I recently uploaded a series of three videos about upgrading my main computer that I use for writing and editing my videos as well as a little gaming.
The PC was originally the family computer that my dad purchased in 2010. It was an HP Pavilion Elite HPE-150f. HP has the original specs for their pc here:
https://support.hp.com/lt-en/document/c01969874
When it was originally manufactured it had these specs:
Motherboard:
MSI-7613(Iona-GL83)
CPU:
Intel i7 860
2.8ghz quad core
Memory/RAM:
8gb (4 x 2gb) ddr3
GPU:
Nvidia GT 230
PSU:
350w
Gigabit networking
First Upgrade (Circa 2013)
When I was a young boy my father took me to microcenter to get a graphics card. The old GT 230’s fan controller broke and ran at an annoying high speed. He got me a GT 620. Because I was young at the time and not playing any demanding games on the computer so I didn’t need anything great.
Second Upgrade (Circa 2014)
I have always played older games for that nostalgia feel even though the games were made way before my time. I wanted to play a two disc game without the interruption of the game saying “Please insert disc 2” So I added a second drive to get rid of that problem. A simple SATA dvd drive would do.
Third Upgrade (April 2020)
This time I wanted the computer to boot and open programs faster, so I replaced the mechanical Seagate Barracuda with an Inland Professional 120gb SSD. But only after a month of usage as my boot drive the computer froze. I restarted it and got the bluescreen. I blamed windows until I pulled the SSD out and connected it to a SATA to USB adapter to my laptop. I could see the drive had corrupted it’s own firmware and got stuck in a read only mode. I was able to recover most of my data but a lot of it was still corrupted. So I got a real drive to replace it. I got a Samsung 860 evo 250gb. This drive is not only actually “professional” compared to the Inland garbage, but it is faster, twice the size, and has some great tools that allow me to reset the firmware. It has worked great for months without a problem.
I used my old 1tb HDD as backup and extra storage.
This was my first rig upgrade that was made into a video and you can watch it here:
Fourth Upgrade (June 2020)
The most recent (as of August 2020) upgrade I made to my rig was quite a lot. I started with the case. I was browsing a resale shop when I found a new old stock computer case. It was weird yet cool. It’s called the Ultra Wizard and looks similar to an old Antec case. I decided to put my pc into this case.
It has more drive bays than the prebuilt HP case I used to have as well as a lot more space. My old case opened on the opposite panel than most cases and all the parts inside were upside down. This case has a normal cover panel position. I also upgraded my old Nvidia GeForce GT 620 to a new GTX 1650. This made some video editing and gaming easier and more enjoyable.
You can see all the videos here:
Conclusion
It may not be the best rig and bottleneck calculator said that my rig has an 80% bottleneck. But it works. It can render 1080p video, it game do some gaming, and it’s fast to boot. Yes yes, someday I will upgrade to a Ryzen 5 or 7 (Unless Intel can win me back) as well as a new mobo and some ddr4 ram. And don’t forget the 350w prebuilt power supply that is like a ticking time bomb! But upgrading the main components like CPU, motherboard, and memory will be pretty expensive and my computer works fine for the time being.
Overall if I calculate the cost of the upgrades I would say it’s around $250 bucks which isn’t too bad. This computer is a lot better than it was before even if it was an $1000 computer back in the day. (yeah, my dad pays too much for our computers, our current “family web browsing computer” has an unlocked i7).