How to make an old slow computer FAST!

you might recognize this computer from a recent video we did about a 10 year old computer versus a new computer and then how the 10 year old computer had something died in the middle of that video if you guys have not actually seen that video please go and watch that first cuz that led us into the discussion we're gonna be talking about today you've seen me upgrade old laptops in the past and I've always talked about how you can make old hardware feel like new wish again by a couple of simple and easy upgrades so today we're going to take this 10 year old computer and see if it can't be somewhat enjoyable with Mike I say as little money as possible but definitely with a limit of money that's possible NZXT T's build is the simplest way to get a gaming PC customizes the way you want this holiday season choose the games you want to play set a budget and let build take care of the rest the all-new starter streaming and creator pcs take the guesswork out of finding a PC that meets your budget and gaming needs with a 48 hour turnaround back with NZXT s 2 year all-in-one warranty and same-day shipping available with blitz mode you can start enjoying your new PC right away to see what NZXT build can do for you click the sponsor link in the description below so the specs of this rig this is actually Phil's friends old gaming rig that he was using up until like as recent as last year so anyway the specs on this are pretty basic it's a q90 400 so it's a Core 2 quad which is a 4 core this is long before like v i5 i7 era quite a ways before Sandy Bridge and all that it is running on a budget version of a budget motherboard at the time so this is like the budget budget and I remember the model number on here - it's a gigabyte g8g 4-1 m es 2l I used to have a gigabyte that I overclocked on by the way that was of the same era the LGA 75 775 socket era and it was the it was a gigabyte ds3 which is like the ds3 series is still technically around but I had amazing overclocking results with that but this one here doesn't really support overclocking as far as I know but we will take a that it's got a newer Antec 650 power supply in there because when it came when Phil brought it to the studio it had one of those gray like included with your case type power supplies I was like the love of God get that out of here for a ram we've got two or four terabytes of Wow it's got four gigabytes of PDC 24 G 800 megahertz ddr2 for the CPU already mentioned it's a box cooler on there now for the graphics card it with an S XFX are 7750 ghost thermal technology card hey metal cooler though but they don't make them like this no more anyway so when we did the video where we talked about ten-year-old PC versus a new PC the two things that were clearly evident one the graphics card was perfectly fine for like source titles and stuff back then it would get the job done I feel like a lot less people were really on the 60 FPS kick like they are today I feel like most people back then were were I know myself included I didn't monitor fps like I do today that's sort of as technologies advanced and as we've seen bigger and better graphics cards and advancement of Technology we just kind of really it's like drag racing now we just get a kick out of how fast is it I spent a lot less time back then really worrying about that because I had what I could afford and that was it who cared that was my performance and I wasn't changing that's kind of what this box represents so the graphics although was was being handedly smashed by a 1650 which is the very bottom offering from in videos current lineup what was painful about this system quite honestly was its IO and that being the fact that it was even on a modern 2 terabyte 7200 rpm 64 megabyte cache 2 terabyte Seagate Barracuda Drive sitting right there that's way better than any hard drive that actually existed back then so well ok caveat there was the the Western Digital Raptor and all that sort of stuff which was really expensive but they also were low capacity high speed but for the sake of the last video we threw this hard drive in there we wanted it to be reminiscent of the era now phil was telling me that he did to speed this computer up he did put an SSD in there but when his friend upgraded and changed computers the SSD came out so games and big items went on a hard drive which is perfectly fine if the hard drive is not having to handle all the system operations and it's actually not that slow and he had an SSD in there for a boot drive but obviously the graphics card could stand that's just yeah hey I have done this now four or five times in the history of my channel showing you that a solid-state drive is the cheapest easiest way to make your system faster and you know why I keep making these videos because people still want to argue that that isn't true that hard drives are perfectly fine the only people who say that are people who've actually never experienced an SSD and although rarer today than it was in the last let's say five or six years ago there still are folks out there I'm sure watching this very video who've never experienced a solid-state drive they they for whatever reason they're afraid of the tech they're afraid of the chips failing or something I'm gonna continue to beat this point until the horse is like decomposed and returned to the earth and a flower is growing where that corpse was yeah then I'm gonna smash the flower and I'm gonna push it back into the ground but while we're at it we're gonna go ahead and throw in an RX 578 gigabyte graphics card from power color the one that was from our original budget built earlier this year doesn't even have a logo or label on the side because you can still get this this graphics card for about a hundred and sixty bucks on Newegg right now it's a very good deal it is light years ahead of this XFX card from the 7700 series and so with these two things right here we are going to see just how much this system wakes up versus before but one thing I want to mention here real quick a lot of people might be like but J that's you know $200 or so right there why not just go out and buy yourself a $200 combo pack like you can find for micro center or Newegg or or whatever retail center you might have and this comment repeats itself every time I do this video but the problem is I don't think people think before they make those types of comments because let's look at it this way we're reusing the motherboard we're reusing the CPU and we're reusing the rim things that are still perfectly fine to pan the games you want to play you're probably gonna be behind the minimum specs of any modern title and there does become a point if you want to enjoy fallout well I guess fallout 3 you could probably still play on the system maybe but if you want to play GTA 5 you won't play Red Dead Redemption 2 you want to play the new Star Wars games there comes a point where you have to upgrade your system it doesn't stay within spec long enough and some games physically won't even launch if you're too far below the minimum spec this is still gonna cost you roughly 200 bucks by itself you also have to update your RAM and a lot of people don't think about that the fact that now that systems are on ddr4 you have to add another at minimum another 100 bucks of RAM to get 8 gigabytes which is where is still the sweet spot is so I guess you could actually get 16 gigs now for around a hundred bucks now you're talking closer to $300 and then you're still gonna be stuck on this and you're still gonna be stuck on that so the upgrade path still makes sense to make your i/o bottleneck removed and then to get a graphics card that's not so powerful that it's bottlenecked by your your current CPU and memory but fast enough so that when you do upgrade that stuff this doesn't become what you're embarrassed about so what we're gonna do is we're gonna start things off here with just a simple boot test all right three two one go oh there is actually not that bad I think you were saying that - yesterday - you were like you know it's actually doing pretty well we're gonna leave the SSD plugged in the way that it is or not the SSD but the hard drive because we don't want to get rid of it we it has value the hard drive especially a 2 terabyte is where we're gonna install most of our games and stuff because this inland professional SSD this is basically like the OEM brand for Micro Center they're very inexpensive and we don't want to completely destroy our budget with going something higher-end like Samsung or whatever so I find we've used these in the past actually we use one of these I think when we did scrapyard wars back with deep Luke I am your father alright so that is in there now we need our windows install media ok so here we are we're gonna go ahead and do a stopwatch test we're gonna time the part two where it takes to unpack the files install and then you have to log in or do your first window set up with the blue screen and all the part you know data mining to get to turn off with Windows so let's go ahead and do this in three two one go 8 minutes and 35 seconds Oh quarter notes listening how is she listening there's no microphone anyway it's actually more like 7 minutes and 38 seconds because I spent about a minute on a reboot waiting for this to boot up because I didn't take the key out after it was done copying files and the BIOS just automatically has a USB I think prioritized as a boot drive even on old old hardware so as you can see right there there's definitely a benefit to an SSD so I'm gonna do now is I'm just gonna go ahead and run through all the setup stuff alright so we're at the desktop let's go ahead and start with a shutdown speed see how fast that goes that's improved it just gonna take the hardware longer to actually shut down Wow because it was waiting for Windows to ship maybe we're out of the last video I had time to killing the ship I was working on clothes I will the warships which is a slow app to clothes and then shut down the computer before you which had it started while I was still playing the game so we don't remember exactly what the boot time was on the previous test we think it's around 37 seconds which really isn't that bad yeah it's sunscreen right that's what it was I remember now that that's it right there so we're gonna do now is another boob test and I and most of this time is just gonna be the hardware initializing so three two one it didn't really change that's surprising okay so maybe that wasn't quite as impressive as I wanted it to be what took so long in that last video and I know I said this was that I was like this video won't take that long to film but then I wonder who underestimate how long the setup took and how long it took to download this stuff and get it all set up was completely underestimated so what we're noticing now though is that by running the SSD even on Stata to that we are seeing a massive increase in our download speeds so what you can see right here if I expand this is that we never had a dropout in the network you can see the network is following the curve of the Green Line which is the disk usage typically what I see is disk usage be much lower than the actual network that's because I'm used to much newer systems so what we're showing here and one of the reasons why you don't want to go with like a super-expensive or even a super-fast SSD is because of the fact that well we are still dealing with the limitations of SATA 2 whereas all the new drives like the citizens are SSDs are all SATA 3 optimized but when we never saw were any dropouts which we were dealing with a ton so that tells me and I thought that that was about a bad network card on that motherboard we yesterday we thought there was something wrong with the network card this shows there's nothing about the network card although we never got the full download speed that we are capable of I think the network card itself may not be capable of as fast as the internet that we have here but we started the download at 207 finished at 213 so 6 minutes to download and install at seven and a half gigabyte game that's really not bad so when the hard drive is also your operating system drive and you have a spinning platter and you have a needle that has sits like a record right - I want to hear this song well it's got to go find that song based on where it is on the record it's a very oversimplified X one nation of how the platter works but it's the same general idea so if you are asking the operating system to run up and up the hard drive and then you want to install something in a certain location and you want to play a game it's in another location it's constantly seeking and doing these things so that's why you would hear the hard drive clicking away the more it's used so that's why I always on budget builds will do an SSD with a large hard drive and there's a lot of people that still push back and say nope I would rather just get a hybrid drive well we actually had a hybrid drive here it was pretty bad all the hybrid diet drive does is get you a small small tiny SSD cache on there and the problem is modern programs with their sizes and the games and all that sort of stuff are swapping out that cache constantly which has to access the drive to refill it and it just slows down too quickly because hard the hybrids never took off they never became a thing and so they never got bigger caches on them so anyway rant over I'd like to point out now as I'm about to start left 4 dead 2 that we started this whole process and we even upgrading the computer and installing Windows an hour ago yesterday all day yeah we started at 9 a.m. like 4:30 so we're gonna do the campaign only because that's that we have to do the direct comparison in our previous video we were you were getting like 30 40 years s and then it would like spike to like 50 look at the FPS I can't even tell you what the FPS is this is so much better and that's why you don't go with a ridiculously overpriced because you would just it would be such a diminishing return let's put it this way if you had both these towers up but I couldn't see what we were connected to and I had that budget one we used which was you know a much better system all around or this one I wouldn't be able to when we're playing on left 4 dead 2 was surprising in our last video because it's steam source engine or it's a valid source engine but it was a heck a lot harder to run the counter-strike source so I was surprised that you were getting as many dips as you were in the yes but we're gonna do is three mark Vantage now to compare the previous scores alright so apparently we broke the benchmark cuz on two different systems we got a 3d mark score of zero I think what's happening is it reaches a point where this numbers are too high anyway we went from a 67 72 GPU score to a 20,000 457 as expected or CPU score did not change 10,000 145 and that's pretty much what we got on the previous test it was ten thousand one something so obviously we got a much better performance out of the system for the use of gaming than anything else but the snappiness of the SSD obviously helps but I talked about general snappiness though when it comes to like clicking on things right here is the Internet yeah it's ripping mistakes video jeez Billy's youtubers in their ads what I kind of want to do and I'm hoping if somebody out there can point me in the right direction I would love to get my hands on a premium LGA 775 board from the era that way we can overclock this and play around it and it's not really retro tech but it's definitely old tech that'd be fun to play with and see how much more performance we can get on top of today with just changing out the motherboard so anyway that's it for days today's video guys as you can see by the simple upgrade of a graphics card giving us really good innit a lot of these tests - it was still hitting a hundred percent utilization on the graphics card obviously on 3d Britany mark it's designed - but with just an SSD and a graphics card we were able to wake this system up and make it completely usable once again so hopefully you guys have appreciated this video because what I was attempting to show you guys today is I now do a really fast shutdown is um you don't need to spend all kinds of money you don't need to break the bank take out mortgages or piss off your spouse's and stuff by spending tons and tons of money on a new computer we like to it's fun but not necessary and hopefully we showed that today you can intelligently upgrade your system piece by piece this graphics card and this SSD would be perfectly usable in a system in 2019 so obviously if you have a system this old you can upgrade it piece by piece where next you get yourself a decent motherboard CPU and memory combo and maybe a little bit better power supply nicer case you would never know that you did this incremental e which is the smarter way to do it so thanks for watching guys if you enjoyed this video and you know what to do give it a big thumbs up if you hated this video for whatever reason you were gonna thumbs it down and probably have already anyway so whatever thanks for watching you guys we'll see you in the next one everyone asked where I get the screwdriver amaz we're literally the cheapest one they had I'll put the link to that down in the description maybe

Channel: JayzTwoCents

Views: 1,574,680

Rating: 4.9042501 out of 5

Keywords: gaming pc upgrade, how to upgrade an old pc, best pc upgrade, old pc upgrades, ssd vs hdd, video card upgrade, q9400, upgrading an old pc, nzxt preroll

Id: 9zGMi7HZ2AA

Length: 17min 13sec (1033 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 10 2019