Worth getting an OS for an AthlonII x3 2.9ghz?

[GoStumpy]

My neighbour gave me a PC because they claimed it didn't work anymore, I quickly noticed the graphics card was completely clogged with dust... I removed that and the PC booted up just fine with a spare HDD I had.

It's a Coolermaster Case, Coolermaster 500w PSU, Asus AM2+/AM3 motherboard, 4GB DDR2 Ram, and an AthlonII x3 435 2.9GHZ CPU.

It doesn't have a HDD so I'll have to get a copy of an OS and supply a HDD.. I have zero experience with this CPU and am wondering if it's worth putting together a system for poker playing, youtube, browsing, etc... how does the Athlon x3 2.9GHz work in daily tasks these days?

My setup right now is two computers side by side, one for me, one for the wife, and pretty often my friend comes over and we play online poker

I looked into it enough to realize it's not worth upgrading it, due to DDR2 ram, so I'm only looking to find out if it's worth using as-is.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

Linux costs nothing and will likely do everything you want. It can also boot from a USB drive with persistent storage (data saved to USB drive) so you don't even need a hard drive. I'd recommend Linux Mint 64-bit with MATE desktop.

 

[whm1974]

Linux Lite or maybe Bodhi Linux would be good for this, as would Manjaro which I use.

 

[GoStumpy]

Browsing on Linux would be fine, I suppose playing with Wine on Linux I could try and get Pokerstars to work...

 

[JackMDS]

For what you intend to do it will work Well.

Add an SSD and it will work better than your Q8200, and you would not notice much diffrence than the performance of the i3 rig.

One of the things that even Enthusiast can not really get is that even if you install components that are 2 times faster on their own Benchmark, the actual overall Experience of regular use of a Computer does not really change much over what you have now..


:coo

 

[whm1974]

I agree with getting an SSD. It will speed up your system almost like something modern.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

Agree with SSD suggestion.

For S&Gs I upgraded Wine to latest stable version on my HTPC (Linux Mint 18.2 64-bit Cinnamon) and installed PokerStars. Install went smoothly, PokerStars started, created account, landed in lobby, changed some settings, clicked through several tabs, exited. Everything worked fine for me, though I didn't actually play a game.

Latest Wine repository for Ubuntu/Mint:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ricotz/unstable
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install wine-stable winetricks

 

[GoStumpy]

Good suggestions, I'll try some Linux on it. Haven't played with Linux in 5+ years so it should be fun. I'll need Wine for sure to get Pokerstars to work though!

I think I might have a spare SSD laying around somewhere which will be better than the 250GB WD Black I have in it now.