Tag: HP

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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.

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The HP Bad Omen – it was supposed to be easy

How did we get here?

The HP Omen needed a new SSD. A new NVMe drive in one of the two M.2 slots should do the trick. The reason was simple, Dustin was selling his computer and wanted to make sure his personal info wasn’t shared. Old drive out, and new drive in. Easy. Not so much. I had prepared for the swap, and it should have been cut and dry, but the Omen PC had other plans.

I installed Windows 10 on a new drive in a PC with very similar parts, but when we turned the new PC on, it boot looped. Okay, get into the BIOS and look for a bootable drive. That was a different problem. On HP computers the spam keys are escape and F10 instead of the Delete key (and occasionally F2), but this didn’t work. I couldn’t get into the BIOS.

We removed the drive to check it, and of course, it worked in the other setup. The original drive also worked in the Omen. Another try with the new drive produced more boot loops, but there was progress. We could get in the BIOS, now. The Crucial P3 Plus was being recognized as a boot drive, but not acting like it. We configured the boot order to see the media creation USB and tried again. The thought being to reinstall windows on the Omen.

Re-installing the OS

I had already taken the precaution of making sure that the SSD was compatible with the OMEN, and I had a back up plan if it didn’t. The media creation tool on the USB was the latest release to keep form a ton of updates when we finished, but we hadn’t gotten to that point.

Windows 10 allowed us to use a local account, and could be set up without needing the new owner’s personal information. The fewer things to worry about the better. The new owner could then update all of the account information, himself. We still had to get the PC to boot in the first place, though.

I was able to start running the media creation tool, but found yet another problem. Windows didn’t see the new drive. In fact, after some trial and error and experimenting, we realized it didn’t see any drive, not even the original. This was just getting weird.

Time to go to the internet. There are several videos for HP Omens and boot issues, but they all say the same thing, change the boot order in the BIOS. Um, we already did that. Maybe this wouldn’t help. I finally found one video from a channel called Lapfix that found the solution. (here). One, out of dozens.

The actual fix

It seems there is an Intel RAID driver required for the new PC to recognize the drive. What? Seriously? An obscure raid driver? It was also necessary to extract it from an exe file. (Obviously you cant use an exe file if you can’t get into Windows.) File was extracted, installed on a different USB, and back to the install. We found the option for using a driver and it actually worked. Finally, things were moving forward again.

Windows was installed along with a handful of updates; there are always updates. The Omen desktop app and the newest NVidia video driver installed easily and we were in business. I was still cautious, though, not taking anything for granted.

A couple of test boots and resets later and this thing was ready to pack up and present to it’s new owner. We installed a second NVMe for games (yes, we had also tried it as a boot), and things were in good shape. I have worked on hundreds of computers and never run into this. Heck, I’ve made stuff work that was never supposed to work together and hadn’t seen this.

Having a small tech channel, gives me an opportunity to see and learn a lot, but this may be one of the stranger things. There should be no reason a single boot drive would need a raid driver. It doesn’t make sense, but it definitely adds to the difficulty of taking care of your PC. It makes it look like these companies purposely keep us from upgrading.

Final thoughts

Prebuilts have parts typically optimized to work with each other, but parts go bad, or sometimes need to be changed. To need a driver like this seems shady at best. It’s entirely possible there is an important reason for it, but I would expect to see it more often, if so. I certainly don’t understand the need on a boot drive.

It’s no secret that companies prevent consumers from repairing their own equipment. Major corporations are guilty and don’t deny it, but this wasn’t a copy protect or proprietary parts. It’s just a driver that seems to be out of place if it’s necessary. To me, it seems shady, but at least now I am aware of it for the next time.

We set things up on Windows 10, but its ready for Windows 11, so by now it should be updated. It’s a shame this was so tricky, because it’s actually a good system. The BIOS isn’t special, but no HP BIOS is special. For that matter, not many integrator’s BIOSes offer many options, but it’s functional. This PC should last the new owner quite a while.

For my part, I will start looking for tricks or extra drivers, especially on prebuilts. I don’t have anything against a prebuilt, but I will stick to building my own. That way, I know the issues are my fault. Sometimes, it’s due to things I shouldn’t do anyway, but that’s a different blog.

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The video can be found here

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The HP Franken Dell. Scary project or a outstanding idea?

Not everything is a bad idea.

So, recently I tried a few fairly standard upgrades on an old Dell Optiplex. They were simple, but effective, and all was good. So, how did we get from there, to the HP Franken Dell? There were a few steps.

Over a year ago, I ordered the cheapest DX12 capable prebuilt PC on Amazon. It was a refurbished Dell Optiplex with an i5 4670 four core, four thread processor and no dedicated graphics card. It did come with dual channel memory, but only 8GB. Upgrades were relatively simple. More capacity on the RAM, an SSD instead of the hard disk drive and a graphics card. It wasn’t the best Gaming PC in the world, but for about 330 USD, accounting for price drops, it was solid. One of the videos benchmarking current games can be found here.

Then came the idea of upgrading the CPU, a Xeon. The choice of the Xeon came from the natural upgrade path (i7 4770) being more expensive. The E3 1270v3 has almost the same clock speed and the same number of cores and threads. It was also only 28 bucks and some change.

The surprise came when it turned out not to be an upgrade because of the GPU. A better GPU meant needing more room, and while I was at it, I might as well, pick up the motherboard for another 18. Nice.

Not an Optiplex anymore

Freed from the Optiplex case, I could test the Xeon with other video cards and find that the four core, eight thread actually performed very well, for a ten year old processor. The problem was, it was stuck in a lousy case. The temps were a bit high on the GPU side, but not horrible. I just wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it.

At the same time, I was considering turning the old HP a6512p into a bit of a sleeper build. The fifteen year old PC wasn’t very capable of playing modern games, even with a decent GPU, but it did have a redeeming quality. A standard mATX fit inside and it took a regular size Power Supply. The same size motherboard that the Xeon called home. Hmmm. Nah, but maybe, just maybe, it would work.

I knew there were going to be a few issues; the front panel accessories being one of them. The front panel lacked the USB3 available from the newer Mobo and there was a firewire (1394) connection that was useless. An expansion bay including USB3 was cheap, so it made the list. Also on the list was something to help with the adapters I had already purchased that worked for the pink case.

Finally, the HP Franken Dell.

When it was all said and done, it worked. Temps weren’t great, but I know there isn’t a lot of airflow in that case, so it’s something to work on. Maybe a Noctua fan will move more air and be more quiet. As it stands, I have some room, but not a lot, for more drives and I have to consider if the FrankenDell will be a better solution for my server that I keep putting off. Noise and temps first, then I will explore more drives.

Overall, it was a fun experiment. Parts fit where maybe they shouldn’t have, and I can see why companies like HP and Dell try to now make proprietary parts. (Though, some of their parts could use a good swap). I don’t yet know what will become of the older HP motherboard and Q6600 that where originally in the 6512p, but I also have an AM3+ motherboard around somewhere without a home. Hmmm, I wonder if I should get a FX processor and pit it against the intel CPU’s like the Xeon. To be continued………maybe.

Link to the YouTube video about the HP FrankenDell.

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