For older systems, use a custom debloated windows 10 version like ghost spectre and disable the spectre and meltdown mitigation with a program called inspectre. This will improve CPU performance and reduce ram usage.
I picked up an HP Elitedesk recently for £80. It has an i7 8700, 40GB Ram and a Quadro P620 graphics card. I think it must be a misprice as I bought it 1 minute after it was listed. Fair play they sent it out and it works. Honestly worth scouring eBay.
@@TechLabUKluckily my lunch break at work started the exact moment it was listed! No SSD or hard drive included so not sure if that pushed it into another category for the seller. They sell thousands of electronics so might have had some apprentice just listing stuff😂
@@bauer9101 RTX 3050 6GB tbh. You can get them new from Amazon for around £148. May sound a lot but considering pre-owned GTX 1050Ti's and 1650's seem to go for nearly that they are worth it.
Nice, had nearly the same pc dumped on me a few weeks back. I3 2100, same motherboard only the cheap m-atx version with a single stick of 8gb ram. Gtx 730 and cheapest of cheap cases nest to a f-tier psu. Bought the i7 3770 with its stock intel cooler for $25, put a extra stick of 2gb ram in it for dual channel that i had laying around and a gtx 780. Not sure if you are still using the intel cooler that came with the i3 but that cooler is never going to be silent. Got the stock i7 cooler with the cpu that has the copper core but even this thing is loud at all times. Although i gave it a tiny "oc" by upping the front side bus in bios to 106 mhz making the i7 go stable at 3.92 ghz base and 4.13 ghz turbo. I think everyone playing around with extreme budget systems like these should give it a oc to get the most out of it. Mind you upping the fsb makes everything attached to it go faster like ram and north bridge.
Good video. That video card probably draws too much power/amps for that psu, are 1060 3gb cards dirt cheap in the U.K? 1650/1650 Super's? Add something like that with maybe a 16gb ram upgrade and you're done.
My oldest sons first gaming PC was an Alienware Aurora from that era with an i7 2700k, 120mm AIO, 8GB RAM and two GTX 645 cards in SLI, it was a real beast for its time, and remained relevant for years. Of course his PC was about $2000, the one you are working on was likely about $350 and another $100 for the GPU. We are kind of spoiled now that even a Ryzen 3 or i3 is perfectly capable of proper gaming, 10 or 12 years ago that wasnt the case.
I had a thermal ghost 7770 1GB and my mate bought it off me a good ten years ago ... its still running quite well all it needed was new thermal paste quite impressed which i did when i sold it on
With Windows 10 approaching EOL and Windows 11 not really an option due to fairly heavy system requirements (and requiring "hacks" to get working) it would be interesting to see a round up of some Linux distros for gaming on older hardware. With the rise of Proton and the work Valve has done pushing SteamOS, Linux gaming is becoming more viable. The likes of PopOS, Manjaro or EndeavourOS are gaming focused with various pros and cons and maybe a more viable option for older hardware especially with the impending EOL of windows 10
Playing around with an i5-3570S and Quadro K2200. I was able to get playable experiences on Far Cry 6, Cyberpunk and Borderlands 3. That is, if you consider a steady 30fps 'playable'. Considering I first played DOOM (the original Shareware release) at 18fps on a 386, 30fps is playable for me. Running unlocked in those games with a non-HT quad core leads to stutters. In the aforementioned games, some type of resolution scaling was necessary, as were low settings. BL3 was more like low-medium. In all three, the CPU was seeing high utilization but never became a bottleneck really. Not with a 30fps cap. The larger issue is the DX feature level and those games are at the upper end of what you can play. Most AAA titles released this decade require feature level 12.0, 12.1 or 12.2. But the hardware will run anything from the 2010s at 1080p with at least 30fps and at 60fps in the vast majority of games and much higher framerates or even do 1440p in titles from the early 2010s or older. It even supports PhysX so you can play Darkest of Days (and probably several other games from the '00s) which can only run on a PhysX compatible GPU.
This reminded me as time goes on, I forget all about previous gen chipsets and ram. We found a F2A78M-HD2 motherboard that had an A7700BE cpu in it. I will update the bios and find an old monitor to see what this thing does. This must have been one of our older sons pcs from a decade+ back. It has just been in the loft in a graveyard of old pcs and back up parts. I was astonished when I found people are still using/selling these parts. Your video prompted me to go dig as we keep the boxes of the components boxed with each pc we retire to the loft of the forgotten and dusty. The craziest thing in the rig was the 2 R9 280 gpus. I am feeling like our son didnt need that power to play WoW in 2014. Maybe an early flex? lol Cheers for the throw back. HL2, good times Edit, the processor bothers me as I think it was an apu not cpu so I am more confused why he had 2 GPUs. The little mobo does support 3 screens and I seem to remember him having 3 ancient not so flat acer screens on his desk.
It's amazing how many people are still using these things. Every time I publish a video on something older I get a lot of people who are still using it all commenting. Happens every time I post / publish anything about the AMD FX CPUs, soooo many people are actually still using them which is awesome to see.
Awesome video. Love the upgrade who says you have to spend alot of money to have fun with PCs. I like that you take rigs that some would write off as not fast enough or too old and give them life again. What to upgrade next? Different GPU is the first thing that comes to mind. Maybe something with 4gb vram, thats not too expensive. Im guessing the PSU may need changing to do that. Adding some new silent cooling could be nice, if its running hot.
We do it just for fun tbh. Not sure on what's next for this system tbh. For a new GPU the PSU will have to be changed as it's not great so might start there. Have a number of other systems turning up soon so will what comes with them.
@@TechLabUK oh cool more systems. That sounds good too. If your plan is to buy cheap systems with different CPU/mobo etc and see how they perform then that's great too. Love seeing these older systems.
@@Jwalker76 It's been a while since I have even been able to find cheap systems, the whole GPU boom didn't help as everything went crazy but managed to find some interesting pieces recently.
@@TechLabUK yeah I was in the new GPU market when the crypto mining boom started. Me being dumb thought prices have to go down soon, then the prices of GPUs just exploded. Was another 2 years before I could afford a GPU again.
I bought an untested motherboard bundle for £1 on eBay. It worked fine and had i5 3450, 8GB DDR3 (4x2GB) and a 120GB 7200rpm HDD. Bought a very old case with PSU for £3 and a working GTX 650 for £5. With postage the system cost £15 so far. Will I upgrade it? Yes of course I will but it games just fine for what it is. Of course I cant trust that PSU...
Earlier this year I upgraded a old PC it had a i5 2500 8GB of RAM and a GTX 660 and I upgraded it best I could ended up getting a i7 3770 from CEX and was going to buy 2x 8GB stick of RAM from CEX but with each item having a £3 delivery fee it ended up being cheaper to buy brand new RAM from amazon and also got a small GPU upgrade for cheap upgraded to a AMD RX570 and I swapped the old SSD a very old 120GB intel SSD for a brand new SSD and kept the old hard drive as extra storage. The person it was for seems very happy with it and it plays everything they want to play and now I have a bunch of parts I have no use for lol.
Well, you could always hunt for more cheap parts and use them for server, network storage, your own custom Linux box, router or whatever . Lots of things actually do not require that much computing power.
I think 40amps on 12v rail are fine for 7870. Maxed cpu and gpu are ~ 90w+150w. You coukd undervolt both and keep the same performance to feel extra safe. I7-2600's have replaced the Q6600's. Outside 3A gaming are still nice
I have 2 suspicions about the wild FPS fluctuations and stuttering. 12v voltages on the PSU are out of spec starving the system of current. I'll assume the PSU is about a decade old and doesn't have the greatest capacitors, filters etc on top 10K + hours of operating time. Additionally not enough RAM still. I have a similar era secondary system I use for legacy music recording hardware and multiboot Win XP and Win 7 with an i7 4770 16gb ddr3 1333 and a rx550 now (used to be a 1060 switched out for lower power consumption and lower noise) and I don't recall such wild frame dips for games of that era. This was back when it was a gaming PC. I also don't believe that games of this era are affected by being on HDD's at all. I mean no-one had ssd's when the i3 2100 or Spec ops released nearly 15 years ago, and to my knowledge only a handful of modern games - Starfield being the most notable, absolutely choke being on HDDs
Very nice for a cheap older game rig! Makes me wanna replay Black Mesa. I think it'd be cool to see a video where go thru your favorite older games. Cheers!
@@dotxyn I have thought about that kind of video in the past, didn’t realise people were interested as I am often laughed at but will take a look to see what I can do 👍
Put an ssd in this with 16gb ddr3 an old i7 2700k and you have yourself a decent little old rig.. cex sells them for buttons.. also when you say your not running anything new lol have a look at the i7 2700k and gtx 1060 benchmarks it will play any game for buttons
Yeah, never trust bad reputation power supplies. Even more so when they are many years used. It's one of the most classic mistakes one can make. I remember people doing them even in the early 90s. Though to be fair the power supply situation was worse back then. Thanks for the video. One suggestion, when testing games, unless you are getting terrible performance, try to do more outside of rooms/corridors test. Small rooms, corridors, etc usually get higher framerate unless there are special graphics which are more demanding. Having said that, I don't remember anything like that happening in the last 30 years, but I am sure there are more modern examples.
Maybe add a cheap 1050ti and a newer psu? Could probably even go for a 1060 3Gb but would you really want to? Makes me shake my head seeing an i7 for such a small amount of money. I lasted after them in the worst way, just could never afford them 😅
@@1Fracino definitely needs a new PSU, I was going to go for a bigger gpu but the PSU would probably explode so wasn’t worth all the extra spending to just get it fixed. Maybe next I should go for a new psu and gpu.
@@WnDTech Not sure where you get your info lol but we don't get CPUs, Motherboards, GPUs or anything like that for free. We don't even get these things sampled for review so it's a graft and grind to get them. Paypal donation link in the channel description lol
Would it be worth the extra 16USD, which is the price of a pair of brand new 8gb Corsair Vengeance ram sticks where I am from though? 2nd hand might be a cheaper option, but I have a pile of broken sticks that put it just a little above 2nd hand PSU's and HDD's in terms of durability.
I have seen an Ebay store actually list an old system like you have there with Quadro cards as a "gaming" PC for upwards of $300 smh. I have several Haswell K series CPU, (I7-4790K, I5-4670K) motherboard, 16gb ram and graphics card combos that would work out well in that case.
@@konstantinlozev2272 Oh man that brings back some memories. I will get the game, think I only have the remastered version at the moment which is intense lol
@@TechLabUK If I have to be honest, the best fitting game for this GPU Radeon HD 7850 2GB is Far Cry 3. I bought it that HD 7850 with the exact purpose to play Far Cry 3. And it was an AMD bundle with that game at the time.
For older systems, use a custom debloated windows 10 version like ghost spectre and disable the spectre and meltdown mitigation with a program called inspectre. This will improve CPU performance and reduce ram usage.
I picked up an HP Elitedesk recently for £80. It has an i7 8700, 40GB Ram and a Quadro P620 graphics card. I think it must be a misprice as I bought it 1 minute after it was listed. Fair play they sent it out and it works. Honestly worth scouring eBay.
That's a great price tbh. I have been looking for one of around that spec and I can't find anything close to that price. Well done, awesome score.
@@TechLabUKluckily my lunch break at work started the exact moment it was listed! No SSD or hard drive included so not sure if that pushed it into another category for the seller. They sell thousands of electronics so might have had some apprentice just listing stuff😂
@@bauer9101 Will make a great system to be fair.
My dilemma now is looking at all the overpriced low profile graphics cards to get it up and running.
@@bauer9101 RTX 3050 6GB tbh. You can get them new from Amazon for around £148. May sound a lot but considering pre-owned GTX 1050Ti's and 1650's seem to go for nearly that they are worth it.
Nice, had nearly the same pc dumped on me a few weeks back. I3 2100, same motherboard only the cheap m-atx version with a single stick of 8gb ram. Gtx 730 and cheapest of cheap cases nest to a f-tier psu. Bought the i7 3770 with its stock intel cooler for $25, put a extra stick of 2gb ram in it for dual channel that i had laying around and a gtx 780. Not sure if you are still using the intel cooler that came with the i3 but that cooler is never going to be silent. Got the stock i7 cooler with the cpu that has the copper core but even this thing is loud at all times. Although i gave it a tiny "oc" by upping the front side bus in bios to 106 mhz making the i7 go stable at 3.92 ghz base and 4.13 ghz turbo. I think everyone playing around with extreme budget systems like these should give it a oc to get the most out of it. Mind you upping the fsb makes everything attached to it go faster like ram and north bridge.
Great video, I love the budget stuff
Good video. That video card probably draws too much power/amps for that psu, are 1060 3gb cards dirt cheap in the U.K? 1650/1650 Super's? Add something like that with maybe a 16gb ram upgrade and you're done.
Great video bud.
My oldest sons first gaming PC was an Alienware Aurora from that era with an i7 2700k, 120mm AIO, 8GB RAM and two GTX 645 cards in SLI, it was a real beast for its time, and remained relevant for years. Of course his PC was about $2000, the one you are working on was likely about $350 and another $100 for the GPU. We are kind of spoiled now that even a Ryzen 3 or i3 is perfectly capable of proper gaming, 10 or 12 years ago that wasnt the case.
That would have been a monster back then. Yes, we are quite spiled now really, so many great options new and used.
Your son maybe spoiled 😅...
I had a thermal ghost 7770 1GB and my mate bought it off me a good ten years ago ... its still running quite well all it needed was new thermal paste quite impressed which i did when i sold it on
I love these kinds of videos!
Then stick around because I have a bunch of others on their way :D
@@TechLabUK I don't move
With Windows 10 approaching EOL and Windows 11 not really an option due to fairly heavy system requirements (and requiring "hacks" to get working) it would be interesting to see a round up of some Linux distros for gaming on older hardware. With the rise of Proton and the work Valve has done pushing SteamOS, Linux gaming is becoming more viable. The likes of PopOS, Manjaro or EndeavourOS are gaming focused with various pros and cons and maybe a more viable option for older hardware especially with the impending EOL of windows 10
Playing around with an i5-3570S and Quadro K2200. I was able to get playable experiences on Far Cry 6, Cyberpunk and Borderlands 3. That is, if you consider a steady 30fps 'playable'. Considering I first played DOOM (the original Shareware release) at 18fps on a 386, 30fps is playable for me. Running unlocked in those games with a non-HT quad core leads to stutters.
In the aforementioned games, some type of resolution scaling was necessary, as were low settings. BL3 was more like low-medium. In all three, the CPU was seeing high utilization but never became a bottleneck really. Not with a 30fps cap.
The larger issue is the DX feature level and those games are at the upper end of what you can play. Most AAA titles released this decade require feature level 12.0, 12.1 or 12.2. But the hardware will run anything from the 2010s at 1080p with at least 30fps and at 60fps in the vast majority of games and much higher framerates or even do 1440p in titles from the early 2010s or older. It even supports PhysX so you can play Darkest of Days (and probably several other games from the '00s) which can only run on a PhysX compatible GPU.
This reminded me as time goes on, I forget all about previous gen chipsets and ram. We found a F2A78M-HD2 motherboard that had an A7700BE cpu in it. I will update the bios and find an old monitor to see what this thing does. This must have been one of our older sons pcs from a decade+ back. It has just been in the loft in a graveyard of old pcs and back up parts. I was astonished when I found people are still using/selling these parts. Your video prompted me to go dig as we keep the boxes of the components boxed with each pc we retire to the loft of the forgotten and dusty.
The craziest thing in the rig was the 2 R9 280 gpus. I am feeling like our son didnt need that power to play WoW in 2014. Maybe an early flex? lol
Cheers for the throw back. HL2, good times
Edit, the processor bothers me as I think it was an apu not cpu so I am more confused why he had 2 GPUs. The little mobo does support 3 screens and I seem to remember him having 3 ancient not so flat acer screens on his desk.
It's amazing how many people are still using these things. Every time I publish a video on something older I get a lot of people who are still using it all commenting. Happens every time I post / publish anything about the AMD FX CPUs, soooo many people are actually still using them which is awesome to see.
Awesome video. Love the upgrade who says you have to spend alot of money to have fun with PCs. I like that you take rigs that some would write off as not fast enough or too old and give them life again. What to upgrade next? Different GPU is the first thing that comes to mind. Maybe something with 4gb vram, thats not too expensive. Im guessing the PSU may need changing to do that. Adding some new silent cooling could be nice, if its running hot.
We do it just for fun tbh. Not sure on what's next for this system tbh. For a new GPU the PSU will have to be changed as it's not great so might start there. Have a number of other systems turning up soon so will what comes with them.
@@TechLabUK oh cool more systems. That sounds good too. If your plan is to buy cheap systems with different CPU/mobo etc and see how they perform then that's great too. Love seeing these older systems.
@@Jwalker76 It's been a while since I have even been able to find cheap systems, the whole GPU boom didn't help as everything went crazy but managed to find some interesting pieces recently.
@@TechLabUK yeah I was in the new GPU market when the crypto mining boom started. Me being dumb thought prices have to go down soon, then the prices of GPUs just exploded. Was another 2 years before I could afford a GPU again.
I bought an untested motherboard bundle for £1 on eBay. It worked fine and had i5 3450, 8GB DDR3 (4x2GB) and a 120GB 7200rpm HDD. Bought a very old case with PSU for £3 and a working GTX 650 for £5. With postage the system cost £15 so far. Will I upgrade it? Yes of course I will but it games just fine for what it is. Of course I cant trust that PSU...
Earlier this year I upgraded a old PC it had a i5 2500 8GB of RAM and a GTX 660 and I upgraded it best I could ended up getting a i7 3770 from CEX and was going to buy 2x 8GB stick of RAM from CEX but with each item having a £3 delivery fee it ended up being cheaper to buy brand new RAM from amazon and also got a small GPU upgrade for cheap upgraded to a AMD RX570 and I swapped the old SSD a very old 120GB intel SSD for a brand new SSD and kept the old hard drive as extra storage. The person it was for seems very happy with it and it plays everything they want to play and now I have a bunch of parts I have no use for lol.
Well, you could always hunt for more cheap parts and use them for server, network storage, your own custom Linux box, router or whatever . Lots of things actually do not require that much computing power.
@@aleksazunjic9672 True but I have no use for something like that at the moment but I will hang on to the parts for now.
I think 40amps on 12v rail are fine for 7870. Maxed cpu and gpu are ~ 90w+150w. You coukd undervolt both and keep the same performance to feel extra safe. I7-2600's have replaced the Q6600's. Outside 3A gaming are still nice
I have 2 suspicions about the wild FPS fluctuations and stuttering. 12v voltages on the PSU are out of spec starving the system of current. I'll assume the PSU is about a decade old and doesn't have the greatest capacitors, filters etc on top 10K + hours of operating time. Additionally not enough RAM still. I have a similar era secondary system I use for legacy music recording hardware and multiboot Win XP and Win 7 with an i7 4770 16gb ddr3 1333 and a rx550 now (used to be a 1060 switched out for lower power consumption and lower noise) and I don't recall such wild frame dips for games of that era. This was back when it was a gaming PC. I also don't believe that games of this era are affected by being on HDD's at all. I mean no-one had ssd's when the i3 2100 or Spec ops released nearly 15 years ago, and to my knowledge only a handful of modern games - Starfield being the most notable, absolutely choke being on HDDs
Very nice for a cheap older game rig! Makes me wanna replay Black Mesa. I think it'd be cool to see a video where go thru your favorite older games. Cheers!
@@dotxyn I have thought about that kind of video in the past, didn’t realise people were interested as I am often laughed at but will take a look to see what I can do 👍
@@TechLabUK Bro your videos are great. Screw the haters. Keep it up.
@@dotxyn Thanks. Will keep it up :)
Put an ssd in this with 16gb ddr3 an old i7 2700k and you have yourself a decent little old rig.. cex sells them for buttons.. also when you say your not running anything new lol have a look at the i7 2700k and gtx 1060 benchmarks it will play any game for buttons
Great work getting it going. Is there somewhere we can donate these old PC's to (in UK)?
Yeah, never trust bad reputation power supplies. Even more so when they are many years used.
It's one of the most classic mistakes one can make. I remember people doing them even in the early 90s. Though to be fair the power supply situation was worse back then.
Thanks for the video.
One suggestion, when testing games, unless you are getting terrible performance, try to do more outside of rooms/corridors test. Small rooms, corridors, etc usually get higher framerate unless there are special graphics which are more demanding. Having said that, I don't remember anything like that happening in the last 30 years, but I am sure there are more modern examples.
Yeah, I was watching the PSU on this. Might upgrade that next. I tend to test games live where ever it loads but will try and diversify it.
@@TechLabUK Thanks.
Maybe add a cheap 1050ti and a newer psu? Could probably even go for a 1060 3Gb but would you really want to? Makes me shake my head seeing an i7 for such a small amount of money. I lasted after them in the worst way, just could never afford them 😅
@@1Fracino definitely needs a new PSU, I was going to go for a bigger gpu but the PSU would probably explode so wasn’t worth all the extra spending to just get it fixed. Maybe next I should go for a new psu and gpu.
@@TechLabUK Yeah definitely! Is still surprising how good those older i7's are.
Good video. Keep upgrading
Not sure what I will do with it next tbh. Might use it as an example of something, no point really upgrading it further due to how old it is now.
@@TechLabUK naa keep going. Max it. 😉
@@WnDTech What you thinking? Intel Core i7 3770K, 32GB RAM and an RTX 4090?
@TechLabUK sure, you got all them free GPUs right ? 🤣
@@WnDTech Not sure where you get your info lol but we don't get CPUs, Motherboards, GPUs or anything like that for free. We don't even get these things sampled for review so it's a graft and grind to get them.
Paypal donation link in the channel description lol
Try updating the graphics card.
Maybe the ram to 32 gigs
I would just like to see the potential of the system. Thanks for the ♥️
Just to be safe, just change the PSU and CPU cooler. Intel cooler are loud and can't cool anything, really.
I'd put 16gb ram in it then retest those games.
Would it be worth the extra 16USD, which is the price of a pair of brand new 8gb Corsair Vengeance ram sticks where I am from though?
2nd hand might be a cheaper option, but I have a pile of broken sticks that put it just a little above 2nd hand PSU's and HDD's in terms of durability.
Linux is shouting for this computer, you would get much less OS system usage, maybe allowing for better gaming performance.👀
Now add a rtx 4090 in this pc and see what happens
That would be really interesting tbh.
the mother of bottleneck
@@hansmaker1236 I think the PSU would explode before we got to see that lol
Windows 11 will run fine on this PC . I have an i5 - 2500 CPU, 16 Gig RAM and SSD and Win 11 runs fine. Not a gaming PC .
he should have used 16 gb ram instead of 8 gb,and 2 gb ram on the gpu is way too low in 2024,minimum is 6 gb.
I could have used an RTX 4090 but it wasn't the point of the fix. We just wanted to get it working properly for as cheap as possible.
There are literally thousands of games that will run happily on this configuration, not everybody plays the latest games.
@@mashk Old games are the best games too.
@@TechLabUK as i understand it the ram was 2 pounds!
16gb of RAM Will do Diference and if possible a 8gb grafic card Will do the Diference ....
I have seen an Ebay store actually list an old system like you have there with Quadro cards as a "gaming" PC for upwards of $300 smh. I have several Haswell K series CPU, (I7-4790K, I5-4670K) motherboard, 16gb ram and graphics card combos that would work out well in that case.
@@Alpha-ms9nj would be great systems.
The game to test here is Crysis.
For the memes OFC.
@@konstantinlozev2272 Oh man that brings back some memories. I will get the game, think I only have the remastered version at the moment which is intense lol
@@TechLabUK If I have to be honest, the best fitting game for this GPU Radeon HD 7850 2GB is Far Cry 3.
I bought it that HD 7850 with the exact purpose to play Far Cry 3. And it was an AMD bundle with that game at the time.
@@konstantinlozev2272 I will look out for it, haven't played that one in ages and if memory serves it was one of the best.
@@TechLabUK It was part of a very aggressive AMD "Never Settle" bundle that had that mid-high-range card sold for usd 250 and a top game for free.
@@konstantinlozev2272 Love getting games for free from AMD, last games I got through one of these was Dead Island 2 and The Collisto Protocol.