• Given PC dated from 2010 -- No Stand-offs Used + more
    10 replies, posted
As it turns out, recently I was given a computer as the title says. Opened it up and there were no stand-offs screwed in and the GPU was sagging in its slot. Seems kind of sketchy to me, plus there might be a problem with accepting the thing in the first place. Sort of as if I was being led into using or salvaging something the previous owner might somehow try to reclaim. But aside from that oddity in this scenario, the specs on this thing, as far as I can tell are something along the lines of: nVidia GTX 470 4GBs RAM x2 i5 or i7 (?) 1st gen Intel CPU I could feasibly test it by installing stand-off screws and securing the GPU. Under the conditions, this might be a fine option. The other option that seems unsure is, since I am looking for a replacement GPU and RAM, using these parts from this system. Under the conditions though, I'm a little hesitant. No stand-offs and sagging GPU on something purportedly used a lot dating from 2010 seems strange. Or at least uncertain.
Thanks for letting us know. Do you have any questions?
It seems I left that out. Does the motherboard not being secured by screws seem strange? I'm probably making a logical leap, but perhaps they were removed from then to now.
... Okay, was this a prebuilt or something someone put together themselves? Sorry, but I'm really having issues trying to grasp the point of all this... Yes, it's strange, so what..? What answer are you looking for here?
Never underestimate the stupidity of the consumer attempting to service their own products. That could be anything from extremely shoddy prebuilt quality to someone losing bits during incompetent upgrading and maintenance. What matters is what this has done to the system and if the parts are salvageable and the only way you'll find out is by testing them.
I think this was something put together. Guess I was looking to see if I should even bother messing with it because of its age and unknown amount of use. It would probably be hard to determine from what has been said, but maybe this system is the type to ruin someone's day. Shoddy construction and all. The final report is that I won't bother messing with it, or its parts at all. And that was sort of my search through posting here. As it turns out, it's more or less something hard to determine at all with the information I have given, but granted, I don't know very much about the system in question to begin with...
If it works without standoffs, then it probably isn't broken. Standoffs are used so you wouldn't short out the motherboard against the case pretty much. If you already have the computer, make it proper and boot it up. You can always just do any kind of a stress-test to see if it is broken or not.
X58 and P55 chipset motherboards are still desirable. X58 boards still go for over $100 on ebay on the low end. X58 is really great if you have it because you can pick up a X5675 for about $25 on ebay, overclock to 4.4-4.6ghz and get around 1st gen Ryzen performance. You can also pick up like 12gb of ram for $30 since it supports ECC unbuffered memory and ECC DDR3 is near worthless. P55 boards aren't worth much but LGA1156 has compatibility with cheap Xeon's quad cores with hyperthreading which can be overclocked far higher than the i7 sku's can be. The GTX 470 though, that's not really worth much and Fermi was always a space heater. It will definitely play games though I suppose but for not all that much you can double or triple your performance.
FYI, prebuilt PCs tend to not use standoff screws but instead use stamped steel risers in the chassis itself. It saves on the production costs. Whether those are good for anything but OEM mobos, I'm not sure.
From what was gathered, it seemed, as has been mentioned, it seemed shoddy enough to not use it for personal use. As far as anything else, I might look into that further.
I put my new 2080 in a my old i7 920 setup and it played Metro Exodus surprisingly well with no overclock. I think I was averaging 50fps compared to the 65-70-ish I get on my 6700k setup. That gen still holds up so well to this day.
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