Alright! So, the new hard drive is installed and up and running in System #1, everything is working perfectly and it's all done! Yay! ^_^ I am so happy, I don't have to worry about constantly running out of space for a while once again. Freeedoooom!!! \o/
While I was swapping out the drives I found out that I never fastened another hard drive that I got years ago, fully. It only had screws on on the other side, because I didn't apparently bother to check the backside of the case. LMAO
It has worked perfectly for years though. But now it's all tightened up. It was silently screaming to me like "Master, maaaasteeerr, pleeeeease heeelllp you forgot the other siiiiddeee" while spinning at 7200 RPM and vibrating all over the place. I mean not really. Apparently at least in my PC case you only need to fasten it from another side. lol, anyway...
So, I took the old 500 GB hard drive out of System #1 and put in inside System #6 as I had planned.
The case has a weird system for hard drives, I couldn't find any screw holes and it goes into this neon green caddy that feels really quite flimsy. Yikes. I don't know if they're standardized or not - if they're proprietary to this case I'm shit outta luck cause there's only one caddy here, and in that case if and when I need to add any secondary drives to this PC they're gonna have to be SSDs that I can just... leave lying around on the bottom of the case lol.
What's this?! Frugalcomputing is thinking about purchasing an SSD?!?! Sacrilegious!!
I mean it's not that I have anything against SSDs. I have considered purchasing them at various points, but so far I have always concluded that I prioritize gigabyte-per-€ ratio more than speed. It really isn't much deeper than that in the end, despite my HDD advocacy. When you're looking for (new) drives below 1 terabyte, it mostly makes sense to just get an SSD no matter what. Larger than that though, HDDs wins out. At least, that is the case where I live at this moment.
So, as the drive is in place, I started installing Windows 10 on it. It has USB 3.0!!! Thank [insert deity here]! It doesn't take too long to install Windooze from the USB stick, and then I find out that my worries about the GPU are... mostly likely unnecessary?
So it turns out that my theory about the live Linux environment NOT liking the GPU and whatever drivers it was using for it. It used to freeze when I tried opening Mozilla Firefox, and if not it froze withing 30 minutes anyway. I left this machine running overnight and no issues there!
When I get the chance to test out some games, it will be the true test of strength for the GPU.
I have a few games I want to try out that I've had in my backlog, waiting for a more powerful machine (& running Windows 10). Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Far Cry 5, Horizon Zero Dawn, Halo: Master Chief Collection and Red Dead Redemption 2.
Now, this PC doesn't even meet the minimum requirements for all of them, but I've studied some Youtube videos and it seems that people have gotten all of them at least running on them.
Heck, I got Assassin's Creed Odyssey running on System #3 which has a Core i5-750 and a AMD HD 7770 (1 GB VRAM). While the MINIMUM requirements call for an second gen i5 and "AMD Radeon R9 285 (2 GB VRAM with Shader Model 5.0) or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660, or better". Granted, I could only do 1280x720 at the lowest possible settings at 70% resolution scale, at 20-40 fps, but it was sort of playable if I was desperate enough.
That's the thing with modern system requirements. The amount of viable machines is so vast these days, they that mostly just pull them out of their asses. I can't even begin to count on how many games I've gotten perfectly playable framerates on System #1 - games that call for way higher specs than I have, games that say that they require Windows 10 but just... work, on Windows 7. Fuck, some of them I've gotten running at the highest possible settings on 60-100+ FPS. LMAO
I think it has to do with the fact that you can comfortably daily drive and game on machines that are 10-15 years old or more, these days. There's just no need to upgrade anymore. Heck, this is the whole premise of my entire site!
So that's about it. The conclusion of the EPIC hard drive saga. Better than "A Song of Ice and Fire" don't you think? What, no? Pfft, there are always critics and haters 8)
After this, dunno what I'll write about. Maybe the "Win 10 gaming machine saga - experiments in running things below minimum system requirements" or something like that.
Oh, btw I have currently connected Monitor #3 to this PC. It has a resolution of 1366x768 which I intend to try to run these games at, to try to minimize the pain of my poor 660 GTX. Pop in a gamepad and ~30 fps will not seem that bad.
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