By the way, while we're on the subject of monitors, mine is actually a used one from back in 2008—it's just a 19'' display with a 1280x1024 resolution at 60hz (16:10 ratio) and I've still got my VGA, DVI-I, and a 3.5 mm jack for speakers...
wiredotter14, I was just mentioning how those stock coolers tend to run incredibly hot... For me, for example, the processor is sitting at a steady 63°F, yet the fan is already screaming along at 1760 rpm.
I was thinking about this, Tim Cook... I’ve had my fair share of rough patches lately dealing with some personal stuff... It felt like I was totally left out of the loop; all my friends would send me photos of their setups with those flashy RGB lights and high-end RTX graphics cards, and one guy even had the nerve to brag to me about how he finally upgraded to 32 GB of DDR4 RAM...
My situation is pretty straightforward—I just don't have the budget for the latest or most powerful gear right now. The most affordable cooling option I can find is the Cloud9 setup from $97, which actually even supports those old 775 sockets... I’ve managed to scrape together just enough for some used parts, but honestly, everyone keeps making fun of me for it... I barely saved up enough to pick up a secondhand 19-inch Dell monitor...
As for the cooling situation... Every once in a while, whenever we have a power flicker, my power supply fan starts making this annoying whining noise...
So, I'm actually thinking about upgrading to a newer power supply, maybe something around 550-600W, just to make sure it has the 6 and 8-pin connectors available... I really don't want to deal with the headache of using adapters...
William Clark86 said:It’s definitely doable to fix that up on a budget. A little over two years ago, with some help from Robert Rodriguez2, I took an old piece of junk and swapped in a GTX 1650, traded out the old dual core for a used quad-core, added another 4 GB of RAM, and tossed in a 350 GB hard drive (I kept everything else on my NAND and just used the SSD for the OS and games). It cost me about $15 plus those two Thermaltake fans just to make use of the extra space I had.
The result: all the Arkham games, AC Origins and Odyssey, the newer Tomb Raider titles, and NFS Payback all running at ultra settings with a steady, playable 30 fps.
I'm honestly super happy with the value I got for what I put in. 👍
Do you happen to know roughly how much a Cooler Master Iceberg cooler goes for these days? My Stock cooler isn't really cutting it... And are there any better cooling options out there than the Iceberg? What kind of prices are we looking at?
crimsonstag84 said:Well, you can definitely keep using it as much as you want 😬 ...it's true that the PC is a bit on the weaker side, but with a few small upgrades, you can really pick up the pace. Are you looking for a graphics card specifically so you can play some games or something?
If you just want to speed up your general workflow, I would definitely grab another 4GB of DDR3 1333MHz (60-$23) and a new 120GB SSD for about $50. After that, you could start thinking about the processor and the GPU, since those parts can be moved over to a newer platform later on.
To be honest, not really. I spent four years working as a web designer, and we dealt with plenty of heavy-duty software like >, >, >, and >...
Money is pretty tight right now, so it might take a year or two—maybe even three—before I can jump to a more modern setup... I'm going to keep this HDD, but an SSD is definitely happening... as far as gaming goes, the only thing catching my eye right now is >... specifically the third one... I was originally thinking about going with an >...
Could you give me your honest take on this? ................................................ Money is a bit tight for me right now, so I'm wondering how much longer I can realistically squeeze some life out of my current rig.
ASUS P5G41T-M LX2/GB (4xUSB 2.0, 2xPS/2, 3x3.5 mm, 1xLAN, 1xVGA) PQI 1x2 GB DDR3-1333 Intel Celeron E3400 @ 2.60 GHz (1MB cache) Intel GMA X4500 Windows 7 Enterprise Build 7600 Genius KB350e Genius Netscroll 100X Hama E80 2.0 GNR TS902 19'' WSXGA 16:10 (1280x1024) Alcatel SpeedStick L850V LTE ................................................. Also, does anyone know what kind of graphics card would actually pair well with this processor?