Gadgetory

so if you have an aging desktop PC maybe five six seven years old even like this one here you might be at a fork in the road deciding should you build a new one from scratch or should you spend some money on it and upgrade it well there are pros and cons to either of those paths but today we're gonna be exploring the latter and seeing what the best way to go about upgrading this system is in hopes of transforming it into a relatively decent gaming PC I mean it's really easy to throw a bunch of money at a system like this in hopes of making it faster but if you don't know exactly which areas could use the most improvement then you could be wasting your money at the same time so hopefully I'll be showing you guys how to get the most bang for your buck when upgrading an old desktop like this speaking of which this is the Dell Vostro 470 pre-built desktop I bought this recently on Craigslist for a hundred and fifty bucks this was the same rig that was featured in my gtx 16:50 video go ahead and check that out if you haven't yet but this is actually a pretty solid build especially for the price I paid for it we have a core i5 3450 that's a quad-core CPU for logical cores turbos up to 3.5 gigahertz of course it's a little bit older third gen Ivy Bridge but it's honestly not too bad for a gaming CPU here in 2019 we have eight gigs of system memory in a weird configuration we have two two gig Stix and one for gigs pic of different frequencies and we'll talk about that more later there's a single 750 gig 7200 rpm mechanical hard drive with our operating system and pretty much everything else on it adèle 350 watt power supply and no discrete GPU you can see that's just integrated graphics we're running off of Intel HD graphics so goes without saying that when I first got this rig on day one it could not gain worth a damn what's important to note here though is that the system has good bones it has a lot of potential and room to grow the CPU and the motherboard the platform in general is pretty strong still so we don't actually need to swap out anything in this build I'll only be adding parts to it which is gonna save us a lot of coins and I mean you could argue that if you're swapping out the CPU and motherboard you're essentially building a new PC anyway so the other thing is that bringing that cost down not having to replace anything just adding to it also keeps us from spending too much money on this really old system I mean we want to bring it up to speed and all but you don't want to dump more money into it than it's really worth with that said the first thing I upgraded was the graphics now if you're trying to upgrade an old system like this and you don't about gaming then you can probably skip the video card upgrade altogether because it's really the main benefit that it's offering but if you are trying to do some gaming with your old dilapidated machine then dropping in a discrete GPU is probably one of the most sensible things you can do for the system but there's a couple things that we have to bear in mind before we decide to throw in any old GPU because not any old graphics card is going to work for starters the computer case needs to be able to fit the actual card physically so the first thing I looked for was PCI slots at least two of them on the back of the case because we have a two slot design card and then I did a quick test fit to see if we had enough clearance for the length of the card as that's usually the dimension that runs into the most problems interference wise fortunately our card fit no problem so the next thing on our checklist was the motherboard and whether or not it had a PCI Express slot at least for modern-day GPUs are gonna need a PCI Express slot whether its Gen 2 or Gen 3 shouldn't matter too much fortunately our h77 Express board does have a PCI Express slot the last thing you ought to check for video card support is the wattage of your power supply to make sure that it actually has enough watts to drive the card if you're not sure you can look up the minimum required power supply on the manufacturers website and also that it has the physical connections or plugs in order to drive the card so our card our rx 570 has a single 610 PCIe connector and fortunately we have exactly one free PCI Express connector coming from our power supply so we're pretty much good to go for our GPU a particular brand of rx 570 is the sapphire pulse ITX and I picked it obviously over the GTX 1650 because a it's about 10% faster on average and B it's much cheaper in fact it's a lot cheaper if you're ok with going second hand because the rx 570 has been out for a lot longer than the recently launched gtx 1650 which means it's really easy to hunt one of these down for a good price in the second-hand market i actually got mine on ebay for $85 so that was just a Buy It Now price I didn't have to bid for it or anything that's almost half the price of a GTX 1650 brand-new so I was pretty happy about that the next thing I upgraded in the system was memory we have eight gigs like I mentioned which is fine for a super budget entry-level machine but if you want to do any kind of multi asking or if you just want a little bit more breathing room having more than eight gigs is certainly helpful here in 2019 upgrading the memory makes a lot of sense here because there's such a broad range of benefits that go far beyond gaming pretty much everything you do with a computer you know running tasks and stuff eats up a certain amount of RAM so whether you're gaming or not having additional system resources in the form of memory is going to benefit the system overall now just like the video card you have to go through a kind of compatibility checklist as well so the first thing is does it have an empty dim slot for you to populate and is it the right type the memory on this motherboard or that supported by this board is ddr3 and sure enough we have one spare ddr3 dimms slot open now if you're replacing all the memory modules with new sticks then capacity is not too big of a concern just by the amount of RAM that you need and you should be good to go but if we're adding to existing Ram modules like we are today then you might wonder if you need to match the same capacity of the existing sticks the short answer is no you don't really have to for example in a weird configuration like this where we have two two gig sticks and one four gig stick for I mean for starters they're already not matching and the system runs perfectly fine but you could easily put an eight gig stick in that fourth slot and everything should work without a hitch what you should look at more closely than the capacity of the modules you're upgrading is the speed or the frequency because at the end of the day your system is going to run all of your memory sticks at the speed of your slowest stick so for example our four gig stick here is rated at 1600 megahertz and our to two gig sticks are rated at 1333 what that means is the system is gonna run all three of those sticks at the lower 1333 speed so this is gonna factor into your buying decision because you don't want to spend extra money on a faster stick when it might be running at a slower frequency anyway so something to bear in mind could save you some additional coin and for our purposes I purchased an 8 gig what was it a time tech I've never used this brand before I hope hopefully it doesn't die on me it's an 8 gig ddr3 module at 1333 that I picked up for 30 bucks so relatively affordable again going for dirt cheap upgrades here so even though we're still gonna be running all of our sticks at that lower speed of 1333 we'll now have 16 gigs of usable memory that's gonna give us a lot more freedom with how we use our rig the last upgraded part that I threw in the build was an SSD and I'm sure a lot of you guys saw this coming because booting off of the spinning rust mechanical hard drive is painful it's just painfully slow these days I mean booting a slow load times are slow everything just feels bogged down and SSDs are super cheap right in-house so it's hard to justify not adding one to a system like this plus it's kind of like memory in the sense where it just speeds up your overall system essentially your system just feels much faster all around now SSDs today take on many different form factors but if you're gonna be upgrading a system like this I would highly suggest going with a two and a half inch SATA based SSD a because they're really cheap that being said you can find you know em two drives that are that are super cheap nowadays too but there's a much higher chance of connector compatibility and inform factor being supported with an older system if you're using a SATA drive so we actually do have a free SATA port on our motherboard for the transfer of data and we have at least one free SATA port coming off of our power supply for power so that's pretty much it it's a fairly slim checklist to see if an SSD is right for your old build however it's also worth checking if the chassis has mounting points for a two and a half inch drive if it doesn't it's not necessarily a deal-breaker because SSDs are so thin and relatively small especially if you get some adhesive velcro you can pretty much stick it anywhere you want and since SSDs don't have any moving parts you don't have to worry about it being completely fixed to the chassis in case it moves around it's not going to get damaged or anything like that so I did in fact yet a two and a half inch SATA based SSD I went with the Patriot memory burst 120 gig capacity of course capacity is going to be up to you for the most part make sure at the very least you have enough for your operating system and at least a few frequently used applications but I got this drive for just $20 on Amazon I believe so that brings the total cost the total cost of this entire system with the upgraded parts to 285 dollars which is right in there in terms of console killer territory I mean I don't are there any consoles better that cheap or cheaper I don't really keep up with console prices but I typically consider as a three to four hundred dollar range to be console killer territory and this goes well blow that at just 285 so very impressive and also goes to show that you can build something like this if you're comfortable with buying from a secondhand market as most of these parts are pre-owned guys if you want links to the upgraded parts I'll put them in the description if I remember but I think without further ado we can throw those parts back into the system fire it up and see what it's like the game on this thing alright it's looking really good the system's booting in like a third of the time that it took with the mechanical hard drive it's super fast and obviously the whole system feels a lot snappier program is just launched like that and we're getting into games a lot quicker too everything's looking really good we booted with 16 gigabytes of system memory no problems there so we have a bit more overhead now I don't have ran anxiety anymore and of course our RX 570 is doing a bang-up job it's pairing really nicely so far with our core i5 Ivy Bridge quad core CPU and I tested four games so they were doom and csgo both of those were running at max settings or ultra if we're talking about doom Resident Evil 2 the remake that was tested at high to very high settings across the board and then we had shadow of the Tomb Raider which I had to dump down to low settings because that is by far the most graphically intensive game on this list it also means we were nearing console territory with the the graphical fidelity in that particular title whereas all the other games looked extra crispy which was really nice to see all the games saw well over 60 FPS on average there were a couple exceptions csgo was more like 100 to 200 FPS because it's not super demanding and in shadow the Tomb Raider there was this one little area that just completely crushed the game it was getting like 22 FPS at some point it was very brief but it did happen and it wasn't pretty the rest of the time though all the titles ran beautifully including Shadow the Tomb Raider it was just kind of amazing that I was gaming on the seven-year-old Dell pre-built that had just been given a little bit of TLC and could not distinguish it from say a five six maybe even a $700 gaming PC doom was the biggest memory hog out of the four it ate up nearly seven gigs of system memory and that would have been an issue had we only had eight gigs of RAM in here but bump it up to sixteen gave us peace of mind and additional Headroom so that if we wanted to do some multitasking in the background we could easily do so now probably goes without saying that our case for the Dell Vostro here is not one of very thoughtful airflow there's only one exhaust fan at the rear it's 80 millimetres no other fans in the entire chassis and the ventilation slots the front here are extremely limited and sort of closed off so I was actually happy to see there are temperatures for CPU and GPU didn't suffer too badly our CPU is getting anywhere from the 50s 60s which is not too shabby and our GPU hovered comfortably in the 50s and 60s and I think into the 70s for Shadow the Tomb Raider it was also nice to see virtually no CPU bottlenecking especially because we're talking about an older CPU that's an Intel Core Ivy Bridge processor third gen from years and years ago and our RX 570 isn't a brand new card or anything it's been out for a while but it's certainly more recent and newer than our CPU so it's nice to see the CPU keeping up just fine certainly a testament to the strong IPC of Intel Core processors even in their early days in fact we we stayed GPU bound more or less the entire time as you can see from the clips here our GPU civilization was that 100% more or less the majority of time but that's it $285 console killer what insane what crazy value oh my god yeah you know it's not pretty okay it kind of looks like my butt hole at the same time this has to be the best bang for the buck system I've ever had the privilege of working on at least in the top two maybe top street cop to at least top two you know if you're gonna take a lesson away from this video it would be that if you have an old aging dilapidated rig maybe consider checking out the second-hand PC market before you take it to your local waste center you never know what you can find so guys I hope this video was somewhat interesting maybe a little informative and let me know what you think down it comes below thanks for watching pass a like on it before you go get subscribe for more tech stuff coming at you really soon buy a frigging shirt screw with confidence right now cool I love hats that's my best Lyle impersonation that I've ever done it probably can't get much better than that he will be very offended that I just did that but I'll drop a mercy link in the description or you can just head the bit with tech if you're interested guys thank you so much have a good one and I'll see y'all in the next day