn’t hitting the lottery, this is quite common. Items, especially tech, are listed if someone lacks the skill, resources, or time to test or repair them.

In this case, the pictures showed that the PC itself worked, but it was missing a drive for the operating system. Knowing it would be a simple fix, I ordered the PC, added an SSD, and opened the door to a whole different adventure. I entered the Realm of Broken and Untested. My buying habits haven’t been the same since.

This obviously hasn’t always been successful. Graphics cards in particular, have turned out to be a loss, but each only cost about forty dollars and I’m not ready to declare defeat on both, yet. There has been much better success with cases, motherboards, and full PCs. Most items have cost forty five bucks or less.

Any hidden Gems?

Actually, there have been two of them, both DDR5 motherboards. The first was a B760 for sale as not working with what looked like very minor damage on one corner. The seller had several pictures of the motherboard and box, which was helpful. It looked like it got dropped on the corner during shipping, but wasn’t damaged badly. Some very careful work to gently push things back into place, a full load of tests with a known working CPU, and everything checked out well. A video containing my used parts adventure is here.

The second motherboard was a swing for the fences. Bent pins were clearly visible in the socket, and it was cheap. I had fixed bent pins before, but this was much more.

My own carelessness had prepared me for the attempt, but that was on an older socket with a lot fewer pins. It was also my own fault. I didn’t secure the CPU heatsink after removing the processor, and the predictable happened. An effort to save me five minutes cost me nearly three hours, but it prepared me for the next attempt.

I was ready to be adventurous and sat down with a few tools, a good flashlight and a lot of patience. After doing what I thought was a pretty good job, I took a break to regroup, then went back to finish. I should have looked at other sockets, though. (That parts coming). With the socket square, I dropped in the budget CPU and some test RAM and started it. A few minutes later it posted and I remembered to breathe.

What happened then?

At this point, I felt good about myself and didn’t bother checking the rest of the board. (I told you I would get to this part.) I slapped it all in a case, and set up to start running tests. This is where being in a hurry bit me again. I have my games on a portable drive that I tried to plug into the front panel. I say tried because it reset the PC. This is the part where I kick myself for not looking at everything.

Two pins on the USB3 connector were bent all of the way down, and needed repair. Very patiently I put them in order and tried again. It reset again. I checked the connection and the same thing happened. Ready to chalk it up to a forty dollar motherboard, I gave up. I should say I was ready to give up, because when I went to go remove the USB plug to the external drive I noticed the reset pin pushed all of the way in. Seriously?

Yes, seriously. Somewhere during my haste to test, I didn’t notice the reset button pushed in, and each time I put pressure on the front of the case, it reset. I was so careful with the CPU socket this time and confident that I knew what I was doing, that I forgot the basics. In my defense, though, I wouldn’t have expected multiple issues with both a motherboard and a case. And it gives me something to laugh about.

What about the testing?

Oh yeah, the testing went great! I found that the 7500F compares very well against the 5800X I currently use, and beats it in most tests. I’m debating between that CPU and a small upgrade to completely swap out systems, and couldn’t be happier. I’ve done all of my testing and let it sit idle overnight making sure there were no unexpected resets. She’s working great and I’m very happy. That video is here, and pics of the build are here.

Oh, and I did give it a once over to make sure everything else was good on both motherboard and case. I learned my lesson. Okay, that’s not a true statement, but I learned something. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to conquer at least one broken GPU.

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ARC B570: Better than it needs to be

How Did We Get Here

My adventures with Intel Arc video cards begins shortly after their release. I bought an Arc A750 in the spring of 2023, and immediately found issues. The price was fair at around two hundred fifty USD, but performance on many titles was insufferable. Some games couldn’t use the Direct X 11 API at all, and although Vulkan worked on many titles, games that had that as a choice, wouldn’t let you choose it. World War Z, for example, had horrible performance, drivers were broken, and the Vulkan API couldn’t be chosen. Some of my thoughts on it are here.

Performance on titles that had Vulkan as the default were okay, and many Direct X 12 titles worked, but the price was too high. The only hope was that Intel would do what they promised and fix the issues. Otherwise, this card one step above a paperweight. Then came the drivers. An update here, one a few weeks later, and a major one later. It also didn’t stop with just one or two. Updates continued to come seemingly every week. A major release at around the year mark fixed DX11 issues including some of those on WWZ , mentioned earlier. It also cleaned up most DX 11 issues. This card was now decent. A follow up video is here.

The one thing the Alchemist cards going for them was the adoption of the AV1 video encoder. The second thing was platforms like YouTube allowed AV1 and the encoder on the Arc A750 was outstanding. In fact, the Intel AV1 encoder for all of it’s cards performed well, even the lower tier A380. AMD and NVidia were both behind, here. With a smaller file size, little quality loss in compression and fast rendering, small creators had a gem.

But What About the Arc B570?

Shortly after the two year mark for Alchemist came Battlemage. The B580 released for desktops and the first thought was driver performance. The first thought should have been if these would be available. No one seemed to have these cards except reviewers, who were actually positive. It was a stark contrast from the previous release, and a great sign for consumers. Two months later, and the B580 is still not available. Okay, technically it is, if you want to pay a one hundred percent mark up.

One thing that did become available, at least occasionally, was the B570. The A770’s little brother was the A750 and likewise for the B570. Similar to the A750, the performance might not be up to the more expensive card, but it was still good. In this case, good enough to beat the RTX 3060 in many benchmark tests. It was also slightly better in the video encoding mentioned earlier.

It performs well in both 1080p and 1440p, and the model I picked up runs extremely quiet. Temperatures were also outstanding with the two fan model Sparkle brand card never going above the mid-60’s Celsius. The RTX 3060 I tested it against has 12GB of video memory, where the B570 has ten, but the only game that the NVidia card beat it soundly in didn’t use more than half the available memory. I used the RTX 3060 because it’s the most popular card on Steam, so it’s a realistic comparison.

So, what now?

The Sparkle card is actually a very attractive card as well. It has a few curves and a nice blue color, with small amounts of accent lighting and a nice fan design. I loved the original reference design from intel, and was hesitant to buy this one, but the reference looks to only be available on the higher model which is harder to find than NVidia’s new 50 series. The A380 I have is a Sparkle Brand card, but the design of the B570 actually impressed me.

This card will soon go into an upgraded editing rig. The color scheme for that machine is blue and white, so the new motherboard and this card will match well. The AV1 encoder is a definite feature, and now I know the gaming performance is as well. I’m sure I’ll write more about this card, and probably compare it to any new card I get from the other two companies, so stay tuned, but in the meantime the video with benchmarks can be found here.

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Yet another simple, missed opportunity for a good PC

How did we get here?

That part is relatively easy to explain. I have an HP prebuilt PC that I bought a few years ago to review on the YouTube channel. You can find the first video here. I found several ‘flaws’ with it that with a little help could have gone from a PC for basic web browsing and email, to a productive machine. Proprietary parts also made it difficult to upgrade with new ones.

Solutions did come with other companies making products that would also work in that PC, but HP’s choice to try to lock you into their eco structure limited those, and still does. Still, aftermarket power supplies and new types of video cards, added to the range of available upgrades. These could take this basic machine into something that would last longer than HP intended or may have wanted. I get it, make a computer that’s obsolete in a few years and someone has to buy a new one. Make parts hard to find, or have you as the only source and you make even more money. Eventually, though, consumers stop trusting you.

I struggled with a few of these, but managed to find a power supply for a similar machine, I upgraded the memory, and I added a small cooling fan so this prebuilt became a better version of itself. It could still fulfill it’s intended purpose, but now it was able to game and stream because video cards with reasonable power requirements could be added. The computer had a Ryzen processor with AMD graphics, so adding an RX 6400 became possible. That card is not particularly good, but it works. It is also much better than the onboard graphic.

Other Goodies in the HP PC

As it turned out, Nvidia video cards were also supported. By supported, I mean the BIOS for the motherboard recognized the card, and I could put things like a GTX 1660, or even an RTX 3050 6GB model, which could both drastically improve this simple PC into a small beast. I’ll have some feedback and right about the RTX before long, so please check back. For now I’ll simply point back to the blog page, here, but hopefully I remember to come back and update to the RTX 3050 blog when I write it.

By adding a small Noctua fan, the PC managed to stay cooler and the existing processor was more than capable. This prebuilt had all of the tools it needed to be a solid build. It had solid CPU performance, decent graphics performance and plenty of memory. But what if we could do more? The Intel Arc cards have an AVI video encoder. A very good video encoder. Surely we could make a solid editing machine.

The Rub

As it turns out, this PC doesn’t recognize the ARC GPU using the very same slot AMD and NVidia graphics cards use. In fact, the machine doesn’t even post or properly start up. Why is this an issue? Because other HPs from the same era, recognize Intel graphics. They may not have recognized Intel Discrete graphics on a stand alone card, but the CPU has it built in.

Why do I say it’s a simple problem to solve, maybe the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) isn’t set up to be able to do that. The only issue with that statement is that they have current BIOS available for other PCs that already have that option. The BIOS on many of their prebuilts is extremely limited, but they already have the very same feature available in other PCs, and the motherboard used in this prebuilt is very common. The worst part, there have been BIOS updates AFTER Intel video cards have been released. It shouldn’t be very hard. What good were the last several updates? It’s a straight miss for HP.

So, What do we do with the Prebuilt PC?

That part is easy. It’s a solid machine and eventually, it will again become someone’s every day driver. But, it does make for a great test PC and a fine experiment. My early experiences with this model were frustrating, but this thing now is almost like the family pet. Well, if I had a family living with me, or a pet. Still, this PC is solid and much more than I thought I was getting when I first reviewed it. I don’t think HP can take the credit for that , though. And I’m certainly not giving it any.

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Using the Old Standard or a Shiny New Rival

How did we get here?

I guess the first thing I should do is explain a bit further. Specifically, we are talking about the RTX 3050 6GB version mentioned in a blog here, and the GTX 1660. Typically, a good test would be the current card versus the next model up from the previous generation. That would mean testing the RTX 3050 against the RTX2060, but there is an issue with that.

The first issue is that the new card is the cut down version of the standard RTX 3050 with roughly 75 percent of the memory graphics processing and speed. It probably deserves an entirely different name, but NVidia enjoys confusing the consumer. It’s not the first time they’ve create a different product with the same name. Nomenclature doesn’t count as one the issues, though. For this example, we will only be talking about the current 6GB version.

The second issue is that we aren’t actually comparing cards with like characteristics. The GTX 1660 lacks the ability to Ray Trace and to use NVidia’s upscaling DLSS process. We won’t be looking at Ray Tracing and AMD has provided an answer to performance comparison, by offering Fidelity FX. Still, both of these cards do have 6GB of video memory.

There is one, very important difference that may give the newer card an edge.

More Power

The GTX 1660 requires external power. Modern motherboards are designed to offer 75 watts of power though the PCI Express slot. Most modern video cards use that and need additional resources provided by an additional dedicated cable. That also means that typically, the power supply needs to be a bit stouter. The last fact tends to limit some older PCs from being good candidates for without extra work.

Finding older Optiplexes or ThinkStations is pretty easy these days with older office PCs selling for pennies on the original dollar. Working PCs can often be found for less than fifty US dollars. They are often good candidates for some easy upgrades, but a few are more difficult. Things like power supplies and front panel connectors are often proprietary, making upgrading the graphics card or changing the case more difficult.

This is also the case for the GTX 1660. It’s not that it uses a lot of power, actually about 20% less than similar cards from AMD, the RX 480 and 580, but it does need external power. One option is using adapter cables, but that can introduce heat and other issues, not to mention a fire hazard. Still, its an option and can be a good one, if done properly. The 1660, and its ‘Super’ and ‘Ti’ versions are great options, even five plus years after their release.

The RTX 3050 has no such limitation because of its seventy-watt power draw. This, and the size could make it ideal to give some of these older office machines a new life as a gaming PC. It still won’t fit in the single low-profile slot that the RX6400 will, but that’s a different comparison.

So, which is better?

As it turns out, both of these cards are very well matched. The GTX 1660 performs slightly better on older titles and E-sports, and the 3050 doing slightly better on newer titles. The full video of this comparison with benchmarks can be found here, but there is one very important thing to discuss; the price.

Used GTX 1660’s and the sibling models range from 90 to 110 US dollars, while the RTX 3050 6GB cost another 40-60 bucks. You can save that on the rest of the hardware that won’t need a bigger PSU or adapters, but what that means to you may come down to what is available when you try to buy parts. The GTX 1660 is more than a worthy opponent, but the RTX 3050 definitely deserves part of the conversation.

The one thing left to talk about is why this card takes on a name that already exists. There seems to be no other reason NVidia does this except to confuse the consumer, and they do it often. They tend not to differentiate between laptop and desktop models and even cards with different memory or die configurations sharing names. Some more recent, blatant examples are the GT 1030 with both DDR4 and DDR5 being available with almost no markings, the GTX 1060 3GB and 6GB models and RTX 3060 available in 8 and 12GB.

It’s certainly confusing, and I, like others, have no idea, why they would do it. I will tell you what isn’t confusing, though, the 3050 6Gb is a decent card that has a valid use case. I may take a lot of flak for writing that, but except for the price, it’s as good or better than many of the other options available, especially options from Intel and AMD.