the pc in a box

[shadowbyte]

So on friday, my friend gave me his old eMachines EL1850G-42W because he didn't want it anymore.

This pc was made to "complete daily tasks" "explore the internet" "Download and view photos" "download music" and "burn DVDs/CDs"

sounds perfect for a gaming pc, right?

 

The pc came with a dual core Celeron E3400@2.6GHz, 2GB of 1066 DDR3, a 320GB WD BLUE hard drive, a custom motherboard (but it's mATX, luckily), the strangest PSU I've ever seen, and a low-profile case.

Not exactly exciting specs, but the motherboard did have a PCI-E slot for a graphics card.

 

So I put the pc together on a motherboard box to see if it would POST. I attached my HD 6450, as the integrated graphics were pretty terrible.

Unfortunately, it didn't POST. No beeps, but the fan did spin up. So I started by replacing the RAM with some Vengeance 1600 that was in my second pc. This resulted in the most annoying beep I've ever heard. So the motherboard and CPU were functional, but the Vengeance RAM didn't work with that board. I swapped the Vengeance out with the RAM the PC came with, and, after swapping sticks for 10 minutes, found that the first DIMM slot was dead. The second slot worked, however, and the PC POSTed and went into Windows 7.

When I got into the OS, the amount of torrent programs and bloatware was too much for the poor 1GB of RAM, and the PC froze for about 10 minutes until I finally got control and shut it off. Since the OS was so full of shit, I decided on a clean install after wiping the hard drive.

Windows really doesn't like running on 1GB of RAM, however, so I attempted to get the first "dead" DIMM slot working. I took a can of compressed air, blew out the RAM slot, and put the second stick of RAM back in.

And, lo and behold, the PC worked perfectly! 2GB of RAM is still pretty low for gaming, however, but I'm upgrading to 8GB very soon.

I took the 320GB drive, put it in my second PC, wiped it, and went to install windows 7 from a USB drive.

But no matter what I did, the PC would not boot from the USB drive, or even recognize it in the BIOS. After trying different install methods for an hour, I wondered if this motherboard even supported booting from USB. With no online resources about this issue, I created a bootable DVD, attached my external drive to the PC, and windows installed perfectly. 

Now, I wasn't going to keep my PC on a test bench taking up half my desk, so I decided to build the greatest custom PC case in the world out of a cardboard box.

 

As you can see, I took the box my 290x came in, put everything in, cut holes for ports, and put the whole thing under my desk. I used a piece of cardboard to separate the PSU and hard drive, and have the original case's power button hooked up so I don't have to short the pins to turn on the PC. It's super ghetto, but works surprisingly well. The system is also very quiet, as it has one fan and a passive video card. 

So what do I plan to do with this PC in a box?

Sell it.

I'm  going to upgrade it by buying a Core 2 Duo, cheap case, cheap PSU, and 8GB of RAM, and try to sell it to someone as a gaming pc. 

Here are some game benchmarks as of now before any upgrades.

Rocket League: 30-40fps medium-high settings @1024x768

Tomb Raider: 30-35fps low-medium settings @1024x768.

Garry's Mod: 40-60fps maxed 2xMSAA @1024x768

Minecraft: 10-20fps low settings @1024x768. As a CPU and RAM bound game, performance was terrible on the dual core celeron with 2gb of RAM, as expected.

 

I'll probably update this with benchmarks once I upgrade the PC so it can play games worth a damn. 

So why am I upgrading an shitty old pc to sell?

To buy a 750ti or monitor for my second rig, which you can check out here.

My parents will provide the money for the upgrades, which I'll pay back once I sell the PC.

So there we go.

A free PC that is going to pay for an upgrade for my slightly better PC. 

8/8 m89s

 

 

 

 

 

[Marcus Torre DeProspero]

I put on in a backpack it was awesome

[shadowbyte]

Just now, Marcus Torre DeProspero said:

I put on in a backpack it was awesome

that's sick

what did you do for power and a monitor?

[Marcus Torre DeProspero]

I would bring it to school and plug it into the wall next to another computer except mine was a bit more powerful 

[shadowbyte]

ah, okay.

did it have a discrete GPU?

[Marcus Torre DeProspero]

1 minute ago, shadowbyte said:

ah, okay.

did it have a discrete GPU?

yeah a gtx 560