Dell Alienware Nvidia GTX 660 OEM

 Another cleaning and repasting of an older, yet still very useful, graphics card.

It was a quick job, simple copper based heatsink, a bit of compressed air to blow it out. The old thermal paste was dry and flaky, so a little rubbing alcohol to remove. The only variant for this was that between the fins of the heatsink and the plastic cover there were some foam strips, so I replaced them with similar sized strips of double sided foam tape.

Interesting that 3 of the 4 screws securing the heatsink came out no bother and left the standoffs attached to the mainboard and one stayed in the aluminum block, no big deal really, but sometimes a worry that maybe a thread becomes stripped, and then attaching the heatsink back will be uneven. A none story really, little to worry about, nothing to see here, move on....

Performance was pretty good, temperature hovered around 70 degrees Centigrade under load and the fan was quiet, running at around 1500 rpm or 40%. Yes, Centigrade, if you pushed your face on the graphics card at the peak, or anything else for that matter, it would indeed leave a mark.

In a world gone mad with new components being scarce and in demand from gamers, scalpers and crypto miners, these used graphics cards, usually around C$75, are a great deal. 

Potato

The "keeping myself busy" build is almost done and connecting a couple of the ancilliary cables and a boot drive is all that really needs to be done to complete the potato.

I attempted to tidy up the front panel wiring by putting some shrink fit tubing over them, however, I am not too happy with the result, so I may try to clean that up somewhat. I've added an Nvidia Quadro 2000 graphics card which should give this computer a reasonable capability for gaming.

The term "potato" is used by gamers to describe older hardware that isn't quite up to the task of running the modern games at reasonable frames per second or resolution. The term has broadened so much that it is a general insult to tag all hardware as inferior, and I'm witnessing a trend in upgrade madness, driven by the industry no doubt to encourage all users to discard "potato" hardware in favour of the next new thing.

This potato however is extremely useful, both with the integrated GPU or the Quadro 2000 and the difference between the two can be expressed as two numbers, the AMD A8-5600K integrated Radeon 7560D graphics have an average G3D benchmark of 475 and the upgrade to the Quadro 2000 almost doubles that to 944. I would expect this PC to play games from 2014 or so very well.

As an "office box" or a PC destined to run Excel, Word, Internet and eMail, this machine would be far more that adequate with the four core A8-5600K processor and DDR3 memory and I consider it unfortunate that a lot of this level hardware is being sent for disposal or recycling on our potato mindset planet.

I encourage anyone with the old hardware to tinker with it, take it apart, put it back together again, learn to upgrade it yourself and give the old stuff a new lease of life in someone else's home. I have realised after the completion of this build that I have a better motherboard to install in this case, however, I will need a better power supply....

...and so it goes.

ASUS A55M-E Lazy build

The online game I am playing is down for maintenance, so I decided that I would not start my Ryzen project today, so took the small case off the shelf and installed an ASUS A55M-E motherboard in there. 

The motherboard has 24 pin power and 4 pin CPU power, so the power supply should be fine, the one thing it lacks is a 6 pin plug for the graphics card, so a lower wattage card will be considered, we will see.

First photos, you may recognize the Rosewill case from the T1700 project here on the blog from back in 2019. I transplanted all the innards from it into a solid Antec case that has become my primary test PC, so the little Rosewill was looking all lonely and dejected on the shelf, I felt it was time to give it a heartbeat once again. 

You may notice that one of the stand offs does not have a screw in it, top left in the above photo. This became a very annoying five minutes as one screw ended up cross threaded and it would not go in, and more annoyingly, would not come out again. Typically it was the sixth stand off, not the first, so I ended up brute force cross threading it even more and then managed to extract it. I will leave it vacant to remind me that the brass post needs throwing away.

It is an older motherboard, socket FM2 with an AMD A8-5600K processor. I will see how noisy that short little CPU fan is and see if I can add a quieter solution. I'm not quite sure what the "FAN Xpert" banner means as I could only find one 4 pin fan header on the board and that is for the CPU cooler and one 3 pin chassis fan header. That really is it for fan options and looking online it appears that the only fan that is covered by the "Xpert" feature is the 4 pin, so it is just a PWM fan ahead of it's time I suppose and the 3 pin is standard.

There are a lot of these catchy banners peppered about on the motherboard, I've often wondered why they do that, perhaps just to encourage the initial sale of the item, odd though, it's akin to them having cars with banners like "handy steering wheel"  or "floor for resting feet on" to encourage sales.

I am a little cranky today, hopefully maintenance on my silly game will be finished soon.