The parts started arriving late last week and by Saturday we had enough to get the new machine up and running. Today a set of “Orange Lighted” case fans arrived and we installed them, bringing that build to a close. My son is busy installing software to get his graphic work back up to snuff.
As a side item, our youngest boy’s PC died a couple of weeks ago with a Power Supply failure. That machine was based on re-purposed components some of which were 10+ years old. He’s been using a spare laptop and while I built the new graphics PC I stripped parts from two other machines to rebuild the youngest’s PC. So he now has a Windows 10 machine with much better components.
Everyone’s set for PCs for a while and I’m tired of flipping machines around.
One of my relatives recently lost a PSU in a prebuilt PC. I went to MicroCenter and bought a new one and it was DOA. Almost sounds like a conspiracy lol.
On the PC parts front, I've been thinking about upgrading the monitor for my backup PC. It's an old cheap-o 1080 TN CCFL workhorse from 2009 that just can't really hack it nowadays.
Torn between getting a cheap IPS monitor, for far better color + contrast, or one of those cheap 144 Hz TN FreeSync monitors (which the backup PC can’t use yet but it sounds so cool). I hear bad things in reviews about even modern TN monitors but any TN monitor made today has to be well above a budget TN monitor from 2009, right?
I kinda wish I still had a CRT lying around. Not to sound like that kid from Summer Wars but I’d like to compare the motion blur of a CRT to my modern LCDs.
Also, from crusty old Steins;gate-ish CRT enthusiasts I’ve heard that cranking up the refresh rate from 60 to 90 Hz makes CRTs great. Dunno if any of my old CRTs could’ve handled that but I’ll never know now as they’re in electronics heaven. For the best as I don’t have that kind of deskspace now.
Mine is pushing 14 years right now, Biggest problem is either if the Video card (AGP) or the motherboard fails. Unfortunately it can’t be upgraded to Win 10, so I’ll have to decide whether to switch to Linux or unplug it from the net when Windows 7 reaches it’s End of Life.
Let me know if you need a Video Card, I have the ATI AGP Card from the retired machine. I’m bad at tossing anything that has any hope of being re-used.
I have the “Takes any Win 7, 8 or 8.1 Activation Key” Windows 10 install DVD that Microsoft put out last year. It still works and I will hold on to it as an eventual solution.
I have a AGP Geforce 6600 (Don’t know which) card.
The computer it was in had crap cooling, so I ended up buying a custom cooler because the standard fan broke, and the nature of this card, requires a wider case than normal (Cooler is about 1-2 inches off the board to the side)
I’ve had to replace fans on video cards several times, it seems like that is the first place that manufacturers cut corners. My wife’s machine has a Geforce based card from ASUS that has fins only - and a bunch of them - which keeps it cooler than the fan based card it replaced. Her machine is much quieter now, which is all for the good.
I took apart my used Macbook Pro to replace the thermal paste and discovered that the previous owner must’ve done that a lot lol as there were all sorts of missing screws and the prior reassembler had done “screw triage” and had put the increasingly-limited screws in the critical spots.
How does the P4 perform? I had to use one as a glorified terminal and it was dog slow. CPUs have aged so well over the past 5 years that I sometimes forget that wasn’t always the case.
On that, my backup PC has a ~6 year old CPU and GPU. In gaming, I thought it was the old GPU that was the hold-up but it’s the CPU. I can get a new drop-in upgrade CPU for cheap that has twice the cores, higher frequency (and per-core performance) and only ~75% of the power draw.
It does fairly well even though the board only supports 2GB RAM I only use it for Retro gaming and if I need to use Excel / Word etc.because I have a copy of Office 2010 on it.
It isn’t one of the really vintage ones that uses that funky RAMBUS memory, is it?
Sadly, the one P4 system that I have still sitting around is SDR RAM (!!) only and lacks hyperthreading. I’m sure that was a performance killer even back in its time but I thought it was awesome (compared to my previous PC then, it really was) lol.
The one that expired was a 2.8 GHz processor with 1 GB of ram. A barn burner in 2004 it still ran well when I stored it in 2014. When I pulled it our a month ago it would not boot, the motherboard would not recognize any drive - SATA, IDE or even Floppy - attached to it. Some sort of chip failure, after 12 years it wasn’t a surprise.
Mine is a 3.2GHz with Hyperthreading, bad is that the MoBo only supports 2GB RAM, if it had 4 I think it wouldn’t have the slowness because of the virtual memory it has to use from the disc at some points, but it still works and is usable so it’s all good. It uses SD RAM .
