Computer nerds?

Started by 94touring, September 22, 2022, 08:50:50 AM

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94touring

I have an old dell inspiron 660 that's about 10 years old that's slower than hell.  Decided I'd see what I could do to make it usable again. I primarily use my laptop for everything these days, especially with traveling as much as I do.  But the desktop is sitting at a desk and has a printer hooked up which does come in handy. Plus maybe I'd like to play some games again.  Started researching and opened the thing up to dig deeper.  Had an i5 3330 which I upgraded to an i7 3770, the biggest this motherboard could handle.  Had 8gb of ram at 1330mhz which I upgraded to 16gb @1600.  Then was the 1tb behemoth hard drive that surely was the main cause for the slowness.  Tossed in a couple SDD drives for 1.25tb.  Figured hell may as well put in a graphics card, so geforce gtx 1650 went in.  Wait, the 300 watt power supply isn't up to task now, 500 watt went in.  End results, it's fast!  Went from taking 5 minutes if not more and painful glitches to load, to loading in under 30 seconds.   I cloned the operating system and hardrive from my laptop and used that as the base to get started.  Tested some new racing game that's apparently all the rage (forza horizon 5) and it does the job without any issues.  I enjoyed the tinkering around so much I want to build another one!

cstudep

Nice, I just recently had to rebuild my desktop computer because the motherboard died. I built it probably close to 10 years ago initially so it needed a refresh anyway. The dying motherboard meant I had to make that upgrade so I also went ahead and jumped up to the latest i7 processor. It wasn't much more money in the end to do that than to try and find an older board to work with what I had. Of course that meant reinstalling windows so I also upgraded the SSD. I already had one in it but it was pretty small only like 250gb I think which at the time was big for an SSD and expensive. My old vid card still worked so I went ahead and kept it, I don't really game much since it's my work computer, I mostly just do 3D design stuff with it, graphics work, and some video editing so it is sufficient for that. I planned to upgrade the vid card but the prices have been stupid on them for several years now. I have not looked lately, have they come down any? Everyone was buying them up to do bit coin mining so a vid card that would have cost $300 2 years ago was more like $1000.

94touring

Yeah noticed some cards were pricey. I got this one for about $150.    It's 4gb of memory which is more than enough for anything I'm doing and if it were to max out on whatever program or game, it would probably bottleneck with the i7 3770 anyways.  I plugged some various scenarios into some online gpu calculators and that's what I determined anyways.

cstudep

By far the worst part of any sort of "upgrade" is getting everything software wise working again. I spent a couple hours o the hardware side, then spend 3-4 days getting all my programs installed and working again. Adobe and Autodesk products are 2 of the biggest pain in the ass programs to deal with and I have several different products from both.

94touring

I had to go into the bios and change the boot settings for the ssd drive.  Otherwise the clone program made it pretty easy.  Did driver updates of course.

cstudep

Yeah if you can clone that is certainly a great way to go. Unfortunately I did not have that option this time. I tried but just had too many upgrades I guess, windows did not play nice and refused to work properly. I fought with it for a while and then just gave up started over.