You may guess I've taken what was basically a junk PC from the in-laws and turned it into a fairly decent machine, what could it do?... Well it was reported to be showing "video like an old slide-show", "internet pages took so long to load we could boil the kettle" and a myriad other little things.
To hear those kind of reports from regular users of 70+ years of age, rang alarm bells, something needed to be fixed.
The machine was:
Intel Celeron 450 @ 2.2ghz
1GB DDR2 400Mhz RAM
Intel HD 3000 Graphics (on board)
320GB western digital carvier blue HDD
I've raided ebay, Amazon and my own spares, and the machine is now, re-cased, with new air-flow/cooling, and it's significantly improved:
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.4ghz
4GB DDR2 800Mhz RAM
Asus GeForce 610 GT (1GB DDR3)
120GB Scandisk Performance SSD
With a nice new box, the thermal paste, a cleaning air-can and all the bits I needed the upgrade cost just shy of £60.
And the new incarnation of the machine runs:
World of Warships - High Settings - 50FPS
World of Tanks - High Settings - 50-60FPS
Minecraft - Fullscreen - 100+FPS
Arma 3 - Medium Settings - 25FPS
Arma 2 - High Settings - 60FPS
H1Z1 - Medium Settings - 50FPS
This is impressive performance from a bog standard Intel G33 Motherboard and a bunch of spare parts.
Certainly £60 was a very fair price for all this kit, and I can't help but thank the moron on ebay who sent me a mail abusing me for listing "such old shit at a high price"... because through whatever machinations I kept the kit, and here we are just a month on with is back in use and blowing through performance like no-ones business.
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