Hardware & Technical Built an ED PC for £150

Parmo

Parmo
drew said:
And Win 10? Love it. Slightly better than Win 7 and a world away from Win 8.x. And free, what's not to like. :)

Cheers,

Drew.
Click to expand...
Win 10? The key logger that comes with an operating system.
I also hope it's not the Home version.
The Home versions of Windows are like witches and vampires - they ask you if they come in and you willingly agree.
:eek::eek:Then they let in everyone to see your laundry.
[===]
Good to see you back Drew and playing ED with your children.:)
 

drew

drew
Alien said:
I have a Dell Optiplex 760 PC.
It doesn't like new RAM in it ... I tried upgrading the RAM and it wouldn't even boot BIOS.
The case is too thin to physically fit a graphics card in ... and yes, I did try.

So my crappy Dell PC won't play decent games ... but I can look at the forum (am posting this now on it) or watch youtube or streams while playing ED on the other PC ... so not a total waste.
Click to expand...

Which Optiplex 760, Alien? The ones we have are the second smallest SFFs (Small Form Factor). Second from right in this pic.

7245.760.jpg


and you can fit a graphics card - not much choice, but the Radeon R7 250 low profile does fit and works a charm. :)

51Nqqo4lIjL.jpg


I also got my Ram from here, 4x 1 Gig modules (since it's only 32 bit Win 10) > https://www.offtek.co.uk/dell/deskt...-desktop-mini-tower-and-small-form-factor-ram

Worked fine, no problems. The 760 can be a half decent gaming rig for not much outlay.

Cheers,

Drew.
 
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drew

drew
Varrag said:
Ah, so you gave up on waiting FDEV to fulfill their promise to give us alts? :)

Good job with that hardware, by the way. ED is very friendly to low-end PCs, which was always one of its strong selling points, imo.
Click to expand...

Yes. I guess I gave up. :) However, my progress in the game has stalled. I want to keep my Cobra, but on its own it simply can't handle some of the tougher opponents in game now, so I need backup. I figure a wing of three co-ordinated ships will be a force to be reckoned with. Once I realised I could get two more PCs up to the starting gate it was a case of 'to hell with it'. The three of us are having lots of fun in Wot and WoW (warships) that I figured it was time to embrace the multiplayer properly. These PCs cost less than the equivalent Xbox and are 10x more flexible + we can play in a wing.

So I'm slowly being won over to PvE atleast. We'll upgrade and then see how we fare in PvP.

My youngest - Josh (White Wyvern in game) is a natural CQC-er, so I'll leave him to that for a bit. He's already mastered FA off mode. :)

Cheers,

Drew.

- - - Updated - - -

Parmo said:
Win 10? The key logger that comes with an operating system.
I also hope it's not the Home version.
The Home versions of Windows are like witches and vampires - they ask you if they come in and you willingly agree.
:eek::eek:Then they let in everyone to see your laundry.
[===]
Good to see you back Drew and playing ED with your children.:)
Click to expand...

Easy enough to switch all that stuff off. Plus I have, courtesy of a previous life, a packet inspection enterprise grade firewall/router combo with Splunk big data monitoring. Nothing comes in or out without me being aware of it. :) (Day job)

Cheers,

Drew.
 
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drew

drew
Oh and we still love playing multiplayer Battlezone 1 on our Local Lan. So we were all dribbling over the surface SRV footage. :)

Cheers,

Drew.
 

Jaiotu

Jaiotu
Excellent to hear Drew. Some of the best times I've had in Elite: Dangerous have been playing alongside my son (age 13).
 

Alien

Alien
drew said:
Which Optiplex 760, Alien? The ones we have are the second smallest SFFs (Small Form Factor). Second from right in this pic.

7245.760.jpg


and you can fit a graphics card - not much choice, but the Radeon R7 250 low profile does fit and works a charm. :).
Click to expand...
Mine is second from the left in that pic.

I'll look into the graphics card ... but to be honest, as long as my Phoenix (it's what I call my gaming PC as the case is a BitFenix case) works, I'm not in a rush to play games on the Dell.

The one thing I do like about the Dell case, there are no screws needed to get into it or change things like the CD drive, it's all clips.
 
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Lobey

Lobey
Nicely done :)
As I mentioned elsewhere I upgrade pc's like that (and older) quite often for gaming - it can be remarkably cheap (eg i recently got a Phenom 9850 for £25 inc postage of Ebay to upgrade a friends older machine). Biggest upgrade boost can be to replace hard drive with a nice cheap sata drive - keep the original as a secondary "data" drive.
Win 10 (pro) is quite a good gaming OS - I recommend either sticking classic shell http://www.classicshell.net/ or personally I use Start10 - https://www.stardock.com/products/start10/ - I also have a aeroglass installed http://www.glass8.eu/win_future.html plus ribbonbegone from the same developer.
As a result you'd be hard pressed to tell my machine from a win7 build - even went as far as to replace things like the calculator with classic calculator ( I really, really hate anything "metro").
Needless to say I have all the Microsoft "report home" stuff turned off (not that hard - google is your friend) - you need to turn this off in win7 and 8 as well now if you don't want it , as it gets patched in.
Good general tip for all Windows OS's - use something like CCleaner to keep track of what runs at start up on your pc, scheduled tasks , browsers and so on - video/sound driver and antivirus should be about all that is allowed - everything from spotify , quicktime to scanner software and office will all try to terminate and stay resident - don't let them, and update things like adobe and java manually , never automatically.
 

Rubbernuke

Rubbernuke
drew said:
Oh and we still love playing multiplayer Battlezone 1 on our Local Lan. So we were all dribbling over the surface SRV footage. :)

Cheers,

Drew.
Click to expand...

If you can find it try out Red Odyssey, the single player expansion to Battlezone 1. Much, much harder, but fun. Its introduces the Chinese as a power along with the CCA and NSDF.

Do you think a recycler could fit in an Anaconda? ;)
 

Malkevin

Malkevin
The game is amazingly well optimised, my six year old gaming rig runs like a dream in space.

Though when I get in stations the fans start complaining
 

the100thmonkey

the100thmonkey
Heh. I just today put together a mini-ITX rig for my 2nd oldest. Cost about £300 in total, but it means I can wing up with my eldest two. I gave my old desktop to my eldest (i7 2600K, GTX 670,ATX case) and built the Mighty Atom for no. 2 (i5 4590, GTX 750Ti, mini-ITX case). I stayed on my Alienware 13 (i7-5500, Amplifier w/ GTX 970).

We are going to rule the galaxy...

And play Rocket League. We have to play Rocket League.
 
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Parmo

Parmo
drew said:
Yes. I guess I gave up. :) However, my progress in the game has stalled. I want to keep my Cobra, but on its own it simply can't handle some of the tougher opponents in game now, so I need backup. I figure a wing of three co-ordinated ships will be a force to be reckoned with. Once I realised I could get two more PCs up to the starting gate it was a case of 'to hell with it'. The three of us are having lots of fun in Wot and WoW (warships) that I figured it was time to embrace the multiplayer properly. These PCs cost less than the equivalent Xbox and are 10x more flexible + we can play in a wing.

So I'm slowly being won over to PvE atleast. We'll upgrade and then see how we fare in PvP.

My youngest - Josh (White Wyvern in game) is a natural CQC-er, so I'll leave him to that for a bit. He's already mastered FA off mode. :)

Cheers,

Drew.

- - - Updated - - -



Easy enough to switch all that stuff off. Plus I have, courtesy of a previous life, a packet inspection enterprise grade firewall/router combo with Splunk big data monitoring. Nothing comes in or out without me being aware of it. :) (Day job)

Cheers,

Drew.
Click to expand...
Glad to hear it. But, we both being in IT gives us an advantage of knowledge and awareness that the usual user has not.
And this is what Microsoft and other vendors rely on to scrape private data from their users without explicit permission.
It's morally and ethically wrong to do so - in my opinion.
Just because we can does not mean we should.
 

Gully Foyle

Gully Foyle
Anyone with sons playing ED with them is a lucky guy. Our 13 year old thinks shes 21.:rolleyes:

Parmo said:
Glad to hear it. But, we both being in IT gives us an advantage of knowledge and awareness that the usual user has not.
And this is what Microsoft and other vendors rely on to scrape private data from their users without explicit permission.
It's morally and ethically wrong to do so - in my opinion.
Just because we can does not mean we should.
Click to expand...
its very easy to turn the peeping stuff off Parmo and its worth it for Win10's benefits.
I don't bother for myself, but have done it for paranoid pals.
The peep data only goes to Microsoft, no 3rd parties.
I trust them and Google with my harmless info, it helps them help me.
Everything sensitive on my comps is tied up tighter than a nun's corset.

I'm a telecom engineering spec writer for Bell Canada.
o7
 
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drew

drew
Well folks, we managed to into the game together, form a wing and even better - hang around in our own private group. :)

Took the boys (they're already better pilots than me) into a Low intensity combat zone. Josh took on an Anaconda, FA off, with his freshly minted Sidewinder and won, netting himself a cool 72,000Cr. (Though he was being helped by NPCs of course)

End result, both came away with 300,000 in cash, don't think those Sidewinders will be around for long.

Clan Wagar in game. Can report that the cheapo Dells performed perfectly and we only experienced a tiny bit of network lag. No graphical problems or slowdown whatsoever. Great result.

12088260_10153041195892447_444946582536008673_n.jpg


Coming to a system near you...

Cheers,

Drew.
 
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magaretz

M
Good to know that ultra PC are not necessary to enjoy the game . When I was using my old PC a short time back that had an Nvidia GTX 560Ti in it, I discovered that using a non gaming case could potentially get problematic with temperature.
 
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