Building Desktops The Frugal Way: Part 2

Back in the middle of January, early this year, I started talking about how I got to my current situation in building desktops for myself. This started in the relatively ancient time of the 386 and I ended at the original Pentium. 

At this point, I was at a crossroads. I had succumbed to the Best Buy glitz and bought a really nice Toshiba Infinia media desktop computer, then proceeded on to it's contemporary IBM Aptiva "Stealth", after learning that buying "new" from the Best Buys of the world is like getting onto the treadmill of losing propositions.

After a pretty fair amount of contemplation, I arrived at my current philosophy. I call it the "generic box", "do-it-yourselfer" computing stage. 

  

This may not have been the exact model, but it's pretty darned close. I decided to find a relatively attractive, but innocuous case that would become home to multiple motherboards over it's lifespan. It became home to the bang vs. buck king of that era; the AMD processors. First there was a K6-II/400, then I moved on to the "Barton" core'd Athlon XP, which is where I stayed for a very long time.

During this time, I used Abit or Tyan boards which were generally slightly less expensive than Asus, but "feature rich" and offered excellent speed for the dollar. This case spent just about as much time with the cover off than on since I was constantly tinkering with it. At this point, I also learned the joys of picking up "surplus'd" monitors, at one point, patching together my very own "Stan-finity" 3 monitor setup long before AMD made it popular. I used a SGI 1600SW LCD (yes the famous one from their graphic workstations) flanked by a pair of Apple Mac CRT Studio Displays. This was around 2000/1, so I was an oddity of that time. This state of affairs when on happily for some time till we moved across the Northern part of Texas from the Panhandle to the Dallas area. However, before we moved, I learned a few things. For one thing, I certainly didn't need to buy new from a retailer ever again. But secondly, and maybe more importantly, there were trends in the market and if you knew what they were.... money could be made from that knowledge. 

Around 2000/2001, LCDs were HOT!!! And special high-end ones (even ones that had been save from the dumpster), sometimes sold for something like $700. Yup, I sold that 1600SW and turned it into parts which became our huge media center, which still sits in our living room. So for a while, I limped along with my giant 20" CRT Mac Studio Displays and the old "Barton", happily oblivious of the butt-kicking that Intel was unleashing on AMD which is still going on today. You see, we had been sucked in by the cult of the laptop! So, after the move, that computer sat out in the garage for years till I had a student who wanted it. I took it apart, and over the course of the next month or so; I taught him how to build a computer. 

As we move forward (and those who have read this blog from it's beginning will remember this timeframe), I became more and more involved with digital photography. This meant the need for; more storage, more muscle, more devices..... pretty much more everything that normal laptops don't do well. Of course, you can do a "workstation" laptop, but those are big bucks! So, the "need"/desire to build an expandable/rebuildable desktop returned to my life. That year's "generic black box"? The Cooler Master 590. As you can see, it's not something that calls a lot of attention to itself, while at the same time, offered the ability to be almost infinitely configurable. Over the last several years, it has seen 3 motherboards (Gigabyte GA-43, then 45s), 3 processors (Intel E8400, Q6600, and now the Q9550), Several drives ranging from different SSDs to mechanical drives of various size and speed. Anyway, you get the idea. This thing is what every tinker needs. The inconspicuous black box that serves as the computer that does everything and starts every time. 

In fact, I was so pleased with it, that there's an older Centurion 5 sitting right next to it which houses my "XP" system that I use to trouble shoot old client machines. It doesn't have a lot in it; just a GA-41M board with a low-end C2D processor, some left over RAM and hard drive. But it does a job and it basically cost nothing being made up of leftover and obsolete parts. 

But these cases and the concept is kind of like this old DeLorean.... just the shell that houses the guts of future technology. Part 3: Coming to a desk near you.

 

Buy Broken Stuff....Really!!!

If you don't already do this, your missing something. What am I talking about on this gorgeous Saturday morning (the first cool one this "fall")? It's no secret that I flip computers, so it shouldn't be a surprise that I often leverage the "scratch and dent" bin of eBay and Craigslist for items that I can pick up cheaper than "normal". There are several dynamics to this particular strategy, so lets look at them.

At it's most basic is the "bread and butter" of my little business; the refurbished Corporate laptop. I don't need to get into the benefits of them today, but here's how to squeeze a little more out of them than is already there. If I go out on eBay and just buy a ready to go E6400, I should be able to pick it up for somewhere between $175 and $200, then if I sell it for the typical $225-235, I will have cleared my standard of about $50 (give or take). However, many of these things are sold "part or repair". That means they are missing something. That could be everything "something", but most likely is that they are missing a hard drive, or maybe the A/C adapter too. Sometimes, there's as much as a $100 difference between a "ready to go" machine and one like that. Another factor is this: if I have an appropriate hard drive, in this case a 2.5" SATA HDD of between 80-160Gb/5400rpm, then I'm already ahead of the game. I emphasizes "have" because, if I have to go buy one, it ends up costing around $40 after shipping and it's just not worth it. So where do these drives come from? When I work on a computer and it's trashed, or the client needs/wants an upgrade, then I save the drive. If they want, I'll destroy it, but that's rarely the case. Also, when I get a computer for my family, I always pull the mechanical hard drive and replace it with an SSD. So, over time, I accumulate a number of good condition drives up here in my cabinet just waiting for a job. You might wonder if this is safe and/or ethical. Here's the deal; if after I've DBAN'd it, and "clean-loaded" an OS on one of these guys, the probability that someone is going to try and extract old data off of it is pretty darned slim! So, if I'm careful in buying the "new" machine and pick one of those "Parts or Repair" jobbies that still have the caddy and cover, then I'm golden! For Pete sakes though, don't buy one without the caddy/cover, or you'll end up spending upwards of $25 just ordering that little piece of metal and plastic! 

The same thing goes for the T61, T400/500 machines from Lenovo ThinkPad. These are corporate machines and when they come "off lease" or are surplus'd due to replacement, many entities require the company handling the old machines to physically destroy the drives. Anybody like banks, insurance companies and hospitals which require client record confidentiality will then put thousands of these computers into the secondary market w/o a drive! The better surplusers, will save the caddy/HDD cover, but the sloppy ones will just destroy the whole thing. This whole process will allow you to either make more money or if you are buying for yourself, save more money. I've often upgraded our own computers using this technique and end up making it a zero-sum operation.

Here's the next Frugal Propellerhead trick: buy outright broken stuff.... really! Understand before we proceed that there are risks with this. It's simply not 100% and sometimes you lose. However, knowing this, if the price is such that you are OK with the cost/benefit ratio of the equation, then there are great gains to be had. I'll start with my latest conquest. The Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD4H bought off of Craigslist for $65. I understood that it had a broken PCI-e (x8) slot, and was pretty OK with the knowledge that it was usable even without that slot. At worse I could use it in my HTPC which would never need a second graphics card. Besides, this was an ATX board with a third full-length slot (albeit a x4). However, the upside was that this is a board which is at worse, a year old, and at best 6-months or less since the Z77 platform was current right up until the release of the Z87 "Haswell" chipset. And as you guys know from an earlier post, I did a RMA (which was approved) on this guy and it's on it's way to Gigabyte. So in a week or so, I'll have a replacement in hand. 

That little episode was so successful, I've decided to do it again. This time, with a Gigabyte GV-R7750OC graphic card. I've been wanting to upgrade my vid-card for some time, not because I need more power (I don't), but because, my HD 6700, on a fairly regular basis, will behave strangely. It will give me artifacts around my mouse cursor, and if I don't reboot quickly, it'll go "black screen" and lock up the box. This is not acceptable on my main workstation on which depend pretty heavily. So, why don't I just pick up one of the many really cheap, 5000 or even 4000 series cards and replace it then? Well, for one thing; I'm kind of a stubborn cus' and don't like using "bottom-feeder" gear on my primary machine. And secondly, I will on occasion, convert a video or two, but most importantly do photo-editing on rather large DSLR generated image files. There's that, plus I want a cool running card as well. Those specialty passively cooled "mid-line" cards are really kind of hard to find and they tend to be a little pricey (at least to me) when you do find one. What to do? While researching cards for my client's gaming computer, I had zero'd in on AMD's 7xxx mid-line otherwise know as the "Southern Islands" series. In there is a low-powered model designated as the 7750. So low-powered that it doesn't need external power. Now; that's for me! However, I didn't want to pay the $90-100 for a new one. Yeah, that's right......I want nice higher end products, but don't want to pay the price. Did I say that I'm a stubborn 'cus.....hence Frugal Propellerhead? Not surprised that I bought a "parts or repair", "untested" (meaning, "we know it doesn't work, but you can hope") one off of eBay for $45, are ya? Would you be surprised to learn that Gigabyte also warranty's these guys for 3 Years like their motherboards? And that, I've got run it through their RMA process and currently waiting for approval to send it back?

One more example. In case you forgot: a little more than a year ago, I bought an "as is" ThinkPad Tablet (original Android version) for a very good price. The same day that I received it, I shipped it to Lenovo as a warranty repair since (of course) it was still within a year of purchase. They didn't have the parts to fix it within the specified time-frame for a "corporate" item, so it was arranged that they would drop-ship a NEW one directly to my house. Yup, that's how it's done! 

Any failures? Yup; I bought a couple of refurbished Dell Stream 7 tablets from Newegg. Unfortunately, the power connector broke on my son's pretty quickly and within what Newegg had assured me to be Dell's warranty period. That turned out not to be the case and after several unproductive discussions with their consumer support facility in India, it went nowhere. Newegg however, was gratious enough to do a partial refund and we moved on from that episode. What's the lesson? I could very well turn the name of this whole blog into: DON'T BUY CONSUMER!!!

Intel is Out to Get Me....or at Least Confuse Me Greatly

Let me tell ya, this learning new stuff isn't for the faint of heart! As you know, I've been working on this gaming computer for someone, which in and of itself wouldn't be a big deal if they had a relatively reasonable budget for an up-to-date gaming PC..... say somewhere in the $2000-3000 range. BUT NO, it's $600! What that means is that I had to be creative and learn the "ins & outs" of the gaming computer world, but not only that, but the next level of PC hardware as well.....meaning the Post-Core 2 Duo/Quad era. Just when I finally get comfortable with the various parts of that generation, and having just climbed (almost) to the top of the heap in acquiring a Q9550 "Yorkfield" processor!

First of all; I've kind of learned to hate Intel! Since the arrival of the Lynnfield/Clarkdale, whatever you want to call their various families of processors, there's been a proliferation of CPU sockets. Everything from 1366, to 1150, to 1156, 1155/H2, yada, yada, yada. I hate it. P4 was socket 478 (after that aborted 423), then the Core Duos were the socket 775, now, we've got all manner of sockets! Which is why I finally settled on the 1155. At least that one can go from the Sandy Bridge G2, to the Ivy Bridge without having to buy a new board..... mostly..... if your board has a Z77 chipset anyway. The other ones.... mostly dead ends..... hate it.

Then, there's the whole chipset debacle. When combined with the myriad of sockets, this is a veritable minefield of processor/chipset/sockets to negotiate to determine what one should be bought. Take the Z68 for example. You're a gamer who wants PCIe 3.0, RAM at 1600? Nope, gotta get a Z77 board. Gives me a headache. This whole time, AMD has been pretty much on the AM3 socket. Oh yeah, Intel has been kicking the stuffing out of those guys, so never mind I guess.

Then there's the whole processor thing. Not only do we have the i3, i5, i7 thing going on, but you have "K" spec, "S" spec, and "T" spec processors within the groups as well. Oh, I almost forgot that there are the normal ones with no suffix. Of course, most people are familiar with the "K" spec, unlocked chips, but what about the "S" and "T"? S for lower power (about 65 TDP), and T for ultra-low power (35, or 45 TDP). Actually, for a normal user like, me, these are the ones that are really interesting. On my current Core 2 Duo/Quad platforms, I'm already at more computational power than I need most of the time, but on second generatoin (and later) Core processors, it's really WAY more power than the normal person needs. Yes, I targeted and got a 2500K for the gaming project just in case the kid decides that down the road he wants to play something like Starcraft Crysis, or any other game that is processor intensive. But for me? I'll probably be OK with a lower priced "S":spec 3330S from the Ivy Bridge generation, or even a "T" spec processor like I talked about before. For what I do (which is the same for most people), the money is better spent on an SSD (way faster speed I/O to the board), more RAM (run a bunch of stuff at once), USB 3.0 (way faster transfer speed with removable storage I use every day). So really, my jump to Intel's "Core" series of processors will have nothing to do with processing power, it's having the same (or somewhat better) level of power as I have now, while having a much cooler running machine. Although my 95TDP "Yordfield" is the most efficient of the high-end Core 2 Quads, that's still 50% higher than an "S" spec Ivy Bridge.

During the last week or two, I've spent as much or more time educating myself on AMD's various current graphics offerings. If I could have had the luxury of spending $500 on a graphics card, it would be a no-brainer, but I'm working in the $100-200 market space. On the bottom end of that space is the 7790, and on the top there's the 7850. 

You can see that at a similar price-point, why there's no real need to look at the 7770, while the $35 difference between the 7790 and 7850 actually does pay for something. Now, in this case, it's all about the needs of a gamer (even a lower end one), but I also learned a few things about how much power each of the different chips uses. In AMD's "Southern Islands" line of cards, it's pretty evident that 7750 version of the "Cape Verde" chip doesn't push a ton of polygons, but it only uses 55w, well less than half of the "Pitcairn" 7850. So while I was learning that at a doable price-point for my client the 7850 is a nice pick-up, I also learned that the 7750 will be a really nice cool running card for me.

In combination, the same research has yielded me twice the results! I've found the cool-running CPU along with a low-consumption GPU for me, while at the same time a high-speed, scalable CPU and beefy GPU for my client. I suppose, overall, I'm pretty happy, regardless of Intel's efforts to confound me!

A Sandy Bridge Silent Assassin

A funny thing happened on the way to building a gaming system for somebody else..... pa-dum. Well, actually; here's what happened. Once I had identified that the Z77 platform had some potential to become a fertile area of growth for my in client (Librarian's son), I started turning over rocks to see where I could find some good boards on which to build. Of course, there was the every-present online retailers such as Newegg and Amazon. Shoot, I even went over to Fry's brick and mortar store and touch physical product! But in the end, I ended up at the tried and true eBay and of course, it's poor cousin, Craigslist. In the last post, I detailed the nice package that I was able to land from eBay which resolved several problems at once at a good price. 

However, it wasn't that Craigslist didn't bear fruit; it was that CL didn't bear the fruit that was really useable for a client. In fact, there was a listing that fairly jumped out at me! An ad for a Gigabyte (although the ad didn't say that), GA-Z77X-UD4H motherboard for a $75 asking price. You might ask, what was wrong with that price for a budget build!?! One hitch. The second PCI Express (x8) was broken clean off the board! Now, I don't expect that this kid is ever going to go triple SLI on the machine, but when dealing with a "client" (even one that I'm not planing on making money from), I don't take chances and don't like to deliver anything where something isn't right. And, as it was, I had found that pretty killer deal on the Asus P8Z77X-V Pro board anyway, so I passed.

But the several days, this $75 board is working on my consciousness, nibbling away. If you've read many of my posts, you are probably aware that I have a pretty decent history with Gigabyte product, currently running 3 of their motherboards in my 5 desktop machines. Finally, I gave in, contacted the guy to see if he still had it (he still did) and offered him $65 for it (which he took).

 

The fact is that it's a risk. Although, anyone can accidentally break things, but you find that if somethings broken on a rather sophisticated device like a computer motherboard, there's every possibility that other stuff is broken on it as well. I'm not being a cynic; that's just the way things like that usually go. But I figured, "what the heck", $65 is a risk worth taking, weighed against landing a very nice mid-line board. In the motherboard world, $100 is the low end, $300 is the high end, and $200 is "mid-line". If you've been around computer building for a while, you know that mid-line leans more toward the top than the bottom. And this board cost every bit of $200 less than 6 months ago! Besides.... I had an Ace up my sleeve. Less than an hour after I got home, I was on the Gigabyte website submitting an RMA (return merchandise authorization) asking that this board be repaired or replaced under their 3-Year warranty. I also know that these sorts of connectors are put on by robotics, so if they OK it, I'll get another board. 

Yup, I came home today to find an email, authorizing the RMA with an attached label and questionaire sheet to be returned with the board! That's so cool, I had to include a picture of the motherboard's onboard on/off switch! I really love this feature which most nicer current MBs include. 

Which brings us to the dinosaur.... Although, my old workstation which finally got a quad-core processor earlier this year runs very well, it's really pretty darned old, in that the socket 775 came out in July of 2006 as the successor to the 478! It even originally ran P4s in it! The Q9550 "Yorkfield" CPU that I run in it is literally the last series made for this line. In it's day, they were the coolest (temperature) running high-powered quad cores having been manufactured on the 45nm process. The total TDP of 95w was ridiculously low for a 4 core high-end chip. These January 2009 processors were literally the last of their breed, newer even than the XE (Extreme) processors or the Q9650. 

So, let's just say that in the 4 years since, some progress has been made by Intel (even AMD for that matter). First there was the Gen 1 Sandy Bridge i3/i5/i7-xxx, followed by the Gen 2 Sandy Bridge i3/i5/i5-2xxx, then the Ivy Bridge Series i3/i5/i7-3xxx. Now, on the eve of the "Haswell" invasion, I might have found the reason to put the old dino out to pasture. When that GA-Z77X-UD4H board comes back "strong, faster......", it can be home to any number of Intel's legion of 2nd or 3rd generation "Core" processors. I'd love to jump on that $180 priced i5-3330S processor that I saw last night, but....

In all probability the dragon slayer will be my brother's old i5-2390t which he just replace. Go ahead, click on that chart and see what it says. That's right, I'll probably replace my 4 Core rig with the world's only 2 Core i5! Thought all i5s were quad-core didn't ya? What that.....? Did you see the TDP of 35w? Yes, that's 35w, essentially about a 3rd of my Q9550. Yup, my computing world is about to go silent.....

The Frugal Gaming PC

When something is said about a "Gaming PC", this is what immediately comes to mind for most people. Some unmarried twenty-something, sitting in a darkened room with several thousand of dollars worth of computer, pizza boxes, chip bags and Mountain Dew cans! I guess, that'd be right in most cases but, I'm here to tell you that it doesn't have to be that way..... at least in the thousands of $$$ end of things. What? Is the Frugal Propellerhead branching out and about to start playing games? Not so much. Let me explain.

??? It goes back some time ago when my school's librarian asked me to look at a Dell Inspiron XPS M1530 that was acting up. It belonged to her teenage son.... well actually, that's not quite right. Note that it's pink. Apparently what happened was that her other son sent the younger brother his girlfriend's old laptop, that she had used, and abused and cast aside, so that they could play games together online. Kind of a cool idea, but the abused part had taken it's toll on this nVidia GPU'd  (!!!) machine. And of course the chip was failing, succombing to the infamous nVidia chip failures of that generation. It worked for him a a couple of months, then lived for about 6 more months after I "reflowed" it with a torch, but then ultimately died again. So, little brother gave up on the machine and it went to live in a closet. However, as it turns out, that wasn't the end of the story. I vaguely remember telling them that he was better off with a desktop rig and I'd help him put it together when he saved up some money. In the movies; your hero rubs the kid's head, who shuffles off with his hands in his pockets and the scene fades to black. Then about a week ago, the librarian emails me that the boy had taken my advice to heart and now has $600 accumulated and wants to know when we can get started! 

So anyway..... after I got over myself (yup, that's the look I probably had looking at my Outlook), I said; sure, I'll be happy to help (or something to that effect), and I'd get back to them after a little bit of research! Meaning, I'm going to have to bone up on all things gaming and the current state of desktop hardware... which by the way, is NOT what I normally use and make a business out of recommending to people. What follows, is what I've learned over the course of the last week and about to start the process of turning it into an actual computer.

As you've no doubt already told yourself: "IS HE CRAZY"!?! $600 isn't enough to put together a decent gaming rig! But, never fear..... FRUGALMAN IS HERE!!! So lets start with the fact that, I plan to cheat. In the image above is a Cooler Master ATCS 201 which is a VERY nice all aluminum case. If you aren't familiar with this now defunct series (at least around here) from Cooler Master. Think, Lian-Li. My impression is that they tried to see if they could compete in the boutique aluminum case market and decided that there was more money to be made in other areas. Anyway, there's one of them sitting in my garage. Not because I had a use for it. Because it was $35 on Craig's List with a RaidMax 640w modular power supply included! It originally sold for over $200 (case alone)! My plan is to build in it, using that RaidMax P/S and if he decides to go with something else down the road, then so be it. We just don't have to worry about those items now.

Then came the big question: To Haswell, or NOT To Haswell? After two days straight of reading every chance I got, I came to the conclusion that Haswell is:

1. Too expensive to fit in a $600 budget.
2. Too new for any really good deals to be had.
3. Too few benefits to be derived for a low-to-mid level gaming machine.

Sure, there are benefits. Clearly, it's the most future-proof, and it absolutely is the most efficient in a power-in vs. power-out equation. But in the end, the question to be answered is; what is this kid going to get the most bang for his gaming buck at his price-point. 

This became very clearly, a Sandy Bridge Core i5 processor on a Z77 Intel Platform. Yes, yes; I can hear the AMD supporters popping their Cheetos bags now. I know it's cheaper, and you can get more "cores" for your money. However, at the end of the day, you know (as does everyone in the industry), that AMD hasn't been able to touch Intel's mid-to-high-end line since the day the evil empire went to their 2nd Gen "Core" chips. The gap keeps widening as we get into the "Ivy Bridge" series and AMD completely has nothing in the works that can challenge "Haswell". I'm no Intel fanboy, having used AMD for years going back to my "Barton" build, but I just have no loyalty on this sort of thing and absolutely will go with whoever gets me the most computing power for the money. So, that aside; why that chip on that platform? 

 

The socket 1155 on the Z77 platform will give pretty much all the "modern" features (eg. USB 3.0, SATA-III/6.0) that people want without the price of the 2011 and Z87/Socket 1150 boards. It will also take the 2nd Gen Sandy Bridge as well as the still current Ivy Bridge CPUs, thus giving upgrade potential. In this market-space there are a number of attractive options ranging from the rather low-end Asrock/ECS boards to the other end of Asus/Gigabyte models. Then you get into the sub-models which address all manner of arcane features mostly having to do with overclocking. Be that as it may, this is where I decided the fat part of the price/benefit curve is at the moment which fits into the kid's budget.

Then, on to the CPU. This was a whole new world to me, since I've just now managed to master the miriad number of SKUs of Intels CoreDuo, Core2Duo lineup. So, I now had to learn Intel's "Core" line. Of course, given our platform choice, we've leapfrogged the first (Nehalem) series (3 digit Core, eg. i5-xxx) and move right on to the Sandy Bridge series. Remember; this is a budget build and there isn't enough room to move on to the Ivy Bridge chips. It became fairly evident, that i5 was going to be the way to go. You get quad cores, with plenty of cache, without paying for cores and speed that he won't use in the i7s. Obviously, the budget i3 weren't under consideration unless I simply couldn't find a good enough deal. I'm not even going to address that here, assuming that my readers will already know why.

Then came The Package..... Sometimes, you just get lucky and things fall into place for you and life is easy. This was one of those. Part of what made my decision for me was that while I was researching, I was also looking on eBay to see what the price-points were looking like on the used front vs. buying new. Don't tell anybody that I said this; but sometimes, new ends up being the way to go.... shhhhh.... but not this time. I ran across an eBay listing with an Asus P8Z77v-Pro board, with an i5/2500K (unlocked) CPU, AND 8Gb (2 x 4Gb) of Corsair Vengence DDR3 RAM, all nicely matched and sold together with no bids and starting at $300. After very little activity (4 bids total), I got it for $355 ($340 + $15 shipping). We're talking about a year old equipment at $100-150 less than retail. 

Now that we've spent over half the $600, what else do we need to do? Well, I sent him a series of links to spend the bulk of the $245 he has left. The most important of them is the boot drive for which I'm recommending a 120Gb SSD. For mass storage to go with that, I recommended a 1Tb/7200rpm Toshiba mechanical drive. As I've discussed before, these days, I'm routinely recommending to buy Toshiba desktop drives because they are really Hitachi DeskStars coming out of a Hitachi factory in China that have been rebranded as Toshibas but, sell for less! There's an explanation in an earlier post regarding this situation, so I'm not going to go through that here. I'm also having him pick up a plain-Jane optical drive/burner to load software and burn disks, which pretty much rounds out the necessities.

I know, I know....the heart of a gaming rig..... the Graphics card. You do know that beginning with the Nehalem "Core" processors Intel had DMI (direct media interface) built-in to the chip, right. Now I didn't say that it was good graphics processing, but by the Sandy Bridge chips with their 2000/3000 onboard GPUs, it was decent. No, not for Crysis 3, or Bioshock, but for old Star Wars games.... which by the way, is what he mostly plays right now.... integrated graphics will work.... for now. 

In the meantime, I'm going to have him put stuff on the all-important Christmas List! Things like a AMD Radeon HD 6850, or 7790. Whoa.... slowdown there nVidia fans, here's my take on that stuff. It's not a clear-cut Intel is kicking the stuffing out of AMD situation here. It's a there's so little to give between the two big boys in this area, it completely doesn't matter in the "mid-price" ($125-175) graphics card market-space that I'm just going to cut down on the amount of work I have to do. So I pick AMD because I already know quite a bit about them.... especially the "Southern Island" series. What else is there?

I know this is an area near and dear to the hearts of gamers everywhere. That is their peripherals. And again, I'm going to one of my little tricks:

That's right.... he has a birthday between now and Christmas! Did I mention that I was going to CHEAT! Yup, between those two very important celebrations, I would suspect that he'll be able to nail virtually every other necessity to fulfill a teenage gamers desires! So....., that's a wrap, right?

.......Well, not completely. Some of you may even be doing some mental math and have about a $75 hole not accounted for..... No, it's not for a cheap-o monitor. It's for things like adapters, cables, card readers and other various items. Then, what about a monitor? I'm embarrassed for you that you should have to ask the "king" of $15-25 monitors! What we're going to do is to either snag one, if it conveniently appears on Craig's List (or somewhere else), or we are going to use one of the old CRTs that they already have at their house. That's right, you didn't misread that...... C R T, as in Cathode Ray Tube. They still work! What we're going to do, is to use whatever we can find for free or othewise ridiculously low price, then when the correct time comes that some generous grandparent, or other family member is willing to check the monitor box on the aforementioned Christmas/Birthday Lists, then this monitor will become a "side" screen on the "Super-Frugal-Gaming-Rig"!!! 

YEA.... WE'RE DONE.... FOR NOW!

 

 
 

Family Upgrade Time

You might be thinking to yourself; why is he showing us two images of the same computer? Actually, the upper is the ThinkPad T61, of which we have 3 in our house (more on that later). The lower image is the T500, of which we now have 1 that is partially disassembled here by my desk. Although there seems precious little to give between the two (as anyone can see), there are some key items that make a change worthwhile.

I'm sure that most of you readers know that Intel majorly changed the computing world when they brought forth the "Core" chips back in 2006. For notebook computing, that was the "Yonah" (32-bit), then on to the dual-core (but still 65nm) "Merom" (64-bit), then on to the "Penryn" (45nm) processors before the line move on to the 2nd generation "i" Core, "Sandy-Bridge" series. The ThinkPad T61s have the same CPU socket, but some will only run the late "Merom", and not the "Penryn" processors. I don't know whether that's due to not being able to run the lower voltage (25 watt "P" chips) or it's a "whitelist" issue, but it's a shot in the dark on which machines will upgrade to which CPU. This is where the T500 come into our picture.

If somebody backs me into a corner and forces me to respond to what is the most important factor in terms of a successful Windows computer, I'm going to say..... RAM! Lots and lots of RAM: as much as I can stuff in a machine. Well..... what does one have to do with the other? What I know about ThinkPads is this: the series that were originally equipped with last of the Core 2 Duo processors (Penryn-3M, 45nm/25tdp) will generally come on machines that have a chipset which take DDR3. So, it's not really the processor at all that's the issue; it's the major change in the RAM that it'll take. To put it in dollar terms, what you'll spend in buying a 2Gb module of DDR2 SO-DIMM for your laptop will roughly get you 4Gb of DDR3! To me that's a big deal. A T500 is basically a lighter (slightly), T61 with the fastest/coolest running Core 2 Duo processors which will take DDR3. That's it.... that's all it is..... plus; they can also be bought at almost the same price!!! As an example; I just bought a T500 locally (completely loaded with activated Windows 7, power adapter, 2Gb RAM, 160Gb/7200rpm HDD) for $125. I got home and put a single 4Gb RAM module in it, and it's about to replace my wife's T61 which I'll have no trouble selling for a profit on the turn-around. 

As you know; I tend to do things in a series. So, over the course of the next several weeks or months, I'll probably do the exact same thing with my son's T61, and my daughter's X61. I've already done a little research and found that the X200 (above) can often be had around the $100-125 mark as well. 

The only real question for me is, whether I should go ahead and switch the daughter to a MacBook now or later. She already exhibits all the indicators of an "artsy" child who also loves computers. That's an Apple product wielding kid if I ever saw one. Now, there's a friend of mine who has/had a dead MacBook Air which he may or may-not be able to find. If that comes to fruition, there's clearly a challenging new project, which might cause me to succumb to the Siren call of the devil himself.......

I know that it's not nice to speak ill of the dead, but.... can't you just see the horns sprouting from his head?