Would you bother upgrading an Athlon II X4 3.0Ghz, for non-gaming?

[VirtualLarry]

Just curious what the consensus might be. Has a GT610 1GB card, 120GB SSD, some HDDs, and 4x4GB DDR2. Running Win7 64-bit.

Usage is basic web / desktop tasks, including Twitch.tv / Flash Player-based 1080P streaming, on a 1440x900 LCD.

Is it too old? Too power-consuming? Or still "just right"?

Power-consumption is of some concern, budget is basically non-existent.

Edit: NB, one time I offered this person a free OCed G3258 rig, or at least mobo / CPU / RAM, but they rebuffed it, not wanting to re-install, I guess.

I replaced the PSU on this rig at least twice so far.

Edit: I would consider an ASRock Deskmini STX rig for him, if he wanted to give up his DVD drive.

Skylake H110 mobo: $50
PSU: $45
case: $30-50
USB AC1200 wifi: $20

DeskMini 110W: $144

Still need:
i3-6100 CPU: $125
16GB DDR4 kit: $60-75
240GB SSD: $60-70
OS: ?

 

[whm1974]

I wouldn't. He is better off saving his money and getting an i3 based system.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Sorry, I should have said "upgrading FROM" an Athlon II.

Meaning, should the system be replaced with something a bit newer, and preferably lower-power?

Although, suggesting usable upgrades to the current PC (240GB or larger SSD, faster video card - like an RX 460, etc.) is fine too.

Mobo is an ASRock AM2/AM2+ 780G board, with four DDR2 slots, which are already maxed out, thanks to some cheap Chinese ebay DDR2 4GB "AMD only" sticks.

If the current platform was upgraded, then the 16GB of RAM could be kept, whereas replacing the entire platform / PC would require re-purchasing some 16GB of RAM. (Not super-expensive, around $60-70, but still.)

Edit: I think it's this board (either the 780G, or 785G):
http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/A780GMH128M/index.us.asp

The board takes Phenom II X6 CPUs, and I have a couple of boards with Thuban 1045T 2.7/3.2
Ghz Phenom II X6 CPUs in them that I could let go of.

I'm not certain that would improve web browsing that much with Firefox, but perhaps newer versions that are going to be multi-process, finally, like Chrome is?

And I could add a GTX950 / RX 460 dGPU to it, to improve the video-decoding, if necessary.

I dunno, it's a sort of semi-ex-friend of mine. We had a falling-out a week or two ago. I'm not currently talking to him, but he's been looking to possibly upgrade his PC.

I had given him what is essentially a clone of his current PC, with a GT740 1GB GDDR5 video card, as a sort of gaming rig.

Or would it be best just to replace the whole thing with a Skylake i3-6100 rig? (My current go-to system, for people that can afford it. A great all-around CPU / iGPU. Can even play Skyrim at 1080P on iGPU.)

Edit: If I went with the Skylake G4400 or i3-6100 in an ASRock DeskMini STX rig, then he would most likely be getting Windows 10, which he may or may not like, because it's a PITA to install Win7 64-bit on a Skylake rig, especially if you don't or cannot connect a SATA DVD-RW drive, like on the DeskMini.

Edit: What about a REFURB i5-2400 / i5-2500 / i7-2600 Dell / HP rig? Would that make any sense? Could you get one complete (sans SSD) for $200, with CPU / RAM / PSU / HDD, and possibly get a case / PSU that would allow for a dGPU, even maybe a low-profile 750ti?

Edit: Maybe something like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...refurbished_desktop_i5-_-83-283-516-_-Product
Or would that be enough of an improvement over Athlon II?

 

[whm1974]

If you are going to have your friend buy a refurbished system, then I would check the check the specs on Newegg very carefully. Sometimes you can find real good deals for not much more then the one you linked to.

Also take a look at Dell's website and techbargains.com. They have decent sales all the the time.

 

[Iron Woode]

My former HTPC was an Athlon II x3 455 (unlocked 4th core), Asus M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3, 4GB DDR3 1333, HD6450, 2TB hdd, DVD all in a Antec case. Worked like a charm and played everything I threw at it. Quiet too.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Just curious what the consensus might be. Has a GT610 1GB card, 120GB SSD, some HDDs, and 4x4GB DDR2. Running Win7 64-bit.

Usage is basic web / desktop tasks, including Twitch.tv / Flash Player-based 1080P streaming, on a 1440x900 LCD.

Is it too old? Too power-consuming? Or still "just right"?

Power-consumption is of some concern, budget is basically non-existent.

Edit: NB, one time I offered this person a free OCed G3258 rig, or at least mobo / CPU / RAM, but they rebuffed it, not wanting to re-install, I guess.

I replaced the PSU on this rig at least twice so far.

Edit: I would consider an ASRock Deskmini STX rig for him, if he wanted to give up his DVD drive.

Skylake H110 mobo: $50
PSU: $45
case: $30-50
USB AC1200 wifi: $20

DeskMini 110W: $144

Still need:
i3-6100 CPU: $125
16GB DDR4 kit: $60-75
240GB SSD: $60-70
OS: ?

If budget is really non-existent, then the answer is "no." It's a serviceable enough machine - 16 GBs of RAM and an SSD address the primary concerns I'd have with a computer that age.

For office/desktop use and usability, I'd maybe be interested in a 1080p display.

If it were me, I'd probably:

Skylake H110 mobo: $50
G4400: $58
16GB DDR4 kit: $60-75

The case is irrelevant. If you've replaced the PSU twice already, dude probably needs a power filter or a UPS, not a new PSU.

Once you're on a modern platform, you can upgrade to an i3 / i5 later if you need to. The Pentium uses a lot less power, has about the same multithreaded performance as the Athlon, and blows it away in anything single-threaded, so it should "feel" a lot faster for desktop use.

 

[VirtualLarry]

If it were me, I'd probably:

Skylake H110 mobo: $50
G4400: $58
16GB DDR4 kit: $60-75

The case is irrelevant. If you've replaced the PSU twice already, dude probably needs a power filter or a UPS, not a new PSU.

Once you're on a modern platform, you can upgrade to an i3 / i5 later if you need to. The Pentium uses a lot less power, has about the same multithreaded performance as the Athlon, and blows it away in anything single-threaded, so it should "feel" a lot faster for desktop use.

Well, I gave him a UPS that I had spare, some time ago, but I only convinced him to hook it up recently, after a thunderstorm glitched the power, and took out his most recent PSU. (That I replaced with one with a 5-year warranty, thought I don't know if they cover "thunderstorm damage".)

I was basically thinking the same thing, as far as platform goes. Only, I was thinking of going smaller, with an ASRock DeskMini STX, if I was going to go with a Skylake CPU, and use the iGPU.

Then again, there is the expansion potential with a desktop rig, and maybe he wants to keep his DVD drive handy.

I do have a spare Asus H110M-A mobo, with one 4GB DDR4-2133 DIMM installed.

And I do have some 1080P 19" LCDs that take DVI-D and VGA, and some HDMI-to-DVI cables. (No speakers, but he's got those already.)

Edit: Addendum: Is the i3-6100 iGPU faster than a GT740 (GTX650) 1GB GDDR5 card? I've seen benchmarks that suggest that the i3-6100's iGPU is faster than a GT610.

 

[Loser Gamer]

That thing has 4 cores @3.0. It's faster than needed for web browsing and video watching. By the time you shell out for a new system and wait for the energy bill to return the cost of the new system I'd say you'll be waiting a long time just to break even.

 

[tcsenter]

For some reason plugins like Flash and certain scripts always yield higher CPU or even RAM utilization on Windows 7 (at least for me, using Firefox) than for Win8.1 or 10. So a better upgrade here might be the OS. A little better graphics card might help but nothing else that I can see ought to be deficient in the described usage. e.g. something with 96 Cuda cores or equivalent instead of 48, which is pretty anemic.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, my "semi-ex-friend" got back to me recently, I guess he still wants to be friends.

Anyways, if I had my druthers, I would swap the whole dang machine, for one of my freshly-built G3258 @ 4.0Ghz rigs, throw in a GTX950 and a 240GB SSD (his current SSD is a 120GB), G3258 mobo already has 8GB of DDR3-1600, running at 1333 (G3258 can only run 1333 RAM, or 1400 if chipset strap slightly OCed, but that interferes with the core clock OC.) The G3258 CPU + board are probably nearly two years old at this point, but they run like new, and unlike "SKY OC" for Skylake locked CPUs, the G3258 was meant to be OCed, and can still utilize the iGPU when doing so.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Well, my "semi-ex-friend" got back to me recently, I guess he still wants to be friends.

Nah. His computer broke.

Anyways, if I had my druthers, I would swap the whole dang machine, for one of my freshly-built G3258 @ 4.0Ghz rigs, throw in a GTX950 and a 240GB SSD (his current SSD is a 120GB), G3258 mobo already has 8GB of DDR3-1600, running at 1333 (G3258 can only run 1333 RAM, or 1400 if chipset strap slightly OCed, but that interferes with the core clock OC.) The G3258 CPU + board are probably nearly two years old at this point, but they run like new, and unlike "SKY OC" for Skylake locked CPUs, the G3258 was meant to be OCed, and can still utilize the iGPU when doing so.

You'd, like, charge him for that, right?

 

[tcsenter]

Did you do any memory performance testing on those 4GB DIMMs in configuration? There are ways DRAM can be misconfigured by BIOS (MTRR and such) that can significantly impact performance. With 4GB DIMMs never becoming mainstream I'm wondering how good is the BIOS support for them.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Did you do any memory performance testing on those 4GB DIMMs in configuration? There are ways DRAM can be misconfigured by BIOS (MTRR and such) that can significantly impact performance. With 4GB DIMMs never becoming mainstream I'm wondering how good is the BIOS support for them.

That's a really good question. I didn't do any performance testing of the sort, though I did do a Memtest86+ of all the sticks, I think. Or maybe just a Win7 64-bit boot-time Memory Test. He hasn't had crashing, but sometimes the whole PC goes a bit slowly, especially when booting up, which is kind of strange, because of the SSD.

Also, when I navigate to his Downloads directory, the icons on the downloaded .EXE packages, take a while to fill in properly. Like some sort of icon-cache loading delay issue.

I don't know if those issues point to his SSD, or something like the DRAM being partially uncached somehow.

But this is an AMD rig, and MTRRs are an Intel thing, aren't they? Does AMD have an equivalent? I haven't really done any low-level programming on AMD CPUs.

Edit: The 120GB Crucial M500 SSD, is probably only filled to 50-60GB full, so it's not nearly as full as his 30/32GB OCZ Agility drive that he used to have, that was like 27-28GB full, and was "pausing" while watching (downloading) streaming video, probably because it ran out of OP sectors on a regular basis, and had to GC on the fly.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Nah. His computer broke.

Nah, he didn't say anything much about his PC when he got in touch with me. Which is kind of funny, because he usually does need some sort of tech-support when he calls me.

You'd, like, charge him for that, right?

He doesn't even manage to pay his rent and electricity and cable bill; I don't know how I would end up charging him for it. A couple hundred bucks would be nice though, that would pay for the CPU / mobo, and the video card (well, almost). Then, there's the RAM, the DVD-RW, the case, the PSU, the SSD... ah well.

Edit: He paid me back some small money he owed me. Maybe he could pay for a newer PC. He does work.