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.