From my college experience, you might even be able to find many Dell Optiplexes thrown out in ewaste disposal; free computer that usually just needs a graphics card and SSD
@@RandomGaminginHD 8 MB Intel Smart Cache helps the i7-860 out a lot and hyperthreading. I have build with the i7-870 two time with a GTX 970 to sell but a GTX 980 is too rich for an i7-870/860 in my opinion but you got that GTX 980 founders edition for the price of a GTX 970. Well done.
This is 15 years old CPU, and you can still somehow play on it. Imagine what was 15 years old CPU when this came out. It was the original Pentium. It's interesting how PCs are ageing much slower than before.
cuz now for a while i7 6th/7th gen is minimum or recommended hardware to run any game at 1080p low/med and sice those and third gen ryzen are pretty well spread in the world devs have no interest in selling a game only to people with the newest i9 + rtx xx90 gpu
yes but im more about 2023/2024 AAA titles most of them would run on any 8th gen i7 or ryzen 2000 series cpu ez since we all know 80% cant afford upgreading thier whole pc just for a game@@IvanOoze1990
i've done something like this recently for my son - i got an old 4th gen i5 dell optiplex mini tower for £60 used on ebay. I added an old 600w PSU and an old GTX 1060 I had spare and bought a second stick of 8gb RAM from CEX for £8. It runs all the game he wants like a dream.
@@BenState the only inefficient thing about it might be that it is old, the less W you use of the powersupply, the cooler and quieter it will run. Although that usually isn't a reason to go overkill on your powersupply
Oh I just love to see old hardware in action. Always reminds me of the good old days when I just couldn’t afford anything fancy but still had hours of fun.
Gtx 980 the legend!!! The ultimate pin up boy from 2014. Wanted one, just couldn't afford it at the time lol!!!Great build, love to see old PCs get a second life.
This is very similar to my pc! Mines is a little different though. My specs are: - intel core i7-950 - Nvidia GTX-970 6:26 - 24gb DDR3 (8gb x3) - x2 500gb SSDs - 2tb HDD - x2 optical drives
The old Dells are certainly the best pc to use as a base chasis as they (at the time) still used standard ATX components, I used one for my first gaming PC and it turned out really good.
I wish I could find more of these in the states locally. Every ad I see for pc’s of this generation all look like they have been kicked down a set of stairs.
The last series of Optiplexes that accepted standard ATX PSU's with the 24 pin power connector were the X010 MT's, which have 3rd Gen CPU's. it's successors, the X020 series, used PSU's with a Dell proprietary 8 pin main power connector, though adapters can be bought online.
First gen chips can be surprisingly capable. I have a X58 build with an Intel i7 970 6cores 12 threads, on a Gigabyte X58A-OC motherboard that is insanely overbuilt for overclocking, 24GB of triple channel ram at 1600Mhz, a GTX 1080Ti, a 256GB SSD and some hard drives. I got the motherboard, cpu, ram and cooler for 100 euros all together. Spent another 100 on a good quality be quiet pure power 11 psu and the SSD. Got a case from an electronics bin. Spent another 80 euros for a broken 1080Ti. Managed to fix it by removing a shorted out VRM mosfet and a current steering mosfet. Undervolted the card to 875mV to reduce the load on the remaining VRM mosfets and also make it run much cooler. Did a huge overclock of 4.6Ghz on the i7 and now runs blazing fast. I can play almost every modern game in existance at ultra settings and above 60fps, all that for just 280 euros. Even without overclock it would still be very capable though
Lack of AVX2 support is becoming a real problem. While I have some 2nd and 3rd gen hardware, it will be repurposed for retro gaming and probably a NAS or two. With the way esports are becoming more and more like AAA titles, I expect even those will start requiring AVX2 in the not too distant future. I'm not building any gaming PCs with anything older than Haswell at this point. I also seem to recall MS announcing it would effectively block Windows 11 on unsupported hardware without AVX2 support. This is because AVX2 is also used for cryptography as well as physics calculations in newer games. There were people running 11 on Core 2s 🤦♂
In my wifes PC we use a x3450 @ 3,85Ghz many years. I bought it for 15euro und use it from 2014-2021. That CPU Series (i7 860/920/xeonx3450) was awesome
@@sjoerdev Basically it's a set of instructions that programmers can use that allow a CPU to process vectorizable calculations really fast, but it uses all of the CPU's power. There's also AVX2 and AVX512 (this is what i can find online)
This was great, I've rescued some Dell 2nd, 3rd and 4th Gen i7 towers and the CPU grunt goes down pretty quickly with these but your first gen i7 is a step slower so not surprised seeing the CPU be the limiting factor most of the time. I use 5600 XTs in mine but for that price, I'd have been ecstatic with the 980. Cheers, mate!
When I picked up a working i3 7100 system last year with drives, RAM and a GPU missing, people on discord told me it's practically e-waste. I equipped it with a fairly new 512GB SSD, 16GB of RAM and a used 4GB 960, all in a nice Sharkoon case tidied up and ready to go. Sold it for a solid 150€ including helping the buyer through the setup of the machine. Tl:dr, it's completely fair to convert an old system that would otherwise have been thrown away into something that can still play games
I HAD ALMOST THIS EXACT SETUP! Except the PC was an HP 6000 with an i7-870, so just slightly higher clocked than the i7-860. I built a new PC with a mix of spare and new parts and then gave the old HP to a friend of mine. Nice to see that it can still play a couple games fairly well.
I have a 1st Gen i5, 2nd Gen i5 and a 1st Gen i7 sitting around collecting dust, mostly because I use a prebuilt i7 6th Gen Dell SFF and my son uses my old HP prebuilt i7 4th gen, there was nothing wrong with the first 3 other than wanting to update to something more capable, it is good to see your channel giving the old machines extra life.
I used to do this all the time at my local garbage dump. People would throw away perfectly usable systems that just needed a new stick of RAM or a new GPU.
The i7-870 and a 1060 3gb was the first build I tossed together for my daughter before I found a decent am4 setup on eBay and ended up giving her a 6600xt from my wife’s setup and upgraded the her to a 6750xt, gotta make sure everybody is set to game! So very grateful! 😎💯
I had a gtx 980 and I7 870 combo until summer 2023. Was a great little machine. I originally built it in 2014 soon after building a brand new 4790k PC and it made me regret buying the expensive 4790k it was so good, especially when overclocked to 4Ghz with 2400mhz memory. I've now swapped the motherboard out for the 4790k as I have upgraded my main PC to a 7700x. It's a lot better now. Modern games really take advantage of the Haswell architecture, whereas before there wasn't much in it.
This is my exact PC, except with 16GB of Ram and a 2060 Super stuffed in it. That CPU is still pulling its weight surprisingly well for the games I play, but it's high time for an upgrade. You've served me well, Vostro
Excited to see what you go with for the mobo swap in the future! Like I said in the short's comments, these vostro 4x0 series cases are wonderful for sleeper builds, just big enough, largely standard, plenty of opportunity to add air intake and exhaust, just too good.
I was honestly hoping you’d put more modern components in it to make a sleeper pc but this works too. Surprised how well the first gen i7 played those games!
Just a suggestion here. Can you consider adding some text on screen when announcing the specs? Not that you pronounce them bad or anything but as a non-native speaker and someone who doesn't know the names of all cpus by heart, I had to rewind a few times to catch on 😅 Love your channel, cheers!
Pleasantly surprised to see that CPU, I have a similar secondary PC that is still capable of running modern 3D modeling/animation software. I rarely game but I remember Tekken7 and GTA5 ran decently on it. Specs are i7 860 16GB RAM intel DP55WG Motherboard 600W PSU GTX 1050 GPU
I've built my brother similar pc 5 years ago. MBO had some stupid 8GB limit, but I've bought some cheap Xeon (10€) from AliExpress - 4cores/8threads and OC to 3.6GHz. It works like a charm. I think that the price for all parts was around 90 €. Year later he bought used 1080Ti (I think) and PC works like a charm even after 5 years. After he changes, it will remain for office use at home for our parents. Best PC investment ever. Throw a Xeon inside and do one more round of testing. I think you'll find results interesting :)
Always live for builds like these. I remember you building a unit way back on this Coolermaster case with an i5 750 and some kind of HD7000 series GPU. This build reminds me of that from your channel back then. Still cool to see these in use. *Also, if anybody runs into issues with the processor not supporting a game cause if instruction sets. Get "Intel SDE" or "Intel Software Development Emulator".* This program is used in Virtual Machines I guess to help programs launch while in a VM. Now, look up specifically what to run by someone else on exactly what you want ran being a game or program. But this does help. I used Intel SDE to run Cyberpunk 2077 on a x3323(LGA771 Xeon equivalent to Q6600). Cyberpunk 2077 used to run on LGA775 if I'm right early on. It might not have ran on LGA775 to being with. But armed with Linux Mint, Heroic Launcher, and a GTX 1050 2GB with a modded GPU cooler for extreme overclocks. I could launch the latest 2.1 update. Now, it wasn't good. Even with latest ultra performance FSR on 720p to 1080p lowest settings. It would average 39 to 15fps. I managed to lock the game to 30fps at 900p. This was best as I could do. Might try the FSR3 mod I got from a commenter in a NJTech video. Problem is the FSR3 mod does increase fps, yet Vsync goes out the picture. Screen tearing then becomes horrendous. This was with a i5-3570k with RX560D 2GB and my Ryzen 7 1800x with RX5500XT 8GB(both 16gb ram). Might need a certain version of Cyberpunk. But Cyberpunk is super buggy and crashes no matter what I play it on(and not in the Skyrim fun way). Everyone else I've talked to is the same except for when I watch TH-camrs who seem to have zero issues which is completely weird to me considering I was getting the Senior Developers help in the support call to understand why is always crashes on all my PCs on Windows 10, 11, and Linux Mint specifically even though I redownloaded it three times. 3rd time under supervision to make sure it was validated correctly. Still crashed every 10 to 30 minutes. But using Intel SDE on the x3323 with a GTX 1050 2gb and 6gb DDR2 at 667mhz. Crashed but at around 4 to 5 hours. I'll never now why and support has no clue either. Sorry for the rant. Enjoy the videos all these years. Keep being awesome RGinHD.
I built my son a gaming PC for under £200 with an i7 4th gen, 16GB of DDR3 and a 1050Ti and he's happy enough with it. The problem is kids see their favourite streamers/YTers with £3k systems and think this is the norm so they say to ma and pa "I want a gaming PC". Ma and pa then hit ebay and see unscrupulous sellers selling "GAMING PC" with Fortnite logos everywhere and ma and pa think "just what my child wants". The 2nd gen i3, GT710 combo, arrives and poor Johnny can't play anything and that's the reason this video is so good, it shows parents an alternative for their child, you have a good upgrade path at a reasonable cost and that's something your kids can do with help from a couple of videos and some parental input. Stay away from these ebay sellers and their "gaming PC" crap and build it yourself with help from videos like this one!!!!!
100 quid for a decent 1080p gaming PC, that's actually very good for someone on a budget. I remember I had a work PC that was a Dell XPS 9100 with a i7 920, that would be a great base system to do something like this with.
Back in the day when I was a backyard tech, I kept my kids in milk money one year just by replacing those Bestech (sp) power supplies. The problem was so bad that when I would see one I would immediately test it.
That CPU is going to get slaughtered in the third act of Baldur's Gate 3 (the city itself). Still, surprisingly good results for a such an old machine.
@RandomGaminginHD 8 MB Intel Smart Cache helps the i7-860 out a lot and hyperthreading. I have build with the i7-870 two time with a GTX 970 to sell but a GTX 980 is too rich for an i7-870/860 in my opinion but you got that GTX 980 founders edition for the price of a GTX 970. Well done.
Great video as always. Here is idea for video maybe you could test this cpu with some similarly powerful amd gpu as its known that amd drivers use less cpu power to run, it should give old cpus a bit more room to breathe and maybe remove some stutters caused by cpu.
I have a similarly spec'd old Dell system that I use as my media pc. Its an xps 8100 build from 2009. Almost the same cpu (mine is the i7-870). Still using the ATi Radeon HD6770 that came with it. Only things I've changed are the case and PSU. For storage it has a 120gb ssd boot drive and two 4tb hdds for storage
Makes a pretty good showing all things considered. Also it has the correct CPU instructions to continue on with Windows 11 24H2. However, who knows what Microsoft is going to block next!
For bg3 I'd recommend going into act 3 for benchmarks. its the heaviest area in the whole game in terms of resource usage. It would definitely give a more realistic benchmark because even newer and more modern hardware struggle in act 3. Act 1 and 2 are fairly well optimized and i think could feel misleading to others for benchmarks because of that huge change in performance.
I still have thos vostro. Got it at my salvation army for $5 and was surprised that it was fully operational. Gonna get another psu and put my spare gtx 1060 in this bad boy
I have in my closet a higher tier version of this. A Z400 with a W3680 at 4.2GHz, RX 480 8GB and 3*8gb RAM (I think it's running at 1333MHz since you can't OC the RAM there, only CPU with some tools on Windows). So this video's build playing decently gives me high hopes. I will check it again this weekend, hope it just turns on.
Always nice to see old pcs having a second chance! What would you suggest as GPUs to pair an i7 3770k 16gb ram and SSD?(Consider that I have a 1080p 75hz monitor)
I'd love to see what this looks like with a more powerful processor, I think it could run a lot of heavier games more comfortably on 1080p low. The GTX 980 is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here.
I just picked up a vostro 230 with a core2quad 8600, some crappy gpu and 4gb ram for 10 euros. Still runs with the original bestec psu. Probably will add a 12 eur ssd, make it 2x4gb ram, run the win11 update, make sure itll stream yt 1080p smoothly and just sell it. The thing easily has 10 years left as a simple casual browsing / office system, alltho it may need a new psu at some point
Just wished you showed the difference between the original i7-860 cpu and whichever is the maximum supported cpu (i7-870? i7-875K? i7-880?) in the gaming benchmarks, to see what kind of FPS increase they'll get with that GTX 980. Also don't forget to mention this is a Vostro 430 MT (minitower). I have a Vostro 460 MT (2nd gen i7) that looks almost identical to the first gen 430.
I personally look at Haswell as the lowest entry level CPU for gaming. It has AVX2 at full speed along with all of the other instruction set extensions that games use. I have a few x58 boards and chips around and they do work well but you are not going to get the same frames as you would with Haswell. Along with many newer games not wanting to start due to missing instruction set extensions.
Built one using leftover parts total cost was 130$USD . Used windows 7 on a PC tell 11 hit on a Dell Laptop. So it using Windows 10 is not a real problem.
I once was given a Dell XPS desktop of a similar vintage a while back. It had a small LCD screen on the front, and to my horror when I turned it on it illuminated the dead body of a cockroach under the outer layer of the screen! Disgusting. Harvested the GT 730 and it's my test card to this day.
I got a video idea, cable managing old PC case, might be helpful for those with old pc case or budget player with old office pc, cz most of those old pc case doesnt have backside clearance for cabling.
@@dallesamllhals9161 Idk how, but seems like some russians figured the "SSE fix" out to make games like cyberpunk work, not sure about this yet, but u should check it!
I think the next video you should do is with the price for performance issues with the GT 1030 and the GTX 1050 cuz if you look in some places the GT 1030 is now costing more than a GTX 1050 including at cex
Eh, I personally wouldn't go for anything lower than Haswell since haswell CPUs have all the currently supported instruction sets required by all games. Still an interesting video and nice to see the old 980 getting some love
@@RandomGaminginHDthanks i plan on bringing it up to an i9 13900f 128gb ddr4 ram and the rx7900 gre when i can afford to could go with the k varient but i dont need the overclocking side of it so might aswell save some money and great video as always
bought a dell optiplex 390 mt off ebay K-TEL for 29.99 had a 2120 cpu in there had a gtx 750 i bought ages ago from maplin i never used put in a 240gb ssd which was a freebie as i am into train simulator this was a great buy and upgrade- just need to unload my thinkcentre now running out of space and the mrs getting annoyed
Way back when, those were very solid workhorse CPUs. The lack of modern instruction sets and limitations on clock speed in OEMs are a disappointment nowadays. That said, GTX 970 and RX 470/570 4gb card are dirt cheap and when paired together you get something pretty solid for a young PC gamer playing simpler titles.
It'd be cool if kids learned a little bit of tech to do something like this for themselves--just take their usual family computer and throw in a few parts for maybe under $300 to get a budget gaming PC. I would've loved to have something like this as a kid, as I did my gaming on cheap office computers that were definitely not meant to be gamed on.
I feel like below Ivy Bridge CPUs struggle a bit with Maxwell GPUs and newer. Maxwell added some driver overhead that impacts those older CPUs. I'd go with a GTX 770 max. Maybe GTX 780 or HD 7970. Still the i7-860 did pretty good with the GTX 980. Might me just the graphical intensity of the newerish titles helping the CPU out a bit. The Nehalem CPUs are a bit underrated . Very cheap, you can get a SSE4.2 8 threaded CPU for $20. It'll perform better than most FX CPUs and be much cheaper. Of course, almost anything newer would be better. That GeForce 310 though...
To touch on a couple of things.. I have a 6950 xt and 4k 144hz monitor and ive been playing through Alan Wake 2 with my wife in the evenings.. she gets jump scared every.. single.. time. We laugh at her every time. ❤ My point is that with any decent motion blur a single player game is more than playable in the low 40s and there isnt much improvement to really be had above maybe 70s. On the other side of things an old gtx 980 is fast enough to be relatively competative in competative games. My daughter regularly gets 8 or more kills pn apex legends at 1080p with a rx 480 somewhere above 100fps on a 144hz screen. You really do not need the best or newest hardware or to run at the high dnough fps to enjoy games. That said.. she and i are extremely aware anytime the default monitor settings in windows goes back to 60hz and i personally run sim racing at 200fps so obviously there are huge advantages to having high feamerates in the right scenarios. I got my 6950 xt for $400 so dont let the price tags get you down.. look for deals new and used for just a few minutes a day and you can land a great deal. Paying sticker price is throwing money away 🤷✌️😎
You said it has 3gb of memory, yet I see 2 sticks of Memory in there- did you take the video after you did some of the upgrades? Those old Dell prebuilts weren't too bad. My second PC that runs my laser engraver is an old Dell prebuilt with a 4790, 16gb of generic memory and I added an old R9 Fury Nano to it and it's a decent PC now- overkill for running a laser engraver/cutter
I have one question In DDR4 rams, we have to use it in dual channel to get maximum performance , is it same for DDR5 , can we use different size rams (for example 12 gb 4800mhz + 8gb 4800mhz ) in DDR5 , as the single channel ram of DDR5 performs equally , please make a video and perform a test
I have a GT210 and it is pretty awful by today's standard but will do for Windows 9X and XP gaming. I doubt there are 98 drivers for it so you'd have to use XP.
Converting these dell pcs into a cheap okish pc is perfect to keep in a dorm room paired with a budget monitor for quick gaming sessions.
Yeah that sounds awesome
just got to hope noone plugs in a hair drier and trips the electrics, dorms always have shit low amp fuses.
From my college experience, you might even be able to find many Dell Optiplexes thrown out in ewaste disposal; free computer that usually just needs a graphics card and SSD
@@RandomGaminginHD 8 MB Intel Smart Cache helps the i7-860 out a lot and hyperthreading. I have build with the i7-870 two time with a GTX 970 to sell but a GTX 980 is too rich for an i7-870/860 in my opinion but you got that GTX 980 founders edition for the price of a GTX 970. Well done.
This is 15 years old CPU, and you can still somehow play on it. Imagine what was 15 years old CPU when this came out. It was the original Pentium. It's interesting how PCs are ageing much slower than before.
cuz now for a while i7 6th/7th gen is minimum or recommended hardware to run any game at 1080p low/med and sice those and third gen ryzen are pretty well spread in the world devs have no interest in selling a game only to people with the newest i9 + rtx xx90 gpu
Not that I'm complaining!
They released lot of games back then that could run on poo hardware too.
yes but im more about 2023/2024 AAA titles most of them would run on any 8th gen i7 or ryzen 2000 series cpu ez since we all know 80% cant afford upgreading thier whole pc just for a game@@IvanOoze1990
That is because Intel bribed OEMs then sat on their laurels for 6 years.
i've done something like this recently for my son - i got an old 4th gen i5 dell optiplex mini tower for £60 used on ebay. I added an old 600w PSU and an old GTX 1060 I had spare and bought a second stick of 8gb RAM from CEX for £8. It runs all the game he wants like a dream.
600W? lol
@@BenState you are saying as if he bought it brand new
@@TechnoFreak-IN Im indicating that 600W is massive overkill and will run inefficiently, irrespective of if it was purchased new.
@@BenState the only inefficient thing about it might be that it is old, the less W you use of the powersupply, the cooler and quieter it will run. Although that usually isn't a reason to go overkill on your powersupply
@@trikop7575 Complete nonsense. PSU efficiency peaks at about 50% load and drops off precipitously lower than that.
Oh I just love to see old hardware in action. Always reminds me of the good old days when I just couldn’t afford anything fancy but still had hours of fun.
Gtx 980 the legend!!! The ultimate pin up boy from 2014. Wanted one, just couldn't afford it at the time lol!!!Great build, love to see old PCs get a second life.
This is very similar to my pc! Mines is a little different though.
My specs are:
- intel core i7-950
- Nvidia GTX-970 6:26
- 24gb DDR3 (8gb x3)
- x2 500gb SSDs
- 2tb HDD
- x2 optical drives
The old Dells are certainly the best pc to use as a base chasis as they (at the time) still used standard ATX components, I used one for my first gaming PC and it turned out really good.
Awesome, yeah can’t beat standard form factor!
I wish I could find more of these in the states locally. Every ad I see for pc’s of this generation all look like they have been kicked down a set of stairs.
That depends. Some of the earlier Dells often used BTX motherboards, which can present some challenges.
My first gaming pc was also a vostro but it was one generation newer
The last series of Optiplexes that accepted standard ATX PSU's with the 24 pin power connector were the X010 MT's, which have 3rd Gen CPU's. it's successors, the X020 series, used PSU's with a Dell proprietary 8 pin main power connector, though adapters can be bought online.
First gen chips can be surprisingly capable. I have a X58 build with an Intel i7 970 6cores 12 threads, on a Gigabyte X58A-OC motherboard that is insanely overbuilt for overclocking, 24GB of triple channel ram at 1600Mhz, a GTX 1080Ti, a 256GB SSD and some hard drives. I got the motherboard, cpu, ram and cooler for 100 euros all together. Spent another 100 on a good quality be quiet pure power 11 psu and the SSD. Got a case from an electronics bin. Spent another 80 euros for a broken 1080Ti. Managed to fix it by removing a shorted out VRM mosfet and a current steering mosfet.
Undervolted the card to 875mV to reduce the load on the remaining VRM mosfets and also make it run much cooler. Did a huge overclock of 4.6Ghz on the i7 and now runs blazing fast. I can play almost every modern game in existance at ultra settings and above 60fps, all that for just 280 euros.
Even without overclock it would still be very capable though
Awesome. Overclocking definitely helps too
What the Hell is: "First gen chips" to You!?
@@dallesamllhals9161 It is the same thing as in the video. A first generation core i3, i5 or i7 CPU
Lack of AVX2 support is becoming a real problem. While I have some 2nd and 3rd gen hardware, it will be repurposed for retro gaming and probably a NAS or two. With the way esports are becoming more and more like AAA titles, I expect even those will start requiring AVX2 in the not too distant future. I'm not building any gaming PCs with anything older than Haswell at this point. I also seem to recall MS announcing it would effectively block Windows 11 on unsupported hardware without AVX2 support. This is because AVX2 is also used for cryptography as well as physics calculations in newer games. There were people running 11 on Core 2s 🤦♂
@@dieselgeezer18 Tee-Hee! AMD Phenom II 1100T asking 😛
In my wifes PC we use a x3450 @ 3,85Ghz many years. I bought it for 15euro und use it from 2014-2021. That CPU Series (i7 860/920/xeonx3450) was awesome
Yeah really long lived too. Still got some life left!
Nice old but gold gaming pc right there
Love to see old tech brought back to life
They are still capable of some light gaming and productivity work
I’m surprised a processor without AVX can still run all these titles, actually quite impressed. Really shows how long good hardware is still viable.
what is AVX?
@@sjoerdev Advanced Vector Extensions (avx) extensions to the x86 instruction set architecture for microprocessors
@@jacobgould618 what is it used for?
@@sjoerdev Basically it's a set of instructions that programmers can use that allow a CPU to process vectorizable calculations really fast, but it uses all of the CPU's power. There's also AVX2 and AVX512 (this is what i can find online)
You can just emulate instruction sets and you're good to go.
This was great, I've rescued some Dell 2nd, 3rd and 4th Gen i7 towers and the CPU grunt goes down pretty quickly with these but your first gen i7 is a step slower so not surprised seeing the CPU be the limiting factor most of the time. I use 5600 XTs in mine but for that price, I'd have been ecstatic with the 980. Cheers, mate!
Always a pleasure, I look forward to seeing your next video!
When I picked up a working i3 7100 system last year with drives, RAM and a GPU missing, people on discord told me it's practically e-waste. I equipped it with a fairly new 512GB SSD, 16GB of RAM and a used 4GB 960, all in a nice Sharkoon case tidied up and ready to go. Sold it for a solid 150€ including helping the buyer through the setup of the machine.
Tl:dr, it's completely fair to convert an old system that would otherwise have been thrown away into something that can still play games
Nice :) There’s always a use for something, no matter how old
Bestec broken power supply? More like Worstec. Love the vid, these old Dells hold a special place in my heart for some reason.
That system is shockingly capable for the specs, pretty cool budget build.
I HAD ALMOST THIS EXACT SETUP! Except the PC was an HP 6000 with an i7-870, so just slightly higher clocked than the i7-860. I built a new PC with a mix of spare and new parts and then gave the old HP to a friend of mine. Nice to see that it can still play a couple games fairly well.
it's always nice seeing ancient components still being able to run modern games with acceptable frame rate
I have a 1st Gen i5, 2nd Gen i5 and a 1st Gen i7 sitting around collecting dust, mostly because I use a prebuilt i7 6th Gen Dell SFF and my son uses my old HP prebuilt i7 4th gen, there was nothing wrong with the first 3 other than wanting to update to something more capable, it is good to see your channel giving the old machines extra life.
I used to do this all the time at my local garbage dump. People would throw away perfectly usable systems that just needed a new stick of RAM or a new GPU.
I love these cheap built pc contents.😊
The i7-870 and a 1060 3gb was the first build I tossed together for my daughter before I found a decent am4 setup on eBay and ended up giving her a 6600xt from my wife’s setup and upgraded the her to a 6750xt, gotta make sure everybody is set to game! So very grateful! 😎💯
I had a gtx 980 and I7 870 combo until summer 2023. Was a great little machine. I originally built it in 2014 soon after building a brand new 4790k PC and it made me regret buying the expensive 4790k it was so good, especially when overclocked to 4Ghz with 2400mhz memory.
I've now swapped the motherboard out for the 4790k as I have upgraded my main PC to a 7700x. It's a lot better now. Modern games really take advantage of the Haswell architecture, whereas before there wasn't much in it.
My friend bought a work station, put i think a radeon hd 6850 in it and a SSD. True gamer
This is my exact PC, except with 16GB of Ram and a 2060 Super stuffed in it. That CPU is still pulling its weight surprisingly well for the games I play, but it's high time for an upgrade. You've served me well, Vostro
Excited to see what you go with for the mobo swap in the future! Like I said in the short's comments, these vostro 4x0 series cases are wonderful for sleeper builds, just big enough, largely standard, plenty of opportunity to add air intake and exhaust, just too good.
I know exactly what you mean.
I was honestly hoping you’d put more modern components in it to make a sleeper pc but this works too. Surprised how well the first gen i7 played those games!
did that with a old mac pro (2 Quad Core Xeons and Radeon 5750 1GB) , Runs bootcamp windows and great for gaming
Sick vid, love seeing maxwell/kepler cards
Just a suggestion here. Can you consider adding some text on screen when announcing the specs?
Not that you pronounce them bad or anything but as a non-native speaker and someone who doesn't know the names of all cpus by heart, I had to rewind a few times to catch on 😅
Love your channel, cheers!
Pleasantly surprised to see that CPU, I have a similar secondary PC that is still capable of running modern 3D modeling/animation software. I rarely game but I remember Tekken7 and GTA5 ran decently on it. Specs are
i7 860
16GB RAM
intel DP55WG Motherboard
600W PSU
GTX 1050 GPU
I've built my brother similar pc 5 years ago. MBO had some stupid 8GB limit, but I've bought some cheap Xeon (10€) from AliExpress - 4cores/8threads and OC to 3.6GHz. It works like a charm. I think that the price for all parts was around 90 €. Year later he bought used 1080Ti (I think) and PC works like a charm even after 5 years. After he changes, it will remain for office use at home for our parents. Best PC investment ever.
Throw a Xeon inside and do one more round of testing. I think you'll find results interesting :)
Always live for builds like these. I remember you building a unit way back on this Coolermaster case with an i5 750 and some kind of HD7000 series GPU. This build reminds me of that from your channel back then. Still cool to see these in use.
*Also, if anybody runs into issues with the processor not supporting a game cause if instruction sets.
Get "Intel SDE" or "Intel Software Development Emulator".*
This program is used in Virtual Machines I guess to help programs launch while in a VM.
Now, look up specifically what to run by someone else on exactly what you want ran being a game or program. But this does help.
I used Intel SDE to run Cyberpunk 2077 on a x3323(LGA771 Xeon equivalent to Q6600). Cyberpunk 2077 used to run on LGA775 if I'm right early on. It might not have ran on LGA775 to being with. But armed with Linux Mint, Heroic Launcher, and a GTX 1050 2GB with a modded GPU cooler for extreme overclocks. I could launch the latest 2.1 update.
Now, it wasn't good. Even with latest ultra performance FSR on 720p to 1080p lowest settings. It would average 39 to 15fps. I managed to lock the game to 30fps at 900p. This was best as I could do.
Might try the FSR3 mod I got from a commenter in a NJTech video. Problem is the FSR3 mod does increase fps, yet Vsync goes out the picture. Screen tearing then becomes horrendous. This was with a i5-3570k with RX560D 2GB and my Ryzen 7 1800x with RX5500XT 8GB(both 16gb ram). Might need a certain version of Cyberpunk. But Cyberpunk is super buggy and crashes no matter what I play it on(and not in the Skyrim fun way). Everyone else I've talked to is the same except for when I watch TH-camrs who seem to have zero issues which is completely weird to me considering I was getting the Senior Developers help in the support call to understand why is always crashes on all my PCs on Windows 10, 11, and Linux Mint specifically even though I redownloaded it three times. 3rd time under supervision to make sure it was validated correctly. Still crashed every 10 to 30 minutes. But using Intel SDE on the x3323 with a GTX 1050 2gb and 6gb DDR2 at 667mhz. Crashed but at around 4 to 5 hours. I'll never now why and support has no clue either.
Sorry for the rant. Enjoy the videos all these years. Keep being awesome RGinHD.
I was shocked that the mobo supported 16 gigs of ram! Since it came with 3 originally, I wouldn't expect the board to recognize more than 8.
This is literally the PC I'm watching from.
I built my son a gaming PC for under £200 with an i7 4th gen, 16GB of DDR3 and a 1050Ti and he's happy enough with it. The problem is kids see their favourite streamers/YTers with £3k systems and think this is the norm so they say to ma and pa "I want a gaming PC". Ma and pa then hit ebay and see unscrupulous sellers selling "GAMING PC" with Fortnite logos everywhere and ma and pa think "just what my child wants". The 2nd gen i3, GT710 combo, arrives and poor Johnny can't play anything and that's the reason this video is so good, it shows parents an alternative for their child, you have a good upgrade path at a reasonable cost and that's something your kids can do with help from a couple of videos and some parental input. Stay away from these ebay sellers and their "gaming PC" crap and build it yourself with help from videos like this one!!!!!
100 quid for a decent 1080p gaming PC, that's actually very good for someone on a budget. I remember I had a work PC that was a Dell XPS 9100 with a i7 920, that would be a great base system to do something like this with.
Back in the day when I was a backyard tech, I kept my kids in milk money one year just by replacing those Bestech (sp) power supplies. The problem was so bad that when I would see one I would immediately test it.
That CPU is going to get slaughtered in the third act of Baldur's Gate 3 (the city itself).
Still, surprisingly good results for a such an old machine.
@RandomGaminginHD 8 MB Intel Smart Cache helps the i7-860 out a lot and hyperthreading. I have build with the i7-870 two time with a GTX 970 to sell but a GTX 980 is too rich for an i7-870/860 in my opinion but you got that GTX 980 founders edition for the price of a GTX 970. Well done.
Great video as always. Here is idea for video maybe you could test this cpu with some similarly powerful amd gpu as its known that amd drivers use less cpu power to run, it should give old cpus a bit more room to breathe and maybe remove some stutters caused by cpu.
I have a similarly spec'd old Dell system that I use as my media pc. Its an xps 8100 build from 2009. Almost the same cpu (mine is the i7-870). Still using the ATi Radeon HD6770 that came with it. Only things I've changed are the case and PSU. For storage it has a 120gb ssd boot drive and two 4tb hdds for storage
Makes a pretty good showing all things considered. Also it has the correct CPU instructions to continue on with Windows 11 24H2. However, who knows what Microsoft is going to block next!
For bg3 I'd recommend going into act 3 for benchmarks. its the heaviest area in the whole game in terms of resource usage. It would definitely give a more realistic benchmark because even newer and more modern hardware struggle in act 3. Act 1 and 2 are fairly well optimized and i think could feel misleading to others for benchmarks because of that huge change in performance.
Yeah hopefully I’ll get that far soon haha
I still have thos vostro. Got it at my salvation army for $5 and was surprised that it was fully operational. Gonna get another psu and put my spare gtx 1060 in this bad boy
Good work, most satisfying feel. But man would love to see that mobo and cpu swapped out for an i7 4770 or 4790. The 980 deserves it.
Yeah it definitely would benefit from a faster cpu
I have in my closet a higher tier version of this. A Z400 with a W3680 at 4.2GHz, RX 480 8GB and 3*8gb RAM (I think it's running at 1333MHz since you can't OC the RAM there, only CPU with some tools on Windows).
So this video's build playing decently gives me high hopes. I will check it again this weekend, hope it just turns on.
Scoring a GTX 980 for 40 quid is bonkers all by itself. That system is not a bad machine at all.
Always nice to see old pcs having a second chance! What would you suggest as GPUs to pair an i7 3770k 16gb ram and SSD?(Consider that I have a 1080p 75hz monitor)
I'd love to see what this looks like with a more powerful processor, I think it could run a lot of heavier games more comfortably on 1080p low. The GTX 980 is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here.
It'd be great if more people were upcycling old hardware like this but marketing pushes against it.
Vostros are great!!!! the mobo's and bios all share the dell XPS8300.
I just picked up a vostro 230 with a core2quad 8600, some crappy gpu and 4gb ram for 10 euros. Still runs with the original bestec psu. Probably will add a 12 eur ssd, make it 2x4gb ram, run the win11 update, make sure itll stream yt 1080p smoothly and just sell it. The thing easily has 10 years left as a simple casual browsing / office system, alltho it may need a new psu at some point
Just wished you showed the difference between the original i7-860 cpu and whichever is the maximum supported cpu (i7-870? i7-875K? i7-880?) in the gaming benchmarks, to see what kind of FPS increase they'll get with that GTX 980. Also don't forget to mention this is a Vostro 430 MT (minitower). I have a Vostro 460 MT (2nd gen i7) that looks almost identical to the first gen 430.
I personally look at Haswell as the lowest entry level CPU for gaming. It has AVX2 at full speed along with all of the other instruction set extensions that games use. I have a few x58 boards and chips around and they do work well but you are not going to get the same frames as you would with Haswell. Along with many newer games not wanting to start due to missing instruction set extensions.
ever considered trying to see how Helldivers 2 runs on low end hardware? The game is deceptively demanding
Yeah been meaning to look at it
Good choice using a blower card in a case like that with restricted airflow.
My first PC was a Vostro got it back in 2013,still think I have the case somewhere in here
G'day Random,
Ah the good old days of DELL NOT using mostly proprietry parts so beginers could buy a reasonable prebuilt & then learn to upgrade.
I can not believe, that this old pc outperformed mine for a ~hundred quids
At least this PC forms a good platform to use as a Bedside Computer!
Built one using leftover parts total cost was 130$USD . Used windows 7 on a PC tell 11 hit on a Dell Laptop. So it using Windows 10 is not a real problem.
I'm surprised at how well Baldur's Gate runs on these older PCs.
Usually,my go to tactic with a decent 1156 motherboard is to replace the cpu with Xeon,as fast as i can.
My current rig runs SLIGHTLY oc'ed X3470.
"I won an eBay auction" You have more patience than I do. I always just skip to the "Buy it Now" to avoid the headaches.
Same, anytime I can have the winning bid for 48 hours then those last 10 seconds are like a gut punch.
I once was given a Dell XPS desktop of a similar vintage a while back. It had a small LCD screen on the front, and to my horror when I turned it on it illuminated the dead body of a cockroach under the outer layer of the screen! Disgusting. Harvested the GT 730 and it's my test card to this day.
Good work 💯
*Sketchy sellers:* Grab this sweet deal for an i7 GAMING PCl!
*The i7:*
Good video. I have a Lenovo mid tower with an i7 860 and gtx 1060 6gb in it. I play a lot of Far Cry 5 arcade single player maps on it.
I got a video idea, cable managing old PC case, might be helpful for those with old pc case or budget player with old office pc, cz most of those old pc case doesnt have backside clearance for cabling.
My son still uses our old i5-4460 with Gtx 1050ti Lenovo as his main gaming machine…doesn’t want an upgrade no matter how much I hint lol!!!
I used a 1050ti until last year, it does decently for what it is these days.
I'm surprised this CPU doesn't run into SSE and instructions support shenanigans like my Phenom II X6 1055T on newer games.
Yeah these old Intel chips seem to be ok
HEY! 1100 here! Still have 200+ games working-BUT-NO Time here! 😞
@@dallesamllhals9161 Idk how, but seems like some russians figured the "SSE fix" out to make games like cyberpunk work, not sure about this yet, but u should check it!
1st Gen chips support SSE 4.2, whereas Phenom II and Core 2 do not
I actually have an old Vostro like the one in this video laying around... I should do something similar with it!
i7 860
damn, i remember when it came out. went to toms hardware and anandtech to read about it...
I think the next video you should do is with the price for performance issues with the GT 1030 and the GTX 1050 cuz if you look in some places the GT 1030 is now costing more than a GTX 1050 including at cex
Proprietrary & weird PSU a.k.a the timer firecrackers/bomb 🤣
Eh, I personally wouldn't go for anything lower than Haswell since haswell CPUs have all the currently supported instruction sets required by all games. Still an interesting video and nice to see the old 980 getting some love
would love to see a video on how the i7 3770 is holding up and what games it cant even start
This would make a fabulous WinXP retro gaming rig...
You should downgrade the OS.
it's Alive ! and Not more E-Waste in a skip - Gift it to a Charity Shop...
Looking forward to this one mate ive upgraded a dell dimension 3000 today from a 2.4ghz pentium 4 to an i7 3770 with 16gb ram and the 8gb rx 570
Great upgrade!
@@RandomGaminginHDthanks i plan on bringing it up to an i9 13900f 128gb ddr4 ram and the rx7900 gre when i can afford to could go with the k varient but i dont need the overclocking side of it so might aswell save some money and great video as always
I can see this thing for good lan party box fur Left 4 Dead, quake 3, unreal tournament, and maybe doom 2016
bought a dell optiplex 390 mt off ebay K-TEL for 29.99 had a 2120 cpu in there had a gtx 750 i bought ages ago from maplin i never used put in a 240gb ssd which was a freebie as i am into train simulator this was a great buy and upgrade- just need to unload my thinkcentre now running out of space and the mrs getting annoyed
Way back when, those were very solid workhorse CPUs. The lack of modern instruction sets and limitations on clock speed in OEMs are a disappointment nowadays. That said, GTX 970 and RX 470/570 4gb card are dirt cheap and when paired together you get something pretty solid for a young PC gamer playing simpler titles.
Dell tends to use a lot of proprietary crap in their systems, but props to them for not doing so here.
It'd be cool if kids learned a little bit of tech to do something like this for themselves--just take their usual family computer and throw in a few parts for maybe under $300 to get a budget gaming PC. I would've loved to have something like this as a kid, as I did my gaming on cheap office computers that were definitely not meant to be gamed on.
I have an old i7-860 with a Radeon HD 7870 that I recently stopped using. Makes me think of whom I could give it to/what to use it for.
I feel like below Ivy Bridge CPUs struggle a bit with Maxwell GPUs and newer. Maxwell added some driver overhead that impacts those older CPUs. I'd go with a GTX 770 max. Maybe GTX 780 or HD 7970.
Still the i7-860 did pretty good with the GTX 980. Might me just the graphical intensity of the newerish titles helping the CPU out a bit.
The Nehalem CPUs are a bit underrated . Very cheap, you can get a SSE4.2 8 threaded CPU for $20. It'll perform better than most FX CPUs and be much cheaper. Of course, almost anything newer would be better.
That GeForce 310 though...
To touch on a couple of things.. I have a 6950 xt and 4k 144hz monitor and ive been playing through Alan Wake 2 with my wife in the evenings.. she gets jump scared every.. single.. time. We laugh at her every time. ❤
My point is that with any decent motion blur a single player game is more than playable in the low 40s and there isnt much improvement to really be had above maybe 70s. On the other side of things an old gtx 980 is fast enough to be relatively competative in competative games. My daughter regularly gets 8 or more kills pn apex legends at 1080p with a rx 480 somewhere above 100fps on a 144hz screen. You really do not need the best or newest hardware or to run at the high dnough fps to enjoy games. That said.. she and i are extremely aware anytime the default monitor settings in windows goes back to 60hz and i personally run sim racing at 200fps so obviously there are huge advantages to having high feamerates in the right scenarios.
I got my 6950 xt for $400 so dont let the price tags get you down.. look for deals new and used for just a few minutes a day and you can land a great deal. Paying sticker price is throwing money away 🤷✌️😎
In other words you made almost something like a Steam Deck, in terms of specs.
Im use similiar spex as my daily pc, xeon x3440 with gtx980
You said it has 3gb of memory, yet I see 2 sticks of Memory in there- did you take the video after you did some of the upgrades?
Those old Dell prebuilts weren't too bad. My second PC that runs my laser engraver is an old Dell prebuilt with a 4790, 16gb of generic memory and I added an old R9 Fury Nano to it and it's a decent PC now- overkill for running a laser engraver/cutter
Hi, yo could be try HoloISO in some of your videos, thx for share your amazing job!
I believe the graphic card only run at PCIE 2.0
not bad at all!
I have one question
In DDR4 rams, we have to use it in dual channel to get maximum performance , is it same for DDR5 , can we use different size rams (for example 12 gb 4800mhz + 8gb 4800mhz ) in DDR5 , as the single channel ram of DDR5 performs equally , please make a video and perform a test
I have a GT210 and it is pretty awful by today's standard but will do for Windows 9X and XP gaming. I doubt there are 98 drivers for it so you'd have to use XP.
Hi mate!
Good as usual 🤝✊
Thanks!
@@RandomGaminginHD top Lad
look at that GTX 980 sipping
Great video Steve ❤
Glad you enjoyed it!