- Dec 23, 2006
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I am looking on Ebay. I want a cheap used option for passive cooling (heatsink) that will do 1080p for basic web browsing via PCI-E 1.0 What is the best option of say a $10-$20 option?
I am looking on Ebay. I want a cheap used option for passive cooling (heatsink) that will do 1080p for basic web browsing via PCI-E 1.0 What is the best option of say a $10-$20 option?
It's a 2.8Ghz P4 with hyperthreading and supports 64bit OS. So it's one of the newer P4's.What specific Pentium 4 do they have? You might be able to pick up an upgrade from eBay dirt cheap. My parents went from a 1.6GHz first-gen to a 2.4GHz Northwood (with a lot more L2 cache), nice little kicker. I mean it was still slow as treacle, but marginally less painful to use.
Be careful, that old of a system is likely an AGP video slot, not PCIe. Meaning you're going to have a hard time finding any cards that will even fit it. And none of those are likely to support much modern hardware encoding/etc.
I simply wanted a card that will support 1080p because the client has a 27" LCD monitor. Not really worried about HD content. Simply something that will support the resolution of the 27" monitor.Be careful, that old of a system is likely an AGP video slot, not PCIe. Meaning you're going to have a hard time finding any cards that will even fit it. And none of those are likely to support much modern hardware encoding/etc.
I would recommend a new system as well. What OS are they running? If it is anything less than Win 7 that alone is a good reason to upgrade. IMO just not worth the time and effort to repair a system that old, when you are going to be stuck with a slow, outdated system anyway, for which all the other parts could fail at any time. Do you or they live close to a microcenter? They have a really good selection of off lease systems for a hundred to two hundred bucks.I'd recommend the dumpster. At this point they'd just be throwing good money after bad.
Well here's a Radeon 4850 for $20.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/ATI-RADEON-HD-4850-Video-Graphics-Card-512MB-Working/253475128773
I would recommend a new system as well. What OS are they running? If it is anything less than Win 7 that alone is a good reason to upgrade. IMO just not worth the time and effort to repair a system that old, when you are going to be stuck with a slow, outdated system anyway, for which all the other parts could fail at any time. Do you or they live close to a microcenter? They have a really good selection of off lease systems for a hundred to two hundred bucks.
An AMD R5 430 is based off of a re-spun GCN 1st gen core and is still receiving driver updates. It's like $25 on eBay. I'd take that over a 610 myself.
a lot of valid points, if the MB supports a C2D upgrade that's totally worth doing, and overall that's a seriously slow PC even for web browsing (Pentium 4 2.8); although the last time I tried the 3Ghz 65nm P4 HT last year it was not THAT bad, if you had a fresh install of Win7 with no AV/auto update and so on, but that PC had plenty of ram and a discrete GPU, far better than the average P4.
I dunno. I'm torn. I fixed up someone's P4 rig with XP a few years back, just before XP went EOL. They had fallen for the "Veendows Support" scam, and I had to clean up the mess. I nuked and paved. (With a new HDD, I saved the old IDE HDD and put it into a USB 2.0 metal enclosure, should someone with a pay grade higher than mine, want to recover some data from it in the future.)
Of course, all of that work, and the enclosure, new HDD for the unit (used a SATA WD 640GB, and an IDE-to-SATA/SATA-to-IDE converter), installation of XP, and updates, oh the updates.... anyways, it took me a number of hours to get it up to ship-shape speed.
I charged, oh, well, some reasonable amount, considering all of the time and hardware I had into it, but they seemed.... disappointed.
I felt bad that I charged them that much, for such an old machine, even though, that's what they asked. So I GAVE them a free refurb Win7 Dell/HP/whatever box I picked up off of Newegg for $99.99 at the time. I don't recall if it was Core2Duo, or Sandy Bridge Pentium, but it was a definite step up from a P4 with XP.
They didn't even use the refurb, client gave it to one of their relatives. Sigh.
It's hard to get people to "Change", or at least, convince them to upgrade.
In my parts bin I have a couple of x1950pro's with 256MB of ram. I think I would have to upgrade the power supply to a 450w which is something I wanted to do originally. Right now the computer has integrated graphics running the machine.
You can throw all the good money at bad but some people want to hold onto their legacy systems. On a side note this system went from 1GB of ram to 4GB of glorious ram. From XP to Win7. I put in a 120GB SSD and ordered a $10 SATA 3 card for added speed.
I always leave loaner laptops because they always want to buy those as well.
Thanks for the feedback. Thoughts on the x1950pro?
the negative with Radeons is that they are no longer receiving driver updates;
I would try some low end fermi, like GT420, 610... something like that.
Browsing .. whats wrong with the integrated ?