best cheap/free scores 1.1

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

The prices of PII/P3 stuff are getting silly now with the whole "collectors" retro PC thing.

yea the p2 and p3 stuff are going for as much as a decent lga775 board now. kinda torn up which to get when they're the same price. the lga775 is obviously faster and more powerful but the p2 and p3 stuff have more retro and nostalgic value... *sigh*

during the pandemic lockdowns in 2020, ebay gave me a $30 off coupon on a purchase of at least $80. really regret it now not spending it on a retro p3 board. didnt think of where i should spend it...

Heck, even 10 is tolerable once I'm done de-garbaging it... but it takes me literally an entire day per one machine to go through each and every setting to do that... so again, understandable why no one wants spinners on newer machines anymore.

probably should write a script or program to do it. much faster if u have to do multiple machines. call it momaka's win10 de-garbaging computer virus! hahaha! hey, not all computer viruses are bad! some of them make your computer faster and better!

AM3 was kind of a sad era for AMD, though not as bad as FM2.

Probably not the best Phenom chip I could get (considering there's the 1060T) but I sense it'll be likely better than a FX chip of the same kind.

It's one of the reason I'm moving to a Phenom X6 - not the best choice but hopefully nowhere near as criminally hot as the FX-4100 I have.

yea, the first phenom wasnt a very good chip. the successor, phenom 2, was a much better chip. it was able to go toe-to-toe with and match intel's core 2 line of cpus. same with intel, their first core cpus like the core solo, werent very good.

[Dan81]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

I'm fairly sure the Core Solos are at best low-end binned Pentiums that weren't good enough to be classified as Pentium nor Celeron chips.

The OG mobile Core Duos (before C2D was given as the final name starting with the T5xxx series) were a good hit tho. I have a HP dv8000 here and they're absolutely amazing, paired with a Geforce Go 7400 (I think, not sure if it's a 7300 or 7400.)

[dmill89]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

I'm fairly sure the Core Solos are at best low-end binned Pentiums that weren't good enough to be classified as Pentium nor Celeron chips.

Core Solos where single core chips of the first generation "Core" architecture (Yonah), essentially the same as a Core Duo but with only one core rather than two. The Pentium and Celeron chips of the time were still using the horribly inefficient "Netburst" architecture. Note both the Core Duo and Core Solo (Yonah) were mobile-only chips (since the hot-running, power hungry Netburst chips were a bigger issue for laptops than desktops), desktop versions of the "Core" architecture wouldn't come along until the Core 2 Duo (Conroe) was released.

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

...until the Core 2 Duo (Conroe) was released.

...and the Conroe was the first CPU of the Core2 generation that was even worth having... I vaguely remember the core 'solo' CPU's...I have never actually seen one that I'm aware of.

[Dan81]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Core Solos where single core chips of the first generation "Core" architecture (Yonah), essentially the same as a Core Duo but with only one core rather than two. The Pentium and Celeron chips of the time were still using the horribly inefficient "Netburst" architecture. Note both the Core Duo and Core Solo (Yonah) were mobile-only chips (since the hot-running, power hungry Netburst chips were a bigger issue for laptops than desktops), desktop versions of the "Core" architecture wouldn't come along until the Core 2 Duo (Conroe) was released.

The Pentium and Celeron I was talking about were also Yonahs. T1300 and (if I'm not mistaken) the whole Celeron M 4xx series.

[dmill89]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

The Pentium and Celeron I was talking about were also Yonahs. T1300 and (if I'm not mistaken) the whole Celeron M 4xx series.

In that case the CoreSolo slotted in between the Pentium and Celeron performance wise (in multi-threaded apps, though back in those days most apps were still single-threaded), but the CoreSolo was a single core version of the "full spec" chip (with 2MB L2 cache like the CoreDuo, but only a single core) officially slotted below the CoreDuo and above Pentium in the Intel hagiarchy, while the Pentium and Celeron were the "low binned" version with only 1 MB L2 cache, with the Pentium being dual-core and the Celeron being single core.


Note: The T1300 is branded a CoreSolo Chip (at least in the US), the T20xx and T21xx were the Pentiums.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us...rly-yonah.html

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare...ntel-Duo-T2450


This was a rather confusing time when buying a CPU as Intel was selling both the Netburst architecture in which Pentium was the "top" chip and the Core architecture (Yonah, and it even extended to the Conroe days with Netburst chips sticking around as a "budget option) in which Pentium is officially the "mid-tier" chip slotted between Core (top end) and Celeron (low end) offerings (though the dual core Yonah Pentiums outperformed the Core Solo at least in multi-threaded applications, despite the Pentium officially being a "lower tier" in the Intel hagiarchy).

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Today's freebie was a 15" HP Spectre (forgot the model), I7-7500 16gb RAM, 512gb M.2 NVMe. 4k display. Guy said it quit one day and wouldn't come back on. Took the bottom cover off and noticed the batt plug wasn't seated all the way.... Reseated and it's been fine. Win10Pro.

One thing I'm confused about... In device manager, it has 2 GPU's, the intel HD and a Nvidia GTX9xx series.... WTF Why both?

[dmill89]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Today's freebie was a 15" HP Spectre (forgot the model), I7-7500 16gb RAM, 512gb M.2 NVMe. 4k display. Guy said it quit one day and wouldn't come back on. Took the bottom cover off and noticed the batt plug wasn't seated all the way.... Reseated and it's been fine. Win10Pro.

One thing I'm confused about... In device manager, it has 2 GPU's, the intel HD and a Nvidia GTX9xx series.... WTF Why both?

Switchable graphics, common on laptops, it will run on the IGPU most of the time to save battery/power and then switch to the dedicated GPU under heavy GPU loading (Gaming, video rendering, etc.) for better performance.

My HP Victus shows the same way with the "AMD Radeon(TM) Graphics" being the integrated graphics on the Ryzen 5 5600H, while the "Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650" is the dedicated GPU.



Interestingly though my Dell Precision M4800 also has switchable graphics (integrated Intel, and an Nvidia Quadro K2100M), but only shows the Quadro in device manager, so it must depend on how the vendor configures the device if both display adaptors show in device manager or not.

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Switchable graphics, common on laptops, it will run on the IGPU most of the time to save battery/power and then switch to the dedicated GPU under heavy GPU loading (Gaming, video rendering, etc.) for better performance.

I'm embarrassed to say that this is the first time I've noticed this! This laptop was made in 2020. Very nicely constructed, all metal body. I looked, and it appears the RAM is soldered to the board, can't upgrade it past 16gb....not thrilled about that, but 16 is plenty.....just the idea that they took that freedom away from me. The NVMe is in a slot. CPU of course is a BGA....but overall, nice laptop...especially for free!

[Dan81]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Yeah. The Victus (as well as Topcat's Spectre) runs on dynamic switching, the M4800 runs on fixed switching of sorts very likely. Thank God they aren't Radeons. Those are absurdly painful to set up in a switchable config, and unfortunately it's not only HPs that would suffer from this - Acer do too.

My faves would be a toss between a Sony Vaio (forgot the exact model number) that's running a 1st gen Core i3 380 + HD5650 chip or a Fujitsu Siemens E751 that features Advanced WLAN, vPro, as well as a SIM card reader. At least the Vaio is built to use the 5650 permanently.

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

A couple of the freebies from earlier....

The Spectre x360 clean install of Win10.



...and the 27" iMac from before running server 2022 natively. No more OSX. I also did Mint on this as well....but ran into a few quirks I couldn't figure out how to conquer....the main one being that the screen brightness is controlled by software. Mint recognized this, but the control was not functional. Windows had the same issue as well, but I found a 3rd party utility that worked it.

[dmill89]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1



List of Items:

1. Emachines T3104, about the only thing special about this one is the fact that it still works, most Emachines of this era faced an early demise at the hands of the infamous Bestec ATX-250-12E power supply, but this one was lucky enough to have a HiPro power supply instead. Though even working a socket 754 sempron is pretty worthless today, though the standard and fairly well ventilated MATX case could make for an interesting sleeper build.
Specs:
CPU: AMD Sempron 3100
GPU: Integrated VIA S3
RAM: 512 MB DDR
HDD: None/removed
ODD: DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo
OS: none installed, windows XP home key



2.HP Probook 6560b
Specs:
CPU: Intel I5-2450M
GPU: Integrated Intel HD 3000
RAM: 4GB DDR3-1333
HDD: 500GB Seagate 7200 rpm
ODD: DVD-RW
OS: Windows 7 Pro

3. Lenovo ThinkPad T520
Specs:
CPU: Intel I5-2450M
GPU: Integrated Intel HD 3000
RAM: 8GB DDR3-1600
SSD: 256GB Samsung MZ7TD256HAFV-000L9 SSD
ODD: DVD-RW
OS: Windows 7 Pro


4. Lenovo ThinkStation P410 Workstation: Probably the real gem of this haul.
Specs:
CPU: Intel Xeon E5-1660 V4 (8 core/16 thread)
GPU: Originally an Nvidia Quadro 600, but I swapped it for a spare GTX 1060
RAM: 64 GB DDR4-2400 ECC
SSD/HDD: 250GB Samsung 870 EVO, 6TB HGST UltraStar 7200rpm
ODD: DVD-RW
OS: Windows 10 Pro







5. Dell Precision M4700: also a pretty decent score
Specs:
CPU: Intel I7-3740QM
GPU: Nvidia Quadro K1000M
RAM: 16GB DDR3-1600
SSD: 250GB Samsung 870 EVO
ODD: DVD-RW
OS: Windows 10 Pro




6.HP Proliant Microserver
Specs:
CPU: AMD Turion II Neo N40L
GPU: integrated
RAM: 4GB DDR3-1600
HDD: none/removed, 4 3.5" bays
ODD: none
OS: none

I'm not sure how useful a server with an old laptop CPU is, but it is impressive how much HP managed to cram in that little box, 4 3.5" drive bays and a 5.25" bay, as well as 2 pic-e slots.

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

6.HP Proliant Microserver
Specs:
CPU: AMD Turion II Neo N40L
GPU: integrated
RAM: 4GB DDR3-1600
HDD: none/removed, 4 3.5" bays
ODD: none
OS: none

I'm not sure how useful a server with an old laptop CPU is, but it is impressive how much HP managed to cram in that little box, 4 3.5" drive bays and a 5.25" bay, as well as 2 pic-e slots.

Good NAS or file server. Don't think it'd take high CPU loads or CPU intensive activities... Is that an ITX motherboard? If so, mod the case and put something good in it.

[dmill89]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Good NAS or file server. Don't think it'd take high CPU loads or CPU intensive activities...

Yes, it could still be useful for something like that.

Is that an ITX motherboard? If so, mod the case and put something good in it.

It appears to be a custom form factor slightly larger than mini-ITX, a mini-ITX board could probably be made to work, though it is a slide-out chassis (and the drive cage and PSU basically wrap around the motherboard) so clearance issues and location of headers would potentially be an issue.

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Modding that to take a different board wouldn't be easy...not sure if it'd be worth the effort there. Even as it is, I could have a little fun with it.

I'd do a different OS drive than what's in the cage. I'd put a 3rd party SAS controller in there, a LSI 9260 perhaps (looks like it'd fit), since the cable going to that drive cage looks to be a standard mini-SAS. This way, easy to run a nice big 4-drive RAID10! Make a mount for an internal SSD and use the one SATA port for the OS.

If you don't want to mess with that little system, keep me in mind.

[Dan81]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Won a Phenom X4 965 w/ ASRock 970 Extreme3 and supposedly 8GB worth of DDr3.

Shame that the chip isn't unlockable, but the mobo might be slightly interesting to toy around with.

[momaka]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

And how many... OK, I still haven't done the tally yet, but I'll try to let you know soon. Probably over PM.

OK, after branching off into 100 other projects while doing this... tally is finally in, and it appears I have almost as many HDDs I'd need... though could probably still use more 3.5" drives for a little redundancy and to upgrade a few existing machines, as I know I have a few duds in my list. I'm surprised at how many 2.5" drives I've collected, though. Well, it's not that many really, but more than I expected anyways. I use these for backups, so they get used up pretty quickly too.

Now just have to tabulate everything from the list and see if I can make a preliminary "match" between the drives I have and the machines they could go into.

Anyways, I'll try to PM you one of these days when I get that done too.

Oh wait, I have to free up space in my BCN mailbox, lol. I guess that has been piling up too. Gotta take a few moments for it too, I suppose.

And done. Got it down to 97%, which is more than good enough for now.

I wouldn't trust a mobo with repaired MOSFETs to run a FX at any rate. Those FX chips are capable of immolating the mainboards if MOSFETs aren't heatsinked.

Challenge accepted.
Gonna try that board one of these days and see if my MOSFET passes the smoke test or not. FWIW, it's lower-specced in some areas compared to the original and has much higher gate capacitance / slower response. But those subtleties reveal that it's also got a much bigger physical die and can handle more energy (and power) than the originals. So I think it stands a good chance. FYI, it's an 85N02 MOSFET from the low-side of the older Xbox 360 motherboard's VRM. I don't think I have burned out one of these yet. They will smoke other MOSFETs but not die themselves, lol.

probably should write a script or program to do it. much faster if u have to do multiple machines. call it momaka's win10 de-garbaging computer virus! hahaha! hey, not all computer viruses are bad! some of them make your computer faster and better!

I'm terrible at programming and writing scripts, though.
Plus, not sure how I'd do it, when there are so many millions of variables with Win 10.
Ugh, it's such a terribly over-layered OS... hence the slugishness.

I vaguely remember the core 'solo' CPU's...I have never actually seen one that I'm aware of.

Same.
I bet they command absurdly-high prices now, simply because they were so rare. Haven't checked though, so could be wrong.
All I know is the single-core king of AMD - the Athlon 64 FX-57, is extremely rare now and indeed does command absurdly-high prices for what it is. I still got mine and it's running dandy. Have an interesting idea for that build, but who knows when I will (if ever) get to it.

1. Emachines T3104, about the only thing special about this one is the fact that it still works, most Emachines of this era faced an early demise at the hands of the infamous Bestec ATX-250-12E power supply, but this one was lucky enough to have a HiPro power supply instead. Though even working a socket 754 sempron is pretty worthless today, though the standard and fairly well ventilated MATX case could make for an interesting sleeper build.

If it has an AGP slot (and I'm pretty sure it does), those are actually getting far from worthless now. More people are wanting Windows 98 machines/hardware, and such machine will do quite well for a high-end Win98 PC, despite being a little bit too new to be considered era-appropriate for Win98. It will also do well for a low-end / early-era XP machine (which is what it was.) So you might want to hold onto that motherboard if you take it out. I see more and more people on Vogons looking for similar hardware, so you could even make something out of it.

Modding that to take a different board wouldn't be easy...not sure if it'd be worth the effort there.

Yeah, OEM HP boards can have you pull your hair out. There's a lot of things they like to do "differently" on some of them.

Could make a great network storage in its current state for someone, though.

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

A couple of the freebies from earlier....

The Spectre x360 clean install of Win10.

Sold this today for a nice chunk....

Today's freebie was a 27" iMac mid2010 with an I5 CPU and 4gb RAM. 1TB spinner. Mint condition. Owner just wanted the data off it. Apparently it won't go any higher than 'High Sierra'....good candidate for a native Windows install or Linux Mint.

...and this thing has been upgraded to the I7-870 @ 2.93, the fastest they were intended to run....I wasn't brave enough to spend $70 for the i7-880 @ 3.06 (the fastest first gen non-1366 CPU)...they don't have a record of being a success in these...silly apple.... The 870 cost me $12 shipped....so the gamble wasn't worth 13MHz... I also bumped it up to 32gb RAM and a 500gb SSD. No idea what I'll do with this, but it's a nice snappy machine!

[Dan81]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

I guess the old folks here will love today's scores, the mainboard in particular.

-micro ATX PC w/ Pentium Dual Core (to be updated once I open it - I can tell the case itself is a Stinkworld) - came with a nice A4Tech silver/black keyboard combo
-ATX PC w/ KME case and PSU, presumably a P4, Pentium D/Dual Core or a Core 2 Duo. I can only say it's a 775.
-cream of the crop - a SDR based Aopen AX4BS socket 478 mobo!!! Even more rare as the VRM caps are entirely good brands - Sanyo WX on the VRM high, and Panny FJ on the low side. Rest are strangely small YEC buggers, but the VRM was a nice surprise. Also came with some SDR sticks and a 1.7GHz Willy.

[grss1982]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Snip...

Now for the Custom in the CoolerMaster case. Given the beige devices and the Zip250, I don't think this is the first/original motherboard used in this build...who puts a Zip drive in a system made this century..lol...it wasn't even hooked up. Best I can determine, this case was made in the early 2000's.

Been a while since I posted here.

Anyway that's a Coolermaster ATCS 200 Case.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Cool...=1089&biw=1920

All aluminum IIRC. Actually wanted one back in the day but it was just so expensive.