PC Tech Thread

I'd be all over a 4096×3072 display

pornhub really should be contributing to damaged electronics recycling

ok boomer

4:3

I've stuck with 4:3 displays throughout. I just had to say goodbye to my lovely old CRT monitor of ten years' standing (*sniff*), and now have a flat screen monitor with the same format. I can understand the appeal of wider displays if people want to watch films on their computer, or have a workflow that requires them to look at things side by side all the time, but I prefer having a smaller display.

Hi all, I'm trying to resurrect an old pc to use as the turbo entertainment/zwift/tr machine for the garage.

It's running super slow at the moment, so looking to buy an SSD for it to try and speed things up.

Will all SSDs work with my old pc? Anything else I need to get it all set up? Any info on cloning the old HD to new SSD?

The old pc in question is a Packard Bell Ixtreme m5801.

Thanks in advance all!

Isn't it more likley that your graphics / memory / CPU are throttling performance?

Plus any amount of bloaty services running in the background.

Disk input / output speeds tend not to be an issue, unless you're writing / transferring a lot of data.

(I have no idea what a tr machine is)

You'll need a SATA one rather than M2. I wouldn't clone your existing drive, you'll be copying over all the crap that is probably slowing it down.

I'd imagine that it will still be slow afterwards (although maybe not as slow) depending on the rest of the specs. Saying that, my 9 year old PC is still pretty snappy so it can be worth it.

Sorry tr was for trainer road.

I only want to use it for running YouTube/zwift and trainer road. So nothing too intensive?

It has an i3 processor, 6gb ram and a dedicated nvidia graphics card.

Planning on giving it a fresh install of windows, not done that in a long time, will my old windows 7 product key work with windows 10.

It's been a while since I've done this (over 10 years).

Any recommendations for a (mATX) motherboard that has 6x SATA ports and 1x M2 that isn't ruinously expensive? Lots have that combination but using the M2 disables a couple of the SATA ports (which is generally in the small print in the specs somewhere).

Have you already excluded the option of a PCIe card with a bunch of SATA ports on it? If you have the slot and the space, that looks like a cheap way to solve your problem

I think I have a PCI eSATA card somewhere. But I'm pretty sure it was only a 2-port.

aggi could have it if I can find it but assume it's not enough?

only a 2-port.

Other port counts are available 🙂

I figured but couldn't be arsed looking.

Who owns this many HDDs? That's what cloud storage is for ;)

For which platform, and what will you be doing with it?

If it's for a budget NAS, then a 4-port HBA PCIe card will do the trick on almost any motherboard.

If you want to build something a bit more fancy, then a server-grade board with out-of-band management like these will give you a lot more options:

https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=ROMED6U-2L2T#Specifications

We ingest ~10TB of ProRes recordings at just under 1Gbytes/second per day, and need to serve it to multiple users for editing instantly afterwards.

The NAS I built to do this is already fully-populated with 16x 14TB spinning drives and I'm about to build another.

I mean, I have AWS and Azure accounts so I have way more drives than you (kinda) nyer nyer :P

How big's ur pipe tho?

Mine's very chodeish.

Yeah, we don't actually have big throughput needs so I have no idea. I think some of our SQL servers might have been provisioned with more hardcore networking and storage but we don't do whatever you're doing, clearly. I'm also lucky in that I went nuts last time I bought my own machine so I've covered myself for a few years.

...90% of the shite that gets put on our NAS doesn't get touched again and just sits there till the retention agreement expires in a few weeks' time then gets nuked lol.

Haha, 90% of everything digital is probably worthless shite.

Cheers all. It's for a budget NAS running Windows 10. PCIe card hasn't been ruled out if that's the easiest option (which it seems like it may be). Given it will likely be a fairly cramped case I was thinking onboard would be easiest for airflow (and possibly less pissing around with drivers) but I'm definitely not looking at server level prices, the plan is to build the whole thing for under £500 or so (I already have all the HDDs in an existing very budget NAS).

So I bought a new SSD, plugged it in, removed old hard drives.

Trying to boot the win10 install from a usb,but just getting a black screen with flashing cursor in the top left corner.

Any ideas?

Is your BIOS set to boot from USB?

Clicked del to enter boot options, then selected the usb stick to boot from.

Does the BIOS recognise the SSD?