Hardware & Technical Built an ED PC for £150

drew

drew
... Kind of. :)

I bought a pair of decom'd Dell Optiplex 760 Sff desktop PCs from work(Core 2 Duo 8400 @ 3 Gig), upgraded them to Win 10, put an extra gig of Ram in (taking them up to 4) and then added a Radeon R7 250 low profile graphics card.

Had old monitors and speakers kicking around, so dusted off and...

Two PCs running ED at 1280x1024 on high settings with 50+ fps.

Result. My boys can now join me in a wing. :)

Cheers,

Drew.
 
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Tuub t Tute

T
drew said:
... Kind of. :)

I bought a pair of decom'd Dell Optiplex 760 Sff desktop PC s from work(Core 2 Duo 8400 @ 3 Gig), upgraded them to Win 10, put an extra gig of Ram in (taking them up to 4) and then added a Radeon R7 250 low profile graphics card.

Had old monitors and speakers kicking around, so dusted off and...

Two PCs running ED at 1280x1024 on high settings with 50+ fps.

Result. My boys can now join me in a wing. :)

Cheers,

Drew.
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Very nice. Well played! Good to know that ultra PC are not necessary to enjoy the game .
 

CipherZR032

CipherZR032
Nice, hope the case is well ventilated though!

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. The GPU desktop gadget I had running was indicating that the card was reaching 97*C (max rated at 99*C) in stations and I was either on low or medium settings with no framerate drops noticeable.
 
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drew

drew
Engadine said:
Well played!

Hope the three of you enjoy the father & sons Wing.

Regards
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Together we shall rule the universe like father and sons... erm... hasn't that been done before somewhere?

Re case vent - Yes, left the spare card slot cover off :)

Cheers,

Drew.
 

Firestarter

Firestarter
drew said:
Together we shall rule the universe like father and sons... erm... hasn't that been done before somewhere ?

Drew.
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It was talked about but never done :cool:

I'll try to make my fortune before the galaxy gets 'Drewed.'

ED will play OK with a low rent CPU, it's the graphics card that carries it and you made a good choice. Well done.
 

Gully Foyle

Gully Foyle
Good job Drew.
Matching HOTAS as well?

Steve50 said:
Nice one Drew!

..but Win 10? Ewww ;)
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I have noticed improvements using W10 even with a 6 year old comp, and all my old progs (including the XP stuff) are working great.
It loads faster than Win 7 and has better system monitoring features too.

- - - Updated - - -

JoeShmo said:
Sidewinder grade computers for two new sidewinders. Sounds about right.
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Jealous hmmm
 

JoeShmo

JoeShmo
Bobdelion said:
£150?! But, but, I could buy... half an XBox for that!

* runs for exit *
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Or a slew of microtransaction / dlc that could have been created in an afternoon by an intern!


Or go to gamestop ..and get a dozen really good used games.

Or wait for the steam autumn sale..and get a 150 games.
 

Smugallo

Smugallo
The games requirements are strangely low! I was posting on the Mac users forum where some are angry that they can't play the Horizons expansion. They could if they just bit the bullet and bought a cheap gaming rig, you'd only have to deal with lowly Windows as long as you needed to game for :D
 

drew

drew
No HOTAS. I have bought them both a Thrustmaster T.1600M, which is what I use myself. Good cheap stick.

Total outlay for each of them to play about £210. I have the £10 discount on Horizons for them when it comes out. Given how much fun we had playing battlezone I think that's a reasonable investment. :)

Plus we are really into World of Tanks and World of Warships at the moment. The joysticks will allow us to play World of Aircraft too. :)

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.
 
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Varrag

Varrag
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.
 

Hilight

Hilight
Congrats OP and R+ for your efforts towards PC's on the cheap. Reminds me of the old days long before AIO water coolers and $250 overclocking and gaming motherboards-- back when we overclocked because it was PC power for not much money :)
 
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Alien

Alien
drew said:
... Kind of. :)

I bought a pair of decom'd Dell Optiplex 760 Sff desktop PCs from work(Core 2 Duo 8400 @ 3 Gig), upgraded them to Win 10, put an extra gig of Ram in (taking them up to 4) and then added a Radeon R7 250 low profile graphics card.

Had old monitors and speakers kicking around, so dusted off and...

Two PCs running ED at 1280x1024 on high settings with 50+ fps.

Result. My boys can now join me in a wing. :)

Cheers,

Drew.
Click to expand...

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.
 
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