Basic i3/i5 motherboard... with IDE?

Sasahara

You could by a 2nd hand SATA 80 Gb or bigger for the price of IDE adapter.


Or buy a cheap 60GB SSD SATA and sell you old IDEs to fund it.


I see you realise buying an up-to-date mobo is better value-for-money in the long-run, so why not with a new HDD as well?

esuhl

Nilrem wrote: »

The problem is that your drive (especially if it's 80gb) is likely to be 5-10 years old, and will have been running for a lot of that time.

It's probably 10yrs old, but I don't think it's been used much. Maybe two years...?

And it might be a bit slow, but with enough RAM in the PC that shouldn't matter too much. I might as well give it a go!

Nilrem wrote: »

Also depending on your chosen OS you could easily end up with 40gb+ being used by the OS and essential apps (a 120gb SSD can be had for around £50 and will likely be 3-5 times as fast, and a lot more reliable).

I'll probably end up using Windows XP and Arch Linux -- each OS (and apps) takes 20GB, leaving 20GB spare (if I split the disk usage 50/50).

Sasahara wrote: »

You could by a 2nd hand SATA 80 Gb or bigger for the price of IDE adapter.

Really?! The SATA/IDE adapter above was about £2.50. Can I really buy a SATA drive for that little?! I didn't think you could get drives smaller than 500GB these days!

And is it worth upgrading an old 80GB PATA drive for an old 80GB SATA one...?

I've never bought secondhand drives before... At least I know my old ones have been stored and handled carefully... :-/

Sasahara wrote: »

I see you realise buying an up-to-date mobo is better value-for-money in the long-run, so why not with a new HDD as well?

The best long-term value-for-money involves getting the best performance for the longest time, for the lowest price. I'm hoping that the high-performance of the Core i3/i5 will make it "good value" as I'll get more years of usage out of it.

The hard drive has poor performance, and might not last that long, but it's free! An infinite value-for-money, surely?!

Like I say, I'll probably get a cheapo adapter for the hard drive and not bother at all with an optical one.

spannerzone

Do you have the i3 or i5 chip or are you buying that too?

I ask because if you are buying a CPU and mobo, you may be better off buying cheaper Pentium dual core, cheaper motherboard and getting an SSD and get performance that'll probably be far better than trying to get a 10 year old hard drive with an i3.

Honestly, once you go the SSD route you'll wish you did it ages ago, it's not just the faster boot time but everything generally runs much better, no deterioration and need to defrag and no hard drive chuttering.

I know this is a money saving site but sometimes you can go too far with cost cutting..... although my 6 year old Dell desktops have had a new lease of life with an SSD and Win7 update so it is possible to extend life out of older PC's but I'd draw the line at using old PATA hard drives to be honest.

It doesn't matter how much ram you shove in a slow old PC, it'll never be a super performer with a modern OS, even XP has it's limits with performance.

esuhl

spannerzone wrote: »

Do you have the i3 or i5 chip or are you buying that too?

I ask because if you are buying a CPU and mobo, you may be better off buying cheaper Pentium dual core, cheaper motherboard and getting an SSD and get performance that'll probably be far better than trying to get a 10 year old hard drive with an i3.

No -- I'll be buying a new mobo, CPU and RAM.

I know it seems crazy to use such an old drive, but I can easily upgrade it later. If I get a Pentium dual-core board/chip, the only way to upgrade would be to replace them...

spannerzone wrote: »

Honestly, once you go the SSD route you'll wish you did it ages ago, it's not just the faster boot time but everything generally runs much better, no deterioration and need to defrag and no hard drive chuttering.

I know this is a money saving site but sometimes you can go too far with cost cutting..... although my 6 year old Dell desktops have had a new lease of life with an SSD and Win7 update so it is possible to extend life out of older PC's but I'd draw the line at using old PATA hard drives to be honest.

Yeah... I know it's not ideal, but I might as well try the old IDE drive first. Even if only to marvel at how much quicker it is with a modern drive when I upgrade later on!

spannerzone wrote: »

It doesn't matter how much ram you shove in a slow old PC, it'll never be a super performer with a modern OS, even XP has it's limits with performance.

That's why I was thinking of getting a i3/i5 chip/mobo etc. That way it won't be a slow old PC any more! Might even get 10 years use out of it as a secondary PC.

If I were to get an SSD, though, my first thought would be to use it in my main PC that I use all the time. No point "wasting" it in a secondary "terminal" in the corner of the kitchen that I'll hardly use much. At least then I could probably take one of the 250GB SATA drives from the main PC for use in the secondary one... Hmmm.... Stop trying to convince me to spend money! :rotfl:

spannerzone

Ah but you can replace a Pentium CPU with an i3 or i5 - they're interchangeable if of the same generation- you could buy a respectable 'Haswell' Pentium and a motherboard and if you really needed to upgrade the CPU as an i3 or i5 will fit if you get the right version. Haswell based Pentiums are just slightly cut down i3's essentially.

Of course it depends on what you're doing, an everyday PC doesn't need an i3, i5 or i7 for the average user but if you do need the extra oomph then of course get one.

I got an i5 (Sandy Bridge) Dell desktop really cheap 2 years ago (Dell Outlet) and the CPU is really excellent but in all honesty 80% of what I do (web, email, letters, excel, youtube, iplayer etc) all can be done on the PC that it replaced which is a Pentium Dual Core 3GHz (E5700 based on the Core2duo series) The i5 excells are processing HD video which I very occasionally edit.

However, the most immedietly noticable upgrade I've done to 2 desktops is add an SSD, the effects are instantly noticable and is almost certainly the best value upgrade for most desktop/laptops. However many are reluctant to get an SSD for some reason or another but wish they'd do it sooner once they take the step.

Anyway, you do what works best for you!

esuhl

spannerzone wrote: »

Ah but you can replace a Pentium CPU with an i3 or i5 - they're interchangeable if of the same generation- you could buy a respectable 'Haswell' Pentium and a motherboard and if you really needed to upgrade the CPU as an i3 or i5 will fit if you get the right version. Haswell based Pentiums are just slightly cut down i3's essentially.

Of course it depends on what you're doing, an everyday PC doesn't need an i3, i5 or i7 for the average user but if you do need the extra oomph then of course get one.

Ooh -- that's interesting. I don't really need the "oomph" of, say, an i5 -- I just thought that the PC would have a longer usable life (and be better value-for-money in the long term) by getting something at the "sweet spot" of performance, rather than something that will just do for now.

Then again, a Pentium G3420 (Haswell) would save a bit of cash, and is probably all I need for a 2nd PC (especially until I upgrade that IDE drive!)

Hmmm... And the Asus B85M-G motherboard looks pretty good for £52...

Oooh... or the Gigabyte B85M-D2V for £38...

Hmph... I see that there aren't XP drivers for those motherboards. Is it possible to get a similar board with XP support? Or will XP perform okay without chipset drivers... I only need it to play Trackmania occasionally. I'll use Linux for everything else.

spannerzone wrote: »

However, the most immedietly noticable upgrade I've done to 2 desktops is add an SSD, the effects are instantly noticable and is almost certainly the best value upgrade for most desktop/laptops. However many are reluctant to get an SSD for some reason or another but wish they'd do it sooner once they take the step.

Stop trying to make me spend money! I appreciate the advice, though. I'm sure it won't be too long before I take the plunge!

I see they have hybrid SSD/HD drives available now... What's the best setup to have -- a small SSD with an HD for personal files, or put everything on a hybrid drive...? Do you need to divert temp file writes to the hard drive to prevent wear on the SSD, or do any other fancy stuff to optimise SSD/HD performance/reliability?

spannerzone

Sorry, I'm not really trying to make you spend more

To keep the cost low I'd personally get a Haswell Pentium for under £40 plus a £40 motherboard which is the same price combined as the cheapest current i3 CPU. It's easy to get CPU comparisions <example>

(Don't forget these motherboards need DDR3 SD ram)

I'm not sure you'll find support for XP now it's been officially consigned to history, you'll have to google the motherboard for that. A quick look at Gigabyte's site for the GA-H81M-H motherboard (£40) doesn't even list Vista support or downloads.

The reason I keep bellyaching about the SSD is that in everyday use you'll likely find a slow/older PC feels nippier with an SSD compared to a newer CPU/motherboard with an old rotary hard drive. While it's not imperative to have SSD at all it is a really good performance kick. You possibly still need a second rotary hard drive for mass storage. I use a 120G Samsung SSD for the operating system (Win7) and a 1TB hard drive for all files including 'my documents', 'my pictures' etc

Cisco001

esuhl wrote: »

Ooh -- that's interesting. I don't really need the "oomph" of, say, an i5 -- I just thought that the PC would have a longer usable life (and be better value-for-money in the long term) by getting something at the "sweet spot" of performance, rather than something that will just do for now.

Then again, a Pentium G3420 (Haswell) would save a bit of cash, and is probably all I need for a 2nd PC (especially until I upgrade that IDE drive!)

Hmmm... And the Asus B85M-G motherboard looks pretty good for £52...

Oooh... or the Gigabyte B85M-D2V for £38...

Hmph... I see that there aren't XP drivers for those motherboards. Is it possible to get a similar board with XP support? Or will XP perform okay without chipset drivers... I only need it to play Trackmania occasionally. I'll use Linux for everything else.



Stop trying to make me spend money! I appreciate the advice, though. I'm sure it won't be too long before I take the plunge!

I see they have hybrid SSD/HD drives available now... What's the best setup to have -- a small SSD with an HD for personal files, or put everything on a hybrid drive...? Do you need to divert temp file writes to the hard drive to prevent wear on the SSD, or do any other fancy stuff to optimise SSD/HD performance/reliability?

Get g3528, which allow overclock.
And get asus motherboard.

i personally use sSD for os and hdd for storage

spannerzone

Good call, the Pentium G3258 is an overclockable (possible to 4.5GHz) so should cater for those that like to tinker. Even without overclocking it'll be a repsectable performer for the average Joe and around the same price as non aniversary edition Pentiums

You'd need an suitable motherboard for overclocking if going that route.

esuhl

Hmmm... The last two (main) PCs that I built were intended to be overclocked, but I just never got round to it! My Core i7 chip runs at about 40C in normal use, so I'm sure there's plenty of room for tweaking there! I really should have a tinker...

But the bits I'm buying are going to be for a "secondary" PC I probably won't use that often. And I'm putting them in an old case, which is spacious, but only has room for three small case-fans... :-/

I'm not sure how much extra heat overclocking would generate...? And wouldn't I need to buy a (more expensive) heat-sink/fan? Or is the stock HSF all you need? Are overclocking-capable boards more expensive too?

According to the link below, the G3258 only supports 1300MHz RAM (versus 1600MHz), and lacks a lot of the instruction-set extensions on the G3240. Is this likely to make much difference to performance if I end up not overclocking?

http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Pentium-G3420-vs-Intel-G3258

Hmmm... If I can't get XP (and hence Trackmania) running on the new system... I'm almost tempted to stick with my slow (8 years old?) Core2Duo laptop for a bit.

Maybe I'll get Windows 8 at some point, so I'll have a Windows 7 licence spare to put on a new machine...

Oooh, decisions, decisions!