Re: Putting together a computer from old components

On Mon, 29 Nov 2021 16:30:41 +0200
Anssi Saari <[email protected]> wrote:
> Spiros Bousbouras <[email protected]> writes:
> 
> > Is there any notion of compatibility between computer cases and
> > motherboards ? If yes , how do I ensure that I get a case such that an old
> > motherboard (one with an AM2 socket) fits ?
> 
> ATX form factor for motherboards has been a standard for a couple of
> decades now so should be OK.
> 
> > Are there any issues related to my efforts I should be aware of ? I mean
> > issues specific to putting a computer together from old parts.
> 
> RAM size and CPU performance might be an issue. I assume you'll have
> SATA for storage and PCIe for video which should be fine.

SATA yes ; for video I ideally want a graphics card on the motherboard. This
is my current set up and it works fine. No gaming (apart from Pacman
clones :-) ) ; I do watch DVDs on the computer and youtube videos.

> As for performance, my wife had a Core2quad desktop until a couple of
> years ago but it choked really hard on simple stuff in Microsoft Word. I
> was surprised the CPU seemed unable to handle a simple document with
> text and pictures. Now I assume you won't be running Word or Windows but
> performance might still be an issue, with just web browsing.

As I said in my opening post , I'm going to run Linux.

> I remember I had a core2duo laptop, two cores at 1.33 GHz. It was fine
> for email and a little software development with Qt but web browsing got
> so painful I got something faster. This was about 10 years ago. The
> replacement laptop is a core i5, two cores at 2.4 GHz. It's also
> starting to feel sluggish now with web browsing. Email and my little
> development and whatever stuff is still fine.
> 
> So, it really depends what you intend to do with your computer. Light
> use, a little web browsing on simple web pages, email, simple stuff
> probably not a problem. Heavy web browsing on heavy pages, editing
> complex documents or video, encoding video... Might need a lot of
> patience.

My experience with my single core Sempron and 2 gigabytes of memory has been
very satisfactory. For example I may run  crafty (a chess engine) which
usually consumes 99% of CPU time , listen to music with  mplayer  and type
stuff using  vim  and the responsiveness of the computer does not go down
at all. Obviously , if I do all 3 then  crafty  will only use about 80% of
CPU time so it will analyse fewer positions per second than otherwise but I
don't really mind. When I use  ffmpeg  similar experiences apply. But I
wouldn't use  ffmpeg and  crafty  at the same time with a single core. I
wouldn't expect the responsiveness to go down even for such a situation but
it wouldn't be the best use of computer time.

Some web pages are slow but I do almost all my web browsing with a text
browser so that's not a problem either. If a website slows down my computer
, I consider the site badly designed and therefore something to avoid if at
all possible (which almost always is) rather than an incentive to buy a
faster computer.

-- 
There are always people who think that horror movies are just kind of one
half-step away from porno to begin with.
  Stuart Gordon