Right alot of you know my rig in my sig is currently on a ship to New Zealand leaving me without any gaming lifestyle and a basic laptop to browse bit-tech hardware porn for the next 12 weeks. Knowing my dilemma my lovely, kind and sympathetic mum who recently purchased a laptop said shortly after i arrived in New Zealand to me on the phone in our general conversation "Tony i have a PC at home i do not use any more, it cost me a fortune and is pretty fast, when you get here from Auckland its all yours to do whatever you want with it" My eyes lit up thinking my mum may have a half decent pc after being conned by some sales rep into spending $1000s on a top of the line gaming pc when all she did was browse and instant message. The day arrived when i got to my mums to stay for a bit while i settle back into New Zealand and sort out work, she showed me into the computer room and i was greeted by this Aside from the serious cable management failure on the outside mum mistook my tears of despair as tears of joy and left the room proud as can be.. Looking at the specs in the below photo i was contemplation if it was worth more as scrap as it weights a ton or would be more useful as a door stop Now however i decided i would upgrade this old relic just for the sheer hell and fun of it but this is where i need your help! - i am sad to say if you were born after 1995 you were more likely interested in cartoons than PCs when this baby was bought out, i personally was around and using PC's when this was built but i was a AMD fan at the time so know little about post i-series Pentiums or there upgrade-ability. However i am going to give it a shot as i have some old xp games i like to play which i can no longer play on win 7 and i am up for a challenge but need some help in part recommendations. So lets open this old girl up Well after voiding the HP warranty obviously never been opened before i was greeted by the usual interior of a relic HP. After fighting with the huge plastic air intake duct which had clips harder than me after a wet dream featuring Angelina jolie in it i managed to get the duct off to find the usual 7 years worth of dust bunnies around, a quick clean i have the below to examine. I can see three pci's and no APG, i did grin at the old IDE cables thought, i have two memory slots to play with as well and a processor that is hidden under a transformer sized passive cooler. So firing this b*tch up i could hear the old girls hard-drive frantically spinning, it sounds like the hard drives arm has rusted solid as the last time mum told me she used this was Sept last year as it ground and groans shaking the desk in the process thinking this may take a minute i went to get a cup of tea...still loading...ok make a sandwich....still loading...walk the dog, have a shower, watch the news, browse bit tech on my lappy and eventually i get into the desktop. Running system spec - Motherboard - Intel Corp NBGV - Northwood/Brookdale-g validation board ?!!? Processor - Intel(r) 4 2.40ghz/400mhz CPU Northwood Ram - 256mb ram DDR SDRAM pc2100 133mhz 184 pin GPU - 64mb integrated Intel® 82845G Graphics controller Sound card Realtek ac97 audio thought the screen does come with a pair of Harmon/Hardon speakers Hard disk - Samsung 40gb ide old filing cabinet Monitor - HP pavilion m703 - can achieve a res of 1280x1024 at 60hz Things i want to upgrade: CPU - can i do something with the heatsink here and add a fan of some sort, was this CPU over clockable? GPU - What was a great PCI graphics card in its days? HDD - Obliviously a newer/newish IDE HDD with a higher RPM this thing is going to have. RAM - http://www.upgradecomputermemory.co...ion-Desktop/Pavilion-500-Series/Pavilion-564a seems to be the general mem spec up to a massive 1gb. Budget - a tenner should do it? but no budget just need get some idea's especially around the GPU on getting this baby bought up into the 18th century to play some old school xp games. As i said in the title it was a challenge
By the way mum said i could keep the desk as well which has massive's of room so at least i got something useful that i can use when my rig eventually arrives.
Awww! At least your mum tried But seriously though - 12 weeks?? It's not that long. Suck it up dude. Either discover casual gaming or go buy an Xbox, because there's nothing you can do on that machine to game on it - its best use now is adding a SATA card and making it into a server. It doesn't even have an AGP port and the PSU will be made to ONLY power the components in it.
True true, thought as i said i have a stack of old xp games i wouldn't mind for nostalgic reasons playing again, even if its throwing in some ram and a old pci card, if it fries the PSU in the end well no real loss.
I only recently moved from a Pentium 4 machine to the rig in my signature. They are utterly useless for gaming. They struggle to play HD video. You might find a legacy graphics card for the machine but Bindibadgi is right, you're not going to do any better than console-quality graphics and you will not be able to play any newer games just because of DX support. If my memory serves me right, none of the Intel motherboards were able to overclock the Pentium 4. I used my old p4 machine for programming websites. It was perfectly fine for this task but it struggled with anything other than CS 1.6 and video greater than DVD resolution. I think the original xbox was better for gaming. At least she tried and perhaps you'll find it useful. My family member was bragging about their 'solid drive' (ssd). Turns out it was only 20GB and their only drive and they had 25kb free space... turns out they generally don't know a thing about computers.
Cheers for the above at least its a start, i think some people are thinking too seriously re "is it worth it" this is just a "for fun" project brining a old rig to life for the sake of doing it, i dont want a xbox or console etc, even when my rig arrives i will still be upgrading this old beast just for the sake of it, then at least i can donate it to a good cause like a womens refugee or a church community place for internet access...remember for me its only going to play old school XP based games mostly late 90/early 2000 games think like Mechwarrior: mercs and C&C era i have laying about- so the old 256mb PCI cards would do, issue is i cannot remember what were the good cards of the time. Just thinking of something like this for a GPU card http://www.dealextreme.com/p/nvidia...i-video-card-with-dvi-and-s-video-ports-34468
Look @ this http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2010/12/24/his-launches-pc-5450/1 maybe get a 80gb sata hard drive and one of the ide to sata converters...
Even better than the IDE to SATA converter could be a PCI SATA card with RAID support. I don't know how many PCI slots you have to play with though or if you need to add more basic things already like WLAN or basic LAN networking cards. RAID 0 can speed things up considerably.
Don't want to be cruel or anything, but how much did your dear mother spend on it? Nonetheless, your best choice is the PCI HD 5450. You might be able to play 6-7 y.o. games. But can it play Crysis?
Nope it cant but my current rig will As for how much she spent on it, don't know i have spent the last 10 years living and working in the UK, see no reason to ask her such a question really its not really my business but guessing as she has all the HP printer, scanner and screen to go with it, likely alot from a retailer...cheers for the recommendation.
