Author: aztpg8

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Is the RTX3050 a great option for Budget Gaming?

How did we get here?

The simple answer is yes, but this question doesn’t have a simple answer. The target I usually set for a low budget gamer is between two hundred fifty and three hundred dollars. This video card will eat over half of that budget immediately. At between one hundred sixty and one seventy nine, this card is not a budget buy. What it does offer, however is great performance for its architecture. In particular, I’m talking about the 6GB version.

You see, NVidia in their infinite wisdom, has introduced another combination of different cards wit the same name. They have done this for years, like the GT1030 which came in DDR5, then DDR4. The GTX 1060 had a 6GB version and a 3GB. The RTX 3060 which had the standard 12GB, a Low Hash Version to prohibit crypto mining, and an 8GB version. They have even done it more recently by changing from DDR6x to DDR6 in some cards.

The RTX 3050 comes in two versions, or flavors if you prefer. The standard RTX3050 comes with 8GB of video memory, 256 more Cuda cores for processing, and a 1.78 GHz clock speed. The 6GB version runs with two less GB of video memory, the before mentioned shortage in processing power, and runs at 1.47 GHz. So, why would anyone buy the step-sibling?

Why I did it

The RTX3050 6GB version offers an advantage that the base version doesn’t. It has no need for external power. It is the closest thing NVidia has to a budget video card right now, placing it with the Arc A380 and the RX6400, though both are much cheaper. The offers from Intel and AMD respectively, also run on much less power and don’t need an external source, meaning a smaller power supply. Any of these cards can get by with a 300W power supply, maybe a little smaller, which means that Optiplex you picked up for 40 bucks, doesn’t need an upgrade and adapters.

In my case, I have a number of those old Dell PCs, some having 300W PSU’s or less. Until now, I have had to try the A380 or RX6400. Each of those has their own issue. The Arc A380 needs resizable bar, a configuration allowing data to flow more efficiently. Older gen hardware doesn’t support it, so performance suffers, horribly. The RX6400 runs on a four lane by PCIe 4.0 standard. Video cards of that era, all ran on 16 lanes. For comparison, NVMe SSDs run on four lanes. It is a sever limitation.

Some testing

The RTX 3050 6GB version runs on eight lanes, twice the bandwidth of the RX6400. It shows in testing, too. The RTX3050 consistently out performed the two other cards, sometimes by as much as double. In all cases, it was at least twenty percent better. But that was with a 12700KF, a recent CPU with PCIe 4.0 and resized bar, what about older stuff? I ran that too.

Running with a 4 core, 8 thread XEON E3-1270v3 from the $300 build , the results were all over the place with the RTX 3050 still outperforming overall, but with inconsistent numbers. I lead, sometimes by a few frames and other times by over twice as much. In all cases, it’s performance was predictable and replicable.

So, what’s next for the RTX3050?

This card will make the rounds on my testing bench for several weeks, then become part of a build. I’m not sure if that will be a budget build or something I would have put the GTX 1660 in, but I’m sure something like a micro ITX build will be very much to it’s liking and the small power requirement will also help keep the build cool. It’s not the cheapest card I’ve purchased, and it certainly isn’t the most expensive, so I’m not upset by the price, but this card really does need to retail for about twenty five dollars less than it does.

The reason it may not, is that it has a use case, like the RX6400. The AMD card is a single slot low profile that fits where other cards won’t, and although the performance suffers in older boxes, it’s still better than some alternatives. The 3050 has it’s place as well, with older machines that have the room, and it does perform well for it’s specs.

So, is it a budget card? No. Is it a card for a budget build? I’m saying yes and standing by my answer. It’s definitely a solid option for a budget minded build .

If you would like to read my other blogs, you can find them here. The video for the RTX 3050 can be found here.

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A great gaming PC on a hundred dollar budget

How did we get here?

My effort to find older budget PC’s and upgrade them has almost become a quest. I find an old prebuilt, or a motherboard/CPU combo then match the rest of the components, to get the best result per dollar. Often, this is a process that is tedious and frustrating. Occasionally, this turns out better than it has any right to.

One such example of success was the three hundred dollar Xeon build, here. There are too many failures to actually list, most recently, many of the yard sale PCs that are here. Of course there are others that fall somewhere between, but sometimes the effort matches the result. You start with a solid foundation, and there is room for improvement, at a reasonable price, Price in this case, being not just the cost, but the work.

One such example is the HP Z440 Workstation. These can be found all over for a range of prices, but the trick is to find one at a low cost, that comes with components like memory or maybe even a hard drive. These machines are capable of using an NVMe drive on an adapter card, and come with a quite capable processor. The one I purchased was on eBay with modest tax and shipping, for one hundred two dollars.

The Workstation

This came included with an E5 1650 v3, six core, twelve thread processor, 16GB of DDR4 error correcting memory, a seven hundred watt power supply, and a Quadro K4200 video card. It was clean and exactly as described in the listing. This was almost ready out of the box. And, let’s spend a moment on the box.

Sometimes, despite the best effort of the seller, they are at the mercy of the delivery company. In my case, FedEx physically moved a previously delivered package, and put both directly in the rain. I know they moved the other package, because it was Amazon, who sent a picture of that package on the other side of the doorstep, dry. Still, the PC was packaged well, and was dry on the inside.

Tests with the SSD in the Amazon package revealed a post and very strong testing in pr5oductivity applications. Less impressive were gaming tests, but The Quadro, with 4GB of VRAM, is not a gaming card. I do have gaming cards, though. Among them is a GTX 1660, the workhorse. Low power draw and good performance promise to make this Z440 a solid gaming option for under two hundred dollars. The previously tested Xeon E3 1270, with all new components, ran about three hundred.

Put an NVMe drive and a better GPU like an RTX 3060ti, or RX 6600XT, and the gains improve even more. Increase the memory, and we get a serious gaming PC that still doesn’t cost everything on the farm. Each of these will get their own video and blog, but suffice to say, this PC may return every ounce of effort I put in it.

The video for this blog is found here. Take a look at it here.

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In a hurry to waste time.

How did we get here?

It started simple enough, find an older PC online and upgrade it into a budget gaming PC. This can be done a variety of ways, but one of the most effective is buying an older PC and adding a video card. This can also be one of the most difficult. Don’t get in a hurry, I’ll explain.

Older office PCs usually have a processor, memory, power supply, and a case. They will occasionally have storage media and maybe even a video card. Even without a discrete or separate video card, the processor will usually have integrated graphics. Computers for offices and schools didn’t need to have power graphics rendering, but they may need high compute power. These are the PCs most useful for upgrade later.

Here comes the conundrum. There are a lot more mid range or low compute capable machines than powerful ones. If the PC was used on a network, it might not have storage, but those may also be small form factor(SFF). Counter intuitive to more modern machines, it’s cheaper to buy an older SFF than a full size, regardless of the processor. Many will also have weak power supplies. A full size graphics card won’t fit.

What does that have to do with being in a hurry?

I’m getting there, trust me.

The effort to try to find a full size PC with a powerful enough processor led me to not one, but two different PCs. One with an Intel i7 processor, and a small amount of memory. The other sold as non working, but a better case and motherboard. Both for the same price.

The non-working one included one very important piece of information that let me know it was a perfect fit, a picture of the current Basic Input/Output System, or BIOS. This PC worked, but didn’t have a storage drive. If I could combine the best of both, I would be very well off for a relatively small price. All I would need to add would be a graphics card. ( I would also need a better power supply, but that’s a different blog).

Armed with the best parts of the two boxes, I closed up the leftovers and tucked them away. I could always use them later. There was my mistake.

Instead of making sure all parts and pieces were secure, I shoved it off to the side and went about testing my ‘better’ PC. A short time later it occurred to me that I may be able to get parts on the cheap to make a second PC. When I went to pick up the parts machine, I knew my mistake. The heatsink for the processor had been allowed to freely smash the pins on the exposed CPU socket. My haste would now be costly. At the very least it would take hours to fix, at worst it would be ruined.

Can I salvage it?

As it turns out. It was able to be repaired. It took a razor, a staple, jeweler’s screwdriver, flashlight, and several hours of painstaking patience. Having already hurried through part of this project and fouled things up, it was time to be careful. Section by section I used the flashlight and another tool, reading glasses, to very carefully bend the tiny pins back to what I hoped were close enough to the correct positions. Many of the 1151 pins were correct, but a number of them were bent, some severely.

Section by section, row by row, pin by pin, I bent tiny contacts back, then very carefully installed a new CPU, and held my breath. The system posted and correctly identified the new processor, along with it’s specs, showing me that the five or ten minutes at the very beginning of this had been made up for after several hours.

I could have very well, just tossed all of it aside and taken the loss, but there was a lesson to learn. And now, a lesson to share. Sometimes, trying to save a few minutes, or in this case, being paired with carelessness, can be extremely costly. It’s a lesson I won’t soon forget.

The YouTube video for this will be published soon, but feel free to check out the channel, here.

Back to the blog, here

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Are a dozen old PCs better than one new one?

How did we get here?

Your first question might be “How old are the old PCs?” The next question might then be “How new?” I’ll answer both, then I will explain a bit.

The twelve in question are Dell Optiplexes from 2008 through 2010, while the new one is pretty much anything from the past few years. Its a silly question with an obvious answer, but maybe it should be how I got them? They are the result of a yard sale find that cost ten dollars for the lot.

They range from Core 2 Duos and Pentiums to one PC that has an E8400 running with DDR3 memory. A quick test showed most of them booting up with four failing. Next will be to take the ones that didn’t, and see if things like a new CMOS battery will help. Most had low battery messages, and I suspect it to be a common them among them.

Are old PCs even worth the trouble?

Of course there will be more experiments and tests. I have a Q6600 Core 2 Quad with higher capacity DDR3 to try, but I may have to swap other parts to get at least one working. None of the machines has a power supply over 320W, so any GPU tinkering will keep that in mind. All will need thorough cleaning and new thermal paste.

Overall, it will be fun to find out which can be saved, if one can be my new server, and which can be turned into a more modern sleeper build with newer parts. That’s where the second question comes in. As it turns out, I have a few ways I can set up a sleeper with either intel or AMD. I might also be able to use AMD, Nvidia, or Intel as a video solution. It may look like a machine from 2010, but it certainly won’t behave like one.

What will I do with the others?

Many of the old PCs only have 2GB or 4GB of DDR2 memory, so I may sell the memory as a lot. I may also sell all of the processors as a lot with all of them being socket 775. The leftover parts will be set aside for recycling. The shipping might cost me a bit, but I should still stand to make more than the ten bucks it cost for the entire batch.

The other thing it definitely provides is content for multiple YouTube videos that will eventually find their way here. I’m also quite sure that if I can continue to commit to this blog again, some of the tests and experiments will end up being written about, so check back here soon. I’m sure it will be hours of entertainment, and if I can get a few working PCs, that will be a bonus.

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Buying a better graphics card for the same price.

How did we get here?

Recently, I found a deal on an older Xeon combo, and thought it would be good to do a theme build. The build works great, I used a GTX 1660, available for about a hundred bucks used. It’s a solid graphics card and a solid price. New, however, is a different story.

This card is available for around 200USD new, and widely available, but it’s not the only one available for that. In fact, several cards are in that range. Better ones, in fact. One of those is the Arc A750 from Intel. I opted for the 1660 because it’s better than the AMD offer of an RX580 2048sp version. Granted, the 580 is a new card, but it’s more of a refurb, than a brand new option. We’ll touch on that soon.

To test these I used my editing rig with a 12th Gen i7, the newest CPU I have. Matched up with 32 GB of DDR4 memory and a list of games, I ran some benchmarks. The 1660 is about four years old, the A750 about a year, but again, prices are the same for the new cards and both are available with driver support. The refurb 580s may be new, but driver support ended a few months ago. For that matter, the 1660 is no longer in production, but still available.

Well, what were the results?

Not surprisingly, the A750 performed better. The difference, however, surprised me. I ran two DX 11 titles and a handful of DX12 games and the difference was noticeable. DX11 titles were reasonably close, but in some cases DX12 titles had twice the framerate. The improvement in DX11 titles shows just how much Intel continues to improve the driver support for their new GPUs.

This ARC series of graphics card keeps getting better and the price makes it a great value. AMD cards like the RX580, RX5700, and even RX6600 all have continued to drop at a reasonable rate, but not so with the Green Team. The GTX 1660, an RTX 2060 without Ray Tracing, just isn’t worth the money trying to buy it new.

I bought the Arc A750 for more than it sells now, but AMD’s RX6600 has similar performance to the ARC card, and both are better than the 1660 at the same price. NVidia’s comparable card brand new runs almost a hundred USD more (The RTX 3060). The green team still does lead in Ray Tracing and the NVenc encoder is outstanding, but the ARC does have the AV1 encoder and that has been a huge leap forward.

So, why use the older graphics card?

That part is simple. It’s still a solid card. The price used is great, and it’s perfect for the build it’s in. Matched up with the Xeon, from Intel’s forth gen chips, the balance of CPU to GPU is almost a perfect match. Everything in that build seems to compliment everything else, and it ends up being a great gaming PC for 1080p resolution.

For that matter, the A750 ends up being a great compliment to the i7 12700 in the editing rig. I didn’t think that would be the case when I put it in there. The driver effort from Intel has been that good.

The YT video on the comparison is here, while the video on the build itself is here. There wasn’t a blog post on the Xeon/1660 pairing, but there is a blog about matching older and newer hardware in a ‘broken’ PC here.