• Notice regarding image hosts and attachments. See here.

Reviving old rig (Is it worth it?)

JSpecter

JSpecter

JSpecter

Associate
Joined
5 Nov 2015
Posts
20
Hi guys,

I found my old rig in the loft earlier and my brother has been looking for a PC and said he would pay for any work that needs doing to bring it back up to a 2015 acceptable standard.

The rig itself is in a pretty bad state but does switch on and work fine (besides sounding like heathrow airport and missing the side panel and fan) it already has vista 64 bit installed.

He uses CS6 regularly aswell as Sony Vegas and would like to play games on it too.

The question I have is, is it worth doing? and if it is possible what options are there to make it passable to use on a day to day basis.

I've attached pictures of the rig itself and the internal spec

The HDD (250GB) is partitioned already with 78.1GB to system and 154GB to everything else (Could not upload image as I had reached max limit)

Thanks for any help it's much appreciated!

20151216_150039.jpg


20151216_150137.jpg


20151216_150154.jpg


20151221_140948.jpg


20151221_141012.jpg
 
Have a look on the bay, building second hand will save you a fortune!
I would recommend a whole new system, which can be had cheap enough if you bargain round, or if he would prefer, buy knew, that can be done on a tight budget too!
Non of that can be really kept, as today 250gb isnt very much storage, even for JUST games, nevermind the space required for editing.
Let me know if you want anymore help!
 
Don't go wasting any money on that. The E2180 is ancient and hopelessly outclassed by even a low end modern cpu. The psu is rubbish as well (they had a habit of blowing up). You are better off picking up something alnog the lines of a Sandybridge/Ivybridge setup second hand.
 
pastymuncher said:
Don't go wasting any money on that. The E2180 is ancient and hopelessly outclassed by even a low end modern cpu. The psu is rubbish as well (they had a habit of blowing up). You are better off picking up something alnog the lines of a Sandybridge/Ivybridge setup second hand.
Click to expand...

This^^^
 
If it were me I'd be buying new to replace. I appreciate this might be more money than you want to spend but it's just to give you a rough idea of how far your budget can go even when buying brand new. You could easily drop another £100 if not more off of this build by dropping from a quad to a dual core cpu (though I wouldn't recommend it given what you use it for) or by dropping the SSD from a 250gb to a 120gb model.

My basket at Overclockers UK:

Total: £513.19
(includes shipping: £12.30)
​


​
 
It's ok to tinker with, put a free OS on it - but really no point investing in old tech.

Ebay it, you never know someone may be after the ram, mb or CPU to fix someones machine.

Put proceeds towards a rig with a bit of longevity.

:)
 
I'm running something like that as a media PC. I put a cheapo SSD in it with a free Windows 10 upgrade. It barely plays 1080p and is frustratingly slow at web browsing, just forget video encoding and gaming entirely.
 
I used to do a fair bit of Photoshop, Premier Pro, 3DS Max and Blender work on my old laptop which had:

AMD Turion II X2
4GB DDR2 800MHz
Radeon HD4530M

It was acceptable but obviously it was slow to render things, and at times it got a bit bogged down quite badly.

You could freshen up that PC fairly cheaply and it would be a lot better than my old laptop was. :)

Core 2 Quad - £10
4GB DDR2 (2x 2GB) - £10
Cheap SSD (60GB?) - £25
Windows 10 upgrade - £0

beany_bot said:
Rule of thumb. If it's got an LPT printer port..... in the bin.
Click to expand...

My spare PC has an LPT printer port. It also has a pair of quad core Xeons and 22GB of RAM. :p
 
Last edited:
You can't really bring that thing to a 2015 acceptable standard because that processor is going to bottleneck every high end GPU currently available now, but with some more RAM, a graphics card that isn't going to be bottlenecked by that processor, a decent power supply and a proper OS (because who in this day and age uses vista) along with replacing the cooling fans you could revive it, but only for low end stuff which is not going to be good enough for what your brother wants.

For that you really need to start from scratch (since depending on what games your brother plays, a quad core is going to be required as some games won't run if it detects a dual core processor even though there (from what I've heard) some workarounds for that) with either an i3 or i5 on the intel side or a piledriver FX-4, FX-6 or FX-8 on the AMD side (they might not be up with the intel equivalents, but if you want to keep some of the costs down they'll still do what is needed in this instance), and depending on what you brother wants with regards to graphics (like does he want to run games at full HD resolution) then an R9 380 or 390 might be the better option over similarly priced options on team green.
 
It has Windows 7 not Vista, and I can't see why my cheap £40~ suggestion won't bring the machine up to an acceptable standard for most people.
 
If your brother is using CS6 & Sony Vegas atm what is the spec of the machine he is using to run these?

No point in downgrading right?
 
even a cheaply made apu system for around £100 would be miles better than that and still be awfully bad, You'd be better off telling him to save around £300 and getting something half decent like an i3 skylake system or a z97 pentium k
 
Could always pick up a second hand Q6600 go, Ram and board should be able to get it for £50/60 maybe less (seen some recently on the MM).

Although old it still would be a massive upgrade on current spec and dependant on the board could then add a better GPU. Also clock the backside off it once you sort the power supply out.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom