Budget pc upgrading

[integrale_evo]

Our downstairs pc kept for the children to use for homework and as photo storage is an ancient dell e520 (dm061) pentium d with 2Gb of ram ( I think that is made from a random mix of my old spares )

My youngest loves games and has been trying to get into pc gaming, his current favourite is team fortress 2.

I saw him playing it the other day and was amazed at how badly it was running, yet he seemed to be enjoying it.

I'll get round to building something with a decent spec one day, but decided to see what sort of improvement I could make on a tight budget.

I flashed the bios to the latest version, straight off the dell website and run through a nice little app in windows, ordered 4x1gb ram for £7.99 ( 4gb is the max for the system ) and chucked in a spare core2duo 1.86 which used to be in mine.

Novabench initial score - 246

Afterwards - 315

Noticeably snappier to load, but the major bottleneck for gaming is obviously the 7300 128mb graphics card.

I ordered an ati 6670 2Gb card which I was told would fit, for £15. Unfortunately it doesn't fit thanks to the back to front BTX layout of the system, it clashes with the processor fan shroud. So I stuck that in mine, and stuck my Gtx 610 2Gb in the dell, using a pair of pliers to bend a couple of the heat sink find a touch.

This took the novabench graphics test from 15 to 66 giving a final overall score of 369.

Better than that, using 3dmark06 ( more suitable for the age of the hardware ) saw a jump from 752 to 3948 more than 5x better!

Tf2 now runs superbly, he's over the moon with it and has been fascinated watching me swap out the components and running the tests. It's got me browsing eBay too and reminding me that putting pcs together is quite fun.

So now I've ordered a motherboard to upgrade my pc using a spare i5 processor rescued from my mums system killed by lightning a couple of years ago and would like to catch up on some of the pc games I've missed over the past 10 years or so.

The spare core2duo 2.66 from mine will go into the dell as the final upgrade. And hopefully push novabench over the giddy heights of 400

[drcarlos]

Does it have an SSD as it's primary disk? It was the single biggest improvement I've made to an old Core2duo laptop. Considering a 240GB Samsung is around £50 it's not an expensive upgrade and will be transferable too.

Carl.

[integrale_evo]

Nope, never tried one, didn't realise they were so cheap either. Will have to get one for mine.

Where's decent for buying bits and bobs these days?

[unzippy]

Last two I got where from ebuyer and amazon respectively, no bother with either.

and has been fascinated watching me swap out the components and running the tests.

Careful. How do you think Beany started...?

[integrale_evo]

I couldn't remember who had bought out who. Used to be dabs, ebuyer, scan, overclockers etc.

Overclockers used to be amongst the cheapest but seem quite expensive now. Ebuyer look better, 480/500gb seems to be the sweet spot for size / price at the moment. £45 for 240gb, £75 for 480gb, but then a big jump to £170 for a 1tb.

[unzippy]

I've gone 240gb for the OS, games and apps and then a spinny NAS for the rest of the crap.

[integrale_evo]

Hmm, motherboard has arrived, I assumed it was just a private seller but turns out it's actually from scan.

Swapped the processor and cooler and memory onto it then noticed the top of the box has got 'faulty lan port' written in biro. The listing says tested and fully working.

Not the end of the world as I tend to use a wireless card anyway, but a bit cheeky if it doesn't.

[mr_jon]

Might just have been a spurious reason for a customer to return the board, which then tested out OK.

I tend to use ebuyer as they offer a bit of cashback and don't tend to mess up too often. They don't have the best reputation for customer service though.

I tried that Novabench jobbie and got 1971 on my - now slighty ageing - rig.

Cheers,
Jon

[integrale_evo]

Motherboard plugged in and working fine with the donated cpu and memory.

Was a bit concerned as my power supply only has the 4pin cpu plug, which only fills half of the motherboard 8pin one, although they are supposed to be backwards compatible to a point.

Once I'd remembered which hard drive was which it booted into windows 10 after a couple of minutes of configuring itself, didn't have to touch or do anything, just wait and straight in. Very clever.

Lan port working fine

It did sound like a hairdryer at first as it wanted to run the cpu fan flat out, so a bit of fiddling and it's much more acceptable.

Core2duo 2.66 to an i5 2.99 has made a decent jump for minimal outlay and will do for a little while longer.

Ssd has to be the next thing.

[IanF]

Motherboard plugged in and working fine with the donated cpu and memory.

Was a bit concerned as my power supply only has the 4pin cpu plug, which only fills half of the motherboard 8pin one, although they are supposed to be backwards compatible to a point.

Once I'd remembered which hard drive was which it booted into windows 10 after a couple of minutes of configuring itself, didn't have to touch or do anything, just wait and straight in. Very clever.

Lan port working fine

It did sound like a hairdryer at first as it wanted to run the cpu fan flat out, so a bit of fiddling and it's much more acceptable.

Core2duo 2.66 to an i5 2.99 has made a decent jump for minimal outlay and will do for a little while longer.

Ssd has to be the next thing.

Intel do a thing called Optane, that uses some learning algorithms to speed up boot times on a standard, non-SD hard drive. Might be cheaper.

[integrale_evo]

I think if ssds make the difference people say they do it'll be worth it anyway, plus more storage is never a bad thing and can always be swapped into another machine in the future.

[JLv3.0]

SSDs are wonderful. My (ex) work laptop came with a 256 Gb one and when I asked for a 1Tb upgrade, they fitted a normal spinny shit type one. In the 12 hours it took to get that sorted, it was absolutely horrible to use.

As an aside, I threatened to not actually kill the IT guy, but to injure him sufficiently badly that he'd be eating all future meals through a straw that his carer has had to wheel him towards. Who the actual blistering FUCK replaces a solid-state drive with a spinny one? What a total cunt.

[integrale_evo]

I thought the dell upgrading was pretty much over, I'd doubled the performance benchmark figure on novabench and seen 5x improvement on 3D mark, for a few quid.

But wait, the core2duo 2.66 wasn't the best chip for the board, there's the £15 core2quad q6700 2.66, or the £30 core2extreme qx6700, or the £45 qx6800 2.93.

Unfortunately these fell well outside of the cheapskate budget so was happy to leave it as it was.

Then spotted a poorly worded / listed qx6800 for under £10, so that's now on its way. Apparently depending on motherboard revision there is some sort of overclocking software which might work too, the extreme chips are unlocked and some have seen 4ghz+ out of them.

It's now turned into some sort of perverse quest to see what I can squeeze out of a 10 year old budget pc

Going to have to have a measure up and see if there are any modern graphics cards I could squeeze in which don't cost obscene amounts but could be kept when I build something more modern. I don't mind modding the pc to fit the card, but don't want to start chopping up the heat sink on a brand new card to fit an old oddly laid out machine.

[integrale_evo]

Qx6800 has been installed, another slight incremental bump but not as big as I was expecting. Other people have been able to software overclock with throttlestop yet it won't let me increase speed or multiplier over the factory settings, maybe a limit of my version of the motherboard.

Novabench cpu score has gone from
Pentium D 2.66 - 119
Core2duo e6300 1.86 - 182
Core2duo e6700 2.66 - 241
Core2extreme qx6800 - 256

Now tempted to just get a new case and use the bits out of this with my old 775 motherboard and an overclock which makes a future swap to more modern hardware a lot easier.

[integrale_evo]

Having been given the go ahead to build him a new computer for birthday/ Christmas, it was time to see if I could fry the dell

Managed to get throttlestop working and set the multiplier to 13 ( tried 14 but got instant bsod and bios error at restart ) so it's running a shade under 3.5ghz, and cranked the settings a little on afterburner to tweak the graphics card a touch.

Finally I've done it hit my target and got a final novabench score of 492, exactly double the starting point.

I think I'm at the limit of the cpu cooling, there is no specific case fan, just one ducted monster fan on the front of the case that blows through a shroud directly over the cpu heat sink fins, and then sort of blows around the rest of the case. Christ does it make a racket though, sounds like a vacuum cleaner when it hits full power. I'm more concerned about the fan overloading the stock power supply than the cpu or gpu.