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Educate me about modern PCs!

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facattack

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Mar 7, 2007
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7yo Dell Dimension E520. It has SATA hard drives (two), one PCI-E v.1 (I think), I haven't counted the regular PCI slots, and USB 2.0 slots in back, and two USB 1.0 in front. Oh, and Pentium D processor.

How similar are other PCs that are being made nowadays? Can I swap the hard drive into a newer PC to use as a secondary? Any recommendations for desktop PCs that allow 2 or 3 hard drives? My max range is about 500 or 600 bucks.

I have bad credit so will have to save for a few months for a new one. I basically want 4 or 6 gig of RAM, Windows 7, pref 1TB or 2TB hard drive, and will swap my HD 6450 from ATI Radeon into the new PC. I might later buy a newer, better graphics card... but this PC is probably at peak performance....

Wanting to keep PC that I have now til it dies...
 
Well, SATA has simplified the drive picture a lot. If the motherboard has a sufficient number of SATA connectors, you're fine with adding drives. Mobos with multiple SATA connections are pretty common nowadays. There are also PCI-to-SATA cards that can accommodate a few more drives.

So basically, no problem with the SATA drive issue.
 
The drive will be fine to put in another system as a secondary. Are you asking about vendor built systems or a home built system? Only the cheapest motherboards ($40 range) will be tied down to 2 SATA ports. Most motherboards have 4-6 SATA ports now from what I've seen and depending on price. The boards I just recently bought for $20 at goodwill (to replace/upgrade my gaming system lol which is now a few years old and I can't buy AM2+ motherboards new apparently) mostly had 6 SATA and some form of RAID capability (0,1,10 and one board had 5 which is what I would actually be interested in), 1 IDE port for legacy CDROM or drives (not 2 like the old days), a bunch of USB ports on the back plus wires for front USB interfaces if wanted, 1 PCI-E slot but usually 16x for video but they have onboard video too if you're cheap and just wanting the basics. Actually the thing I really liked was both motherboards and onboard video have HDMI as well if I just wanted a simpler machine I could plug it into my TV and directly host my videos from it. Really the thing I do the most now anyway. Also sorta interesting was the option apparently to do cross-fire with the onboard video card with an additional card (if I had an ATI card). I thought they had to be the same generation card but maybe it works no matter what now? Either way pretty cool if it's a free boost of sharing resources. Not sure if that would let me use a beefy video card with the onboard HDMI which would be pretty cool too.

So building your own it would be fairly simple and cheap other than finding a legit operating system license.

Vendors I think mostly should be the same except they're probably cheaper motherboards so you might only have 2 SATA slots if it's a cheaper desktop but your drive will still be fine as a secondary and you can buy SATA cards to add additional slots if you need.

The only other thing to consider is your RAM/speed and see if you need to replace that or use it again. I found surprisingly that I only have 800Mhz RAM not 1200 but whatever it works and that's not a bottleneck. Plus I could upgrade or replace it for probably $40 on a good day.
 
...and watch out for those rebates! Most seem to be Amex Rewards cards that now start deducting two or three bucks per month after 7 months.

I won't deal with TD anymore--they won't give an inch on their "30 days from order filled" policy on defective merchandise, even if said merchandise sits in the box waiting for the rest of your components to arrive. I've had much better luck with NewEgg and Geeks.
 
The SATA ports on the motherboard are usually labeled "Sata 0, SATA1, SATA 2, SATA 3." The SATA drives will be booted from in the numbered order in which they are plugged into the motherboard. Say if two drives are plugged in, the one plugged into SATA 0 will boot before SATA 1, and so on. Older SATA drives had jumpers to specify this configuration (like IDE drives).
 
If you're going to build your own, I would highly recommend that you buy an SSD and put it in your current computer. The speed increase will probably hold you over until you have the funds for the rest of a new system and then put the SSD in that.
 
For around $20 you can pick up a Core 2 Duo chip that'll fit in there on ebay, I can tell you for sure that swapping a Pentium D with a Core 2 Duo is one of the best upgrades for the old machines as I've done it personally for people, and it feels more responsive and starts up a lot faster.

If you really do want a new system at the moment a Core i3 will probably be fine, just any basic desktop midtower from an OEM if you don't want to build yourself, as an i3 is fairly cheap, an i5 if you want to spend a few more bucks for some more speed.
 
Compgeke said:
For around $20 you can pick up a Core 2 Duo chip that'll fit in there on ebay, I can tell you for sure that swapping a Pentium D with a Core 2 Duo is one of the best upgrades for the old machines as I've done it personally for people, and it feels more responsive and starts up a lot faster.
Click to expand...

This is very good advice. The C2D is much faster than a P4 clock for clock and will run Windows 7 fine. Looks like you can pick up 4x1GB DDR2 for around $30 too, which is plenty of RAM really. Unless you really want to play the newest games, you'll be happy with this setup.
 
My comptuer "can" in theory run some games I want to play. But I can't get past DRM to know for sure.

Dead Rising 2
Dead Rising 2: Off the Record
Super Street Fighter 4: Arcade Edition

What is a main problem with my PC is Windows XP. I can't upgrade the RAM plus 3 gig. I want to have more RAM than that so I'll need a Windows 7 64 bit setup.
 
facattack said:
What is a main problem with my PC is Windows XP. I can't upgrade the RAM plus 3 gig. I want to have more RAM than that so I'll need a Windows 7 64 bit setup.
Click to expand...

Your motherboard supports Core2Duo, that's a 64 bit CPU that will run Windows 7 fine. Your motherboard also supports 4gig of DDR2 RAM. That's enough for anyone who isn't editing photoshop documents with dozens of layers, or doing statistics on very large datasets.

I think this is your best upgrade path. Many games are still targeting consoles, which are 6-7 years old at this point. It would make the most sense to keep this rig until the next console generation comes out, and then build a PC to match.

Just make sure you don't buy a 1333 FSB CPU, your motherboard tops out at 1066 FSB. The RAM is also limited to 800 FSB, but you can underclock RAM no problem.
 
I have a relevant question--if the motherboard supports a maximum of 4GB, is there any compelling reason to go to 64 bits? I run a mix of 64- and 32-bit applications, I'm hard put to see a substantial difference in performance. But then, I tend not to use heavy CPU hog programs.
 
The 4 gig limit for XP applies to system RAM and GPU RAM combined. If his HD6450 has 1 gig of RAM, that means 32 bit XP can only see 3 gigs of RAM. I don't think the board will run just 3 gigs of ram, so he'd have to buy a whole gig of ram that would go wasted.
 
Before buying any processor or RAM I would first install a new SSD and see how the performance compares. The (traditionally mechanical) hard drive is THE major bottleneck in most systems. An SSD is only around one order of magnitude slower than RAM - so the entire PC runs alot faster.

Move this into the new PC...or run a couple in RAID. I helped with a setup on a large database machine - it had an SSD boot drive, SSD temp drive and SSD page drive, with all other data on a high speed SATA HDD.

Look at this video for proof of concept. Looking at his BIOS, he is using a Pentium 4 2.4Ghz with 1gb RAM (comparable system - Pentium D is basically 2 Pentium 4's strapped together on one die, precursor to the Core Duo architecture).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cnRlQFf5X8
 
I sorta thought (could be wrong) that XP did use the 4GB or could with a service pack, unless I'm thinking Vista. Either way to sorta answer Chuck's question no there's not much reason to do 64-bit. All it really does is take away some 16-bit functionality and 32-bit stuff also ends up running in ntvdm I think. Performance wise (benchmark app from personal tests) 64-bit as expected is a tad slower than 32-bit. Also our tests found on our systems (also no big surprise) Vista was a hair slower than XP despite offering the newer DirectX libraries. Once you disable the backup feature of Vista and turn of UAC though it's quite comparable to XP again, just a small performance ding.
 
32-bit Windows always has the 4GB addressable limit, so typically only 3.25GB or so of actual RAM is available. But this doesn't necessarily make it worse - 32-bit Windows is also somewhat more memory efficient than 64-bit Windows, and I usually find the 3.25GB is enough.

Windows does kinda support PAE on 32-bit, but I've never gotten it to work very well on workstation versions. If you want to try your luck at getting it working, here's the Microsoft article on it: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/gg487503.aspx - again, I haven't had any luck getting 32 bit Windows addressing 4GB, even with PAE.
 
I wonder if I could keep the case and fit a different mother board in it? Or do I need an entirely new case? What size case is this thing anyway?

EDIT: I have DDR2 RAM? Is a DDR3 RAM slot backwards compatible? I have SATA, is there a new SATA standard? Is that backwards compatible?


This PC looks okay I guess. It has DDR2 RAM though... doesn't say if it is 64 bit OS... so buying older DDR2 RAM is more expensive than DDR3? And it says Small Form Factor but doesn't indicate if the PCI slot bays are the smaller ones. Oh wait... 1.8 GHz... that's slow. :(

I guess I'm looking for something I can buy cheap at first then upgrade a little as it goes along....


I guess these PCs are just not worth the money?

Before I get a new PC, I kinda want to backup this one. Good solution?
 
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I haven't been in a Dell case for about a decade, but OEM cases are often proprietary. I wouldn't count on a generic motherboard working.

You do have DDR2 RAM. DDR3 is not backwards compatible. The best you can do with this motherboard is 4x1GB of DDR2. Don't get 2x2GB by accident.

There is a new SATA3 standard, but it is backwards compatible. In any case, if you store your data on spinning rust you won't be saturating either SATA2 or SATA3.
 
Hatta said:
In any case, if you store your data on spinning rust you won't be saturating either SATA2 or SATA3.
Click to expand...

Uh, I forgot to ask if USB 3 is backwards compatible as well...

Anyhow, I'm making the gross assumption that the new standard for Games for Windows Live is across the board using BAD DRM from now on that requires a special connection to their servers to get the game running. They won't provide a work-around when I called them and insisted I had a very slow PC with viruses and whatever. I was told to just wipe the hard drive, reinstall XP, and try to get past the DRM again.

If I can't even play the games because of DRM wackiness there's no need to buy new games for me. Which puts the need for a new "gaming" PC down to below nil use for me.
 
USB 3 is backward compatible but you can't reuse your existing cables. The drive normally has what looks like 2 mini connectors located side by side and the part that plugs into the computer (or hub) is a longer version of the standard USB plug. There are two sets of pins and it should stop and only connect the USB 2 pins in a USB 2 port. It worked for me but I worry that the plastic stop will be damaged and a short created.

Regarding new systems, those Semprons you linked to are about the same speed as what you have. Check the part number carefully; AMD reused Sempron model numbers on parts with different capabilities.
 
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