Post by Brad Nelson on Oct 10, 2021 10:36:41 GMT -8
My nephew built a new PC for his dad so I inherited an old HP computer. We got this computer (ostensibly for the business but really for my brother's eBay business and such) about six years ago from OfficeMax.
Well, I needed a PC (and had used his previously) in order to run TurboTax. My Mac's operating system isn't new enough anymore and upgrading the OS isn't a viable option.
But I wondered if I could upgrade the HP into something usable for medium to light gaming. So I started by buying a couple sticks of DDR3 RAM from Crucial for about $54.00 to upgrade the machine to 16 GB. It previously had 6 gigs in it. I was advised to just remove this slower ram. The PC has four slots and is upgradeable to 32 GB RAM. But 16 is plenty for what I have in mind.
That certainly helped. But this low-end HP PC came with a dual-core AMD A6-5400K which (I later learned) is toward the bottom end of the AMD world at the time. It had "integrated graphics" which means some kind of Radeon graphics card was on the processor chip as well. Integrated graphics are generally not powerful enough for gaming.
So the next task was to find a good graphics card. Luckily the motherboard has an expansion slot for one. I did the best research I could on this, reading a lot of reviews. But it was a crapshoot. I finally decided on the GeForce GT 1030 because it looked like the most powerful card I could get that would fit (and fit my budget). I was advised that anything more powerful (a $500 to $700 graphics card would be considered a "starter" card for serious gamers) would just be bottlenecked by the processor. So I got the GT 1030 on sale for $138.00.
I saw an instant boost in performance in most games. But Counter-Strike (a free download on Steam) was giving me only 30 fps tops. It was just barely playable. And this game would sort of be the benchmark on my ability to run any modern game relatively smoothly.
So I looked into a processor upgrade. The specs on the datasheet for the HP said it could take as much as a Trinity Quad-Core A10-5800K processor. (It had a dual-core A4-5300K as stock.) These are all just numbers to me. But 4 core has got to be better than two-core, right? And the gigahertz was a touch higher as well.
So I picked up the A10-5800K for $59.00. Newegg had a refurbished one for $45.00 but it looked like the one at Amazon came with a cooling fan. So I went with the new one on Amazon. And it didn't come with a cooling fan. I was hoping then that the exiting fan would be adequate.
I've added RAM to lots of machines. But I've never mucked about with upgrading a processor. Almost all Apple machines won't let you just switch the processor. But the HP processor is in a standard "FM2" socket and it is easier putting a new processor in than it is trying to snap in those damn RAM sims.
Easy, but would it work? All kinds of problems could arise. But darned if the computer didn't boot up. I had one freeze in Counter-Strike when I turned all the settings up. I don't know if that was a heating issue or not. I turned a couple of the graphics settings in the game down a little and haven't had a problem since. But I do have on order a couple USB-powered fans just to blow a little more air into the case. It can't hurt.
But would four cores in the processor make that much difference over the old two-core one? Well, surprisingly, it was like night and day in Counter-Strike. I was getting 70 fps and up. It ran smoothly.
So for about $250.00 (plus the $20.00 fans) I turned this old HP into a credible and useful gaming machine. And, of course, the business can pay the bills because I need this computer for running TurboTax. Yeah. Sure.
Well, I needed a PC (and had used his previously) in order to run TurboTax. My Mac's operating system isn't new enough anymore and upgrading the OS isn't a viable option.
But I wondered if I could upgrade the HP into something usable for medium to light gaming. So I started by buying a couple sticks of DDR3 RAM from Crucial for about $54.00 to upgrade the machine to 16 GB. It previously had 6 gigs in it. I was advised to just remove this slower ram. The PC has four slots and is upgradeable to 32 GB RAM. But 16 is plenty for what I have in mind.
That certainly helped. But this low-end HP PC came with a dual-core AMD A6-5400K which (I later learned) is toward the bottom end of the AMD world at the time. It had "integrated graphics" which means some kind of Radeon graphics card was on the processor chip as well. Integrated graphics are generally not powerful enough for gaming.
So the next task was to find a good graphics card. Luckily the motherboard has an expansion slot for one. I did the best research I could on this, reading a lot of reviews. But it was a crapshoot. I finally decided on the GeForce GT 1030 because it looked like the most powerful card I could get that would fit (and fit my budget). I was advised that anything more powerful (a $500 to $700 graphics card would be considered a "starter" card for serious gamers) would just be bottlenecked by the processor. So I got the GT 1030 on sale for $138.00.
I saw an instant boost in performance in most games. But Counter-Strike (a free download on Steam) was giving me only 30 fps tops. It was just barely playable. And this game would sort of be the benchmark on my ability to run any modern game relatively smoothly.
So I looked into a processor upgrade. The specs on the datasheet for the HP said it could take as much as a Trinity Quad-Core A10-5800K processor. (It had a dual-core A4-5300K as stock.) These are all just numbers to me. But 4 core has got to be better than two-core, right? And the gigahertz was a touch higher as well.
So I picked up the A10-5800K for $59.00. Newegg had a refurbished one for $45.00 but it looked like the one at Amazon came with a cooling fan. So I went with the new one on Amazon. And it didn't come with a cooling fan. I was hoping then that the exiting fan would be adequate.
I've added RAM to lots of machines. But I've never mucked about with upgrading a processor. Almost all Apple machines won't let you just switch the processor. But the HP processor is in a standard "FM2" socket and it is easier putting a new processor in than it is trying to snap in those damn RAM sims.
Easy, but would it work? All kinds of problems could arise. But darned if the computer didn't boot up. I had one freeze in Counter-Strike when I turned all the settings up. I don't know if that was a heating issue or not. I turned a couple of the graphics settings in the game down a little and haven't had a problem since. But I do have on order a couple USB-powered fans just to blow a little more air into the case. It can't hurt.
But would four cores in the processor make that much difference over the old two-core one? Well, surprisingly, it was like night and day in Counter-Strike. I was getting 70 fps and up. It ran smoothly.
So for about $250.00 (plus the $20.00 fans) I turned this old HP into a credible and useful gaming machine. And, of course, the business can pay the bills because I need this computer for running TurboTax. Yeah. Sure.
