$20 Frankenstein Sleeper HP (plays GTA5 at 60+ FPS)

Hardware Build Logs
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I picked up some old Pentium 4 systems for free and a stack of HP Elite 8200 i5-2400 systems for $10 each from a school. I also got a broken HD 7770 I repaired for $10 and put them all together to make a ultra cheap extra gaming rig for LAN play.

I suppose you could say this is free since I sold all of the other systems for $250 each and made a large profit. (after using them all as a compute / code compiling farm for awhile of course)

Specs:
CPU = Intel core i5-2400 (included with system)
GPU = AMD HD 7770 $10
RAM = 8GB DDR3 (included with system)
PSU = Cooler master 500w (free)
HDD = 250 GB Seagate (included with system)

Testing the system

Gutting the system and modifying power supply to work with the proprietary HP motherboard power connectors. There is no standby power on the HP motherboard (12v only) so the PSU always has the drives and fans powered up unless you turn off the PSU manually with a switch I put behind the floppy drive button. The stock power supply was extremely dangerous, there is 110v AC across a loosely secured heatsink that is 1cm away from the power supply casing, I have no idea how that happened but definitely scary.

The finished product! It looks like an old Pentium 4 machine except it plays GTA 5 at 60+ FPS!

Here you can see the hacked up power supply and an old Dell CPU heatsink that is cable tied in place. The motherboard is also attached to the case with cable ties. Annoyingly there is this bug in the HP BIOS that prevents you from entering the BIOS setup utility if the proprietary HP front panel USB board is not plugged into the motherboard, so if I ever have to change settings I have to open it up and plug that USB board in. Since that USB board is not plugged in, the BIOS also gives an error upon boot and will not start an OS until pressing F1 on a keyboard. I solved this by just programming a keyboard to automatically press F1 10 seconds after receiving USB power.

A shot of the upside down motherboard with a slot cut out for the GPU.

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Let me put it this way. My mac pro 1,1 with dual Xeon 5150’s and an R7 370 runs GTA5 at 90FPS.

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Was it 20,- bucks?

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You can get them for about 50 from recycle centers.

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Holy moly, I wish the schools/universities around me sold old PCs to people. They all donate them to charities. Suppose that’s a good thing but it means I never get crazy deals like this

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150% increase in cost, 50% increase in FPS.
I think @Yuki is doing fine. :wink:

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I help admins there a lot so they often let me pick through their old stuff.

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:stuck_out_tongue: its often production companies clearing house though so you’re likely to find one with 32 gigs of ram. More than 4 or 8 anyways.

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Ah, the good old HP SFF PC’s. The enterprise workhorse. My company used to let me take them with no HDD but now they have stopped that (even though I work in the IT dept).