Category: Tech

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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.

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Was it a great idea to test old processers? No

How did we get here?

In this case, it was simple. I saw a few videos with people tinkering with old FX series processors, and though, sure. Two different people on two different continents were testing cheap 83xx processors and I thought, hey, I have an old motherboard for that.

I should have left it at that. Buying a similar chip here in the States turns out to be four times the price, and I don’t even know if the board works. I can also buy two intel MB/CPU combos that definitely work for the same money. Still, I wanted to try, so I found a cheaper CPU to order and test. Keep in mind, its been several years since I have even tried to test this MB and I stopped using it in 2015 because I thought I bricked it.

I ordered the CPU, it came quicker than I expected, thank you eBay seller, and I was excited to test. I gathered everything I would need, looked at the CPU and it had bent pins. Great. AM type processors have pins on the CPU instead of the motherboard and sometimes they bend. I didn’t panic. It was very slight and I could use a razor. Problem solved.

My next issue was the cooler. AM3+ and AM4 are different sized brackets, and have different mounting holes. Luckily I have a few different coolers and chose a tower cooler that is far more than that processor should need. I grabbed known good working parts from another system, and installed them. It was time to start it up.

Hmmm

Everything started, but nothing posted. No HDMI cable in the Graphics card. That was the last good feeling I had about this set up. I connected the HDMI, started it again, and waited, nothing. No post, no beeping, no nothing. Okay, I can’t say nothing. The CPU fan was running, the GPU leds were on (no spinning fans), and leds on the motherboard lit up. There is nothing fancy about the leds on the mobo, it’s just to show they have power.

I tried one stick of ram in each slot. No post on any combination. An hour or so of troubleshooting produced the same result. This was not working.

I faced a bit of a conundrum. I have a ‘tested good’ CPU, and a questionable motherboard. Do I count my twenty bucks as a loss, or do I look for a different mobo? How important is this video? How deep do I go in the rabbit hole? Used motherboards for this series are running from 40USD to 100USD. What? Are you serious? They’re 8-10 years old.

There is no reason I can think of that this platform should be so expensive eight years later. It wasn’t a high performer and it was inexpensive to start with, yet it’s holding it’s value and people are buying them. AMD was my preferred platform for a long time based on price to performance, but it didn’t age well. Pricing is very different here than the rest of the world evidently.

So what’s next for this set up?

First, I’m not upset spending 20 bucks testing an older board. I am not 100% sure it’s the problem, but the odds are high. The CPU tested good from a reputable seller, so I am okay with that. The issue is whether to sink more money into a used board just for the sake of a video. I don’t dare get something ‘high’ end just to check the CPU, but if it is good, what’s my next step? Yep, to buy a better board and a better CPU. This can’t end well. And it can’t end cheap. I have a lot of thinking to do.

There’s no video on this, yet, because the story isn’t over, but it may be time to hit the used market and find the next rung in this impossibly high later to nowhere. Wish me luck.

Here’s a link to my other videos, and a link back to the blogs.

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How old does a budget PC have to be?

How did we get here?

The term budget PC can actually be a bit misleading. It’s very possible to have an extremely high budget, where financial constraints don’t matter, but most of us think of budget as spending less money. Budgets are typically associated with financial management, and living within your means. Corporations and Governments also have to adhere to budgets, though the latter doesn’t seem to think they have to. (Different subject, altogether).

If you are a PC enthusiast at all, you are typically trying to get the best performance for the lowest price. This may come in the form of buying a part used, or in some cases, refurbished. It may also come in the form of buying a less expensive part, seeking to upgrade later. This works well for newer parts, but it becomes more difficult with older ones. But what if your PC has a mix of both?

Can a new graphics card do well with an older processor. Is it even practical? In some cases, yes. Pairing a newer RX 6400 graphics card with a sixth generation Intel i5 in a PC sold as ‘broken or parts only’ is an example. I planned to put a mid tier graphics card in it, but the case was small, and I needed a low profile option. Older low profile cards just don’t do the trick, but I took the risk and was able to fix it. With a graphics card and a few other things, we had a two hundred dollars gaming PC. I used both newer and older parts.

Well, there’s your answer. New and Old.

Well, yes and no. Obviously mixing the age of components isn’t our only option. Using a different case, allows for a better graphics card and for a bit more, we can have a better PC. Our challenge there is to have the money we spend, show in the performance. Does going from spending two hundred to three, give us at least fifty percent better gaming? Chances are that it won’t.

Now, in most cases, one of the easiest upgrades will be to use a solid state drive instead of the hard disk drive, so yes we are mixing old and new. The memory modules can be new, but built on the older technology, reliable, but for this argument, old. There is also an influx of remanufactured older technology emerge in graphics cards and motherboards. That’s a harder one to call, but I have to group that with the memory, old.

What about our budget PC?

It actually gets more complicated. Some newer platform parts are available for the same prices as newer remanufactured ones. Both Intel and AMD have options for CPUs and motherboards for a hundred USD or less, each. That makes the core of the platform not too much more expensive than older systems, with better performance. So, maybe the way to go is new parts.

The honest truth is, older parts don’t give much of an upgrade path, but finding an old workstation or a PC that is ‘broken or parts only’, could be a great find, if you are careful. In my case, I saw a few things in the photos that helped me diagnose the issue before I bought it, and a twenty dollar SSD made my starting price 60 USD. If the case were bigger, the whole gaming PC could have been less than 175 USD, and done quite well. The only problem I have now is what to do with it.

I am finding the more I buy to tinker with, the less shelf room I have. I don’t seem to sell them as quickly as I buy, test and shelve them. Maybe that’s a different blog. We are getting to a point where PCs from even a few years ago, though, might outlive their operating systems, presenting a different problem. These systems are still solid and can perform well. I guess to answer this question, we may have to wait to see how long the software itself is supported.

The video that prompted all of this is here, but here are others and I will have to make a playlist.

There is also more written on the 40 dollar PC here.