"New" old PC

[Sportsman]

For the past few years I have been using an old Dell workstation as my desk top PC and a very good buy it turned out to be, fast reliable and quiet. But, all things die and a motherboard problem did for it when it was 11 years old.

So, I have just bought a slightly newer one. This one is only 6 years old.

Because I could scavenge hard drives and video cards from the old one all I needed was the chassis with m'board, a hex core Intel Xeon CPU and 12gb DDR3 ram. Total cost for this was just under £200.00

It is up and running now. It is unmarked inside and out. It is quiet, stupidly fast and built like an architect designed brick built outside WC.

Bargain of the century as far as I am concerned.

If you are in the market for a reliable, powerful, fast desktop, then can I suggest you contact these people.

http://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/

I have no connection to them other than that of an extremely pleased and satisfied customer.

[corydoras]

Hard to fault Dell. What model did you get?

[Sportsman]

Precision T3500

[chesters1]

Unfortunately the run fast until you have used them for a month or so then windows insists on handling your files its way.my user file is now over 90gb why?

Why wont windows use the original files why does it need to make copies of everything?

When i did a full rebuild i chose an octo core cpu ,2gb (now 4) graphics card and 16gb of memory ,fine for a month then it starts slowing down to the speed of the one i replaced ,windows is just a middleman it just saves you typing a line of code to start a program so in essence it could be tiny not several gb of rubbish you never use.

Like firefox they start of lean and mean then try to get clever putting in features few will ever use and they get vast and bloated

 

My sister likes her HP and my neice Dell but they are not a lot of use to me ,cases far to small and strange psu's with no power and some have risers to fit the cards at an angle which isnt much use and usually just two bays for hard drives /dvd drive which in this day and age is stupid

Even worse is hardly any external slots for fan controllers or media drives etc

My case has 4 3.5" and 1 2.5" external bays and the bottom 2 pinch 2 internal bays ! Full tower next time again i think i need 6 internal bays and 5 external ones at the same time!

Damn main pc has been on two days trying to download a 55gb update to a game ,at <2mbs it takes a while!

Chap just dropped of a copy of win10 he downloaded in ten minutes! bastard!

Edited September 1, 2017 by chesters1

[corydoras]

T3500 is a tower. Do Google image search. A few years ago Sportman's would have cost £1,000+

[chesters1]

Not sure what cost then has to do with now?

A ford car cost xxx in the past but its scrap now

Theres just two external bays in a photo i have found theres also towers and towers and if its a unusual shaped psu then its limited to what you can put inside .

My point wasnt about the pc but what i expect from a pc ,my last one had quad sli for instance this needs plenty of room to house the gpu's in the internal drive bays so in my case room for those plus the hdds as well

You can easily pay a grand or more for a pc now but it will be half that in a year because you are paying a premium price for a niche product.

I had a armoured laptop used in the first gulf war it no doubt cost a small fortune its worth nothing today except as a paperweight.something top spec then has less power than a kids toy now

 

Anyway back to pc's in general you have a quandary while a pc may run fast in its initial version of windows if you upgrade windows then it will probably slow down because microscoff insist on bloating their windows ,you also have a problem if the old hardware needs new drivers ! Fine if the company update them buggered if they dont ,if you keep thevoriginal windows you could also come a cropper if you buy a new graphics card or bit of hardware and the company dont release a driver for the older windows.

 

I had to install a second boot drive many years ago so i could use my trusty A3 printer on win98 while i ran xp because HP refused to update the drivers and my sister had to eventually buy a new pc because her machine couldnt run the program she uses to move her pictures of her new camera .Other from that her pc ran fine with what she used it for.

 

She now wisely has the old pc as standby she uploads all her stuff to the cloud (lucky she has fiber) so if new pc crashes she can use to old one until brother fixes new one ,she is self employed and machine is part of her job ,she can get round the camera issue by removing the card and use a reader in her old machine but has a slight problem the editing software isnt the same as the new version so confusing lol

Edited September 2, 2017 by chesters1

[Sportsman]

I know that there are many bigger, faster, more powerful computers than mine, but not many for £200.

Chesters1, if you want big, try this one.

Two CPUs and 4 hard drives in an enormous case

http://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/dell-precision-t7500-a-grade-configure-to-order/

[chesters1]

Very nice for my sister who juggles pictures about but infact its a mini tower so not a full tower ,the mobo is a bit limited i think but i like how they house the hdd's sideways.

Trouble is modern gpu's are as big as the early ones in lenght most about 10" long taking 2 slots width .The mobo can handle the power 120w each though so good there .theres also finding a mobo with full speed pcie slots some have 1 running at x16 and another at x8 (your links has 2 at x16) but i had a hell of a search finding a mobo that run 4 at x16

Just a dual sli this time so much easier to find gpu's hang on in price as they are very limited run now so no "old" new ones to get at bargain prices anymore

Processing power at 2.9ghz each is slow now but two could make up for it but i doubt many programs can run two processors my son had a server box a decade ago and it was slow and safe but no good for games .

Trouble is its the weak points that count everything will run at the slowest speed rather than the fastest if theres a bottleneck .

The game i am upgrading at the moment grumbles at my octocore cpu running at 3.6ghz which is the bottle neck in mine ,the only way to get round it is new mobo and new memory because my 16gb is probably to slow for new mobo and a shiny new cpu that will be slow next year lol

Theres also my point about PSU's mines 1kw (from the old quad sli machine) it may not fit in !

 

Not dissing your machine its good for what your using it for ,if games hadnt been invented a 486 would still be fine for most things lol i could type out a letter on it fine you could on a zx spectrum as well! But along comes progress and your 240k hi def picture you can throw about the screen becomes a 25mb raw photo you would wait a week to see appearing.(except ofcourse it wouldnt the software then wouldnt know what it was lol)

My machines been on for days ,very noisy even with its 5 fans on slow and makes a great room heater running doom ,once ofcourse its fricking updated!

 

The only off the shelf pc i ever had was a ibm xt ,since then i have built my own ,the last one had a full tower as it needed 4 cards but i got away with a 3/4 tower but its very tight i will go full tower again next time you can sort the wires out tidier !

PS my old gpu's wouldnt have run in your link machine they were 150watts a peace luckily technology can save on power today as my new ones are 120w

 

Strange the dell specs list it as 120w max each pcie slot but the page in the link say 150w !?! Unfortunately a 90 day warranty explains the competative price of the ssd! Thats my next step up once they drop to prices i can afford new

Edited September 3, 2017 by chesters1