Repair-It

As I have written elsewhere I bought this computer as refurb from Dell in June 2009 for under $700. It was a Core i7-920 with, uh, 4GB RAM, 750GB, and some other specs.

I have since done the following:
- Upgraded PSU when it died
- Added boot SSD (180GB Intel 520)
- Upgraded HDD from 750GB (it died) to a 4TB HGST
- Upgraded RAM several times. Latest is 24GB which may be the most it can handle, but maybe not. It's plenty for what it is anyway.
- Upgraded GPU. Adam gave me his old nVidia 8800GT. Originally was an ATI Radeon HD4670.

I have learned that the best CPU I can drop into this board is a Xeon W3580 which is the Xeon version of the i7-975. It should provide something around a 25% boost to CPU performance which is worthwhile. These old CPUs are available on eBay for $30 or less. I made an offer on one. We'll see.

I also tried my hand at SetFSB and also checked CPU temps running Prime95 to baseline. I am going to run the stock CPU cooler. Fully loaded it goes from mid-40s idling to like a peak of 72C or 74C when slightly overclocked. This should be fine. The overclock is more of an academic exercise. I will probably not really do this long term. Plus I have to use SetFSB so it has to be done each restart. Probably only provides a couple % improvement. Not worth it. If I jack up the FSB beyond a certain point the machine instantly locks up. So again, not worth screwing around for a tiny gain. Upgrading the CPU will be a big gain. For the record here is the setting in SetFSB that seemed to provide the highest core speed running Prime95: Room temp was around 67F at the time.

Successfully made a task in Task Scheduler to run SetFSB on reboot or wake. This is so marginal but it's "interesting" so I'll stick with it until I get my new CPU. Still waiting for eBay seller to respond to my $23 offer. That could save me $7!

I bought it now for full price. $35.29 all in. Still seems like a no brainier. 11 years ago this processor cost $1,059!

I disabled the 3MHz FSB overclock for now. Questionable results from an internal CPUz benchmark revealed practically no change, but it completes in under a minute so it may not be the best benchmark. I could try others as this doesn't even seem to register the theoretical 2.2% improvement I should have seen.

Stock
3MHz FSB overclock.
Multiplier is 20x so that gives me ~60Mhz of actual overclocking. This is laughable and pointless. If I crank up SetFSB any higher, it instantly freezes the system. It's not worth bothering with. I may tinker with the Intel XTU and changing multipliers when I get my Xeon but for this multiplier locked 920 (on an OEM motherboard), this is pointless.

Decided to open up the Dell and dust it out before doing CPU replacement. It wasn't that bad but there was definitely some in there. I use the air compressor in my garage (carefully) which is 1000x better than a stupid can of compressed air.

New CPU. I cleaned it off with alcohol (after taking this).
The heatsink is right there. Good case design because the blast of hot air from the CPU is aimed directly at a case fan (which is throttled by the motherboard) and it exhausts the hot air from the case before it has a chance to circulate. I remember the ducted fans of the old Dell Optiplex P4s. I guess this doesn't need that.
4 screws and the heat sink comes off. Just unplug and remove. Easy.
This is better quality heatsink than I expected.
Exposed CPU slot.
Cleaned heatsink. A dab of thermal compound I had laying around (maybe from the Vaio's CPU upgrade now that I think about it), installed the heatsink, put case back together and BAM, success!
That was really easy. Cinebench reveals a nearly 26% performance improvement from the old i7-920. So great success!

I have also been playing with the turbo multiplier settings in Intel Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU) and while I had some success, I'm not sure the results are worth it based on initial testing....I will experiment more at some point. But running stock is probably fine anyway.

I failed to document another GPU upgrade last year. In March 2022, Adam gave me another old GPU to use. I think I needed this because it was DX12 compatible for some game that Ian was trying to play. I totally forgot I did this, too, but the device manager doesn't lie (well sometimes it does).

https://www.evga.com/articles/archive/0 ... efault.asp

Somehow I was able to find one e-mail to get a rough date then searched my phone pictures around the same time. I guess because there was a straight incompatibility driving this, I installed it inside of a week. Here is the evidence: It is shorter than the 8800GT I removed (single fan). Now I have a 960 GTX in the parts funnel and it is a long boi. Like 10". I simply do not know if I can jam it in. That is the mission this morning.

Break out the Dremel...

No Dremel required!
All I really had to do was slide the SSD drive carrier in to deconflict the SSD power cable and the PCI express 8 pin power for the GPU. It didn't need much but I slid it all the way back anyway. There is some more cable nonsense somewhat in the way but I just jammed the card in and let it push stuff out of the way. I didn't feel like doing more tape stuff but could have I guess.

Works fine. Actually, passed a 10 min burn test (https://geeks3d.com/20231004/furmark-1-37-released/) with flying colors. It was well in control of temps at only ~35% fan speed and I couldn't even hear it. Pretty good.

Had to re-tape and reroute a few cables and now there is plenty of room. In terms of rough measurements, this case could fit a 14" card. In reality, I probably wouldn't be able to angle a 14" card in there. This 960 is 10.1" so maybe something like a 12 or 13" GPU could fit. Good to know.

Then it was time to upgrade the boot/OS drive. I was still rocking my faithful Intel 180GB SSD but that has become too small for all the.....stuff that Ian installs. And some of these games really should be on an SSD for performance. So I decided to fix that glitch and upgrade to a Samsung 870 1TB SSD.

There was a free SATA port (SATA 2 3.0Gbps) so I just plugged in to that for cloning. You can see the Intel SSD just hanging out because I had already mounted the Samsung permanently.

For cloning, I used Clonezilla disk to disk. But first I had to enable legacy boot mode from my Clonezilla USB drive (hence the initial error - it was in uEFI mode from the last time I used it). I used the -k0 mode to maintain the total disk size, so the 1TB drive would have the C: partition as well as the 500MB recovery partition. The next step would be to extend the main partition to fill the rest of the drive. But, Windows disk manager will not do that without contiguous storage (meaning the new/extra space was NOT right next to the main C: partition).

So I downloaded some software to accomplish moving the recovery partition to the very end of the drive. This was super easy. Then I was able to use disk manager to extend the C: partition to use the rest of the free 1TB. This also worked perfectly. Done!