Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “We Downgraded all our PCs to Prove You Don’t Need a New One”.
Good news, everyone, I found a buyer for the valuable workstations you’ve all been using. Now. How are we supposed to get anything done? Lus? I got new ones, they’re, not brand new, but they’re brand. Exactly I mean who needs a brand new computer when a perfectly good, older workstation that someone might deem to be obsolete is still perfectly fine for 99 % of tasks. If you aren’t playing the latest AAA releases or editing 4K video there’s no reason that an older, sixth or even fourth gen processor, with a reasonable amount of RAM and an era appropriate GPU shouldn’t work for basic work. So, to find out, we had three Brave volunteers: give up their high-end systems for about a month, swapping them for more Antiquated options.
Just like I gave up this more Antiquated segue to our sponsor pulseway, easily manage and monitor your systems from anywhere with pulse Way’s, instant alerts and auto remediation. All you need is your phone so get away from your desk and start your free trial of pulseway at the link down below. When we checked out the treasure box PC, we were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the refurbished Dell Optiplex that we received, so we reached out to Sky Tech Global who agreed to send us a few workstations for this project. Our only requirements were that we wanted minimal downtime enough iio to use our existing peripherals and the ability to review 4K footage from our network storage Drive. I feared that using this old computer it would just be really slow, like you’d click on things and just have to wait for them to happen, but the snappiness is pretty much all. I feared because I don’t do a lot of heavy lifting with the PC. It’S glorified Chromebook.
I honestly wasn’t too worried about it. I don’t have to look through a roll too often, so I don’t actually need that good of a computer, I’m mostly just opening word in Chrome biggest problem. I figured was going to be uh.
Reviewing footage cuz. Those are pretty big files and usually take a lot of of transfer speed, really to get them to play properly, even on a brand new computer. I was actually really looking forward to seeing how much of a difference I would feel on the CPU side, because there’s been a mad increase in terms of raw CPU performance over the last 10 years and uh.
I haven’t used anything that old in a long long time, so I was really looking forward to seeing how bad would be. I don’t see the big deal. Businesses are right now, divesting of machines that have CPUs as recent as sixth generation Intel quad core ddr4 support. I’M even talking native support for nvme boot drives and that last one is super handy because it allowed us to just pop the drives out of our current PCS and toss them into these with little to no downtime. Now we could use a workaround to boot from a pcie adapter on older Generations, something that we actually did with the latest $ 69 PC build, but our PCI slots, as it turns out, are a valuable commodity. We’Re going to touch on that later.
Our preferred machine for this project was the Dell Optiplex 7040, ideally with a core i5 6500 CPU, 16 gigs of RAM and a dual display port GPU. But given these R refurb systems and we’re Beggars, we didn’t get to be choosers, so we ended up with some HP, proes 600 g3s and our gpus were a complete mixed bag. The Radian rx5 50 is perfect for our use case, but for office use an older, 750 Ti or gt1030 could be a problem DVI. That would require a monitor downgrade.
What worked well that you didn’t expect to work. Well, honestly, the whole thing using this computer was not very disruptive for me. I did notice it the first day I booted it up and I was like huh. Why is this taking longer than I’m used to? Oh right Tanner gave me this crappy computer, pretty much the computer in general. I had complaints, I sent Tanner a bunch of complaints, um cuz every now, and then it just like. Wouldn’T do something quickly enough and it would drive me crazy, but overall it it was actually decent. It was mostly just slower and uh when you’re used to computers being like Lightning Fast um that gets frustrating. Basically, everything worked pretty well, there was, you know, hiccups here and there that were probably unavoidable due to the the speed of the machine and just not implementing all the current features, but overall things were pretty smooth.
In spite of wanting to kill you a few times now, obviously, even if we have an older GPU out of the box, that can be upgraded, but we need to watch our power budget when converting an older station for modern use. A few of the machines we received with lesser gpus also contained correspondingly lesser power supplies, and we just weren’t comfortable installing more power hungry, modern gpus, to make matters worse. Clearance for larger gpus can be a big challenge in these kinds of systems depending on Drive Bay locations. Luckily, the HPS allowed us to pop the drive cages out.
Tooless no LTT screwdriver required this time. The other issue newer, gpus presented, was just how many pcie slots they took up. We really wanted to have 10 gig networking working so that raw footage from the server could easily be accessed. It helps out the editors a lot when we can scrub through and flag important moments or unneeded Clips playback of raw footage.
If we were doing like a big, you know 20 plus gig file, 4K, whatever it would be real, choppy uh, especially actually after the network card died. You put in, I think, a 10 gig card initially and that crapped out kind of halfway through, but even with that it was still a little choppy and then after that, things definitely took a turn for the worst, and I just didn’t touch big files. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how fast your Nick is, if your processor can’t keep up with it. Aside from a few short bursts, our experimental workstations were effectively limited to gigabit speeds, which made playback a little bit choppy and unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of our issues.
So parac just kind of stopped working. I had to get tanner to go and just uh completely reboot my computer and launch parseek, because we encountered a weird, lock screen bug that I was never running into before, and I’ve been using Park on this machine. Well, I guess my own machine uh for the last 3 years, just fine, we switched to the oplex and all of a sudden we encounter an issue and uh. That was incredibly frustrating because I’m pretty sure my computer was swapped out when the snowstorm happened. So I couldn’t do a whole lot and it was very frustrating, especially on YouTube. I found there was a lot of problems with playback there.
The screen would just flash black randomly like weird kind of driver acceleration issues in the browser browser plugins were another actually, where we use uh something called one page to capture a web page. That worked, maybe one % of the time on the old computer, and I don’t really know why I had two or three main issues that were recurring. First, one um, the headphone jack on the front of the machine is, is just that: it’s not a combo Jack. It seems to just be a headphone jack, so I found out in the first meeting like nobody can hear me uh. That was annoying. The other thing was my Ram kept maxing out when I had launched a bunch of tabs in Chrome and part of our job is opening a lot of tabs and doing a ton of different research and making sure you keep everything uh sorted.
So you can just kind of grab whatever little section you need at any moment. Second thing was intermittent, like just little click from my monitor, don’t know what that was about. I learned very quickly.
Just don’t turn the computer off that was kind of the key startup took for ever like absolutely forever, and normally I do have a bunch of apps starting up in the background Discord teams, it’s normally fine. Now, all of a sudden, it took like a couple minutes, at least even with an SSD. It was driving me nuts uh.
The first couple times I did start up. It was you know, set it go downstairs, make a coffee whatever come back, and it might be good after that that it was just leave it on permanently and just lock the computer. When you go home and the third thing I didn’t notice until we had an outage at the office and the internet was down, so we had to use Wi-Fi and I didn’t have a Wi-Fi card um. Actually there was Wi-Fi in Bluetooth for each machine.
It was an external dongle, also, interestingly, it has a speaker on the chassis so like if I unplugged my headphones in the middle of a meeting. Suddenly people could just hear the meeting out in the room not used to a tower having a speaker on it. That was funny. I did not really find any solution. The uh lock screen bug. I think that was when I started caving and I was like please give me my computer back.
I need my computer back. I think that I just slowly encountered minor issue after minor issue after minor issue of just performance, not being where I need it to be. I say My overall experience was like out of 10 I’d, give it like a seven at least maybe even an eight. It was fine, snappiness uh was totally workable.
I think, if I wasn’t spoiled with the kind of tech we have here, it probably was as good as what most people are using at work. If not better, I would say day. One was a challenge getting things logged in and just running in general by the end of the process, I could have kept going. If I had to everything worked worse, but not worse enough to be a deal breaker in most cases it wasn’t the worst experience.
I think that we could probably use Optiplex just ideally not ones that are as old as these ones were. Obviously, if the budget is there for it, there is a reason that businesses account for regular upgrades to their it equipment and we’re going to be going back to our modern workstations. But I think what we’ve shown is that if you need a PC for basic tasks, even a 10year old machine can get her done. If you’re willing to be understanding of longer wait times and the odd bug which got me thinking about our own approach to Rolling Out systems to our staff, I mean compared to a more modern, obviously pre built system.
Do we really need high-end, motherboards and Overkill cooling, or could we just equip our staff with modern versions of these? You know basic computers and let them age out gracefully. Please don’t ever give me an Optiplex again. I don’t think we quite need the computers that we have currently, at least I don’t, but I do need something. That’S newer.
Give me like a 13100 like I don’t like give me or give me like a 13400 Max. I don’t need anything all that crazy. I don’t need anything overclockable as well.
I mean, certainly some people, like our editors or the folks who do CAD as part of their daily work, are going to need more powerful systems for tools like Adobe After Effects or solid works. But those are the exception to our standardized workstations, not the rule, and yes, there are some folks on our team who are more sensitive to even the smallest amounts of system leg. Why did you cut to me, but with the cost Savings of a pre-built there’s room to have a fleet of identical systems on standby that can be swapped in without the user ever even really noticing I get it I’d notice, so we aren’t downgrading at least not For now, but I do think maybe it’s time that we stop assembling every PC in house and only build the ones that are really fun or Cutting Edge or otherwise used for more demanding or specific tasks what we will still assemble in house. Every time, though, is our Segways to our sponsor ground news. Ground news is changing the way we read and take in the news by giving us a better understanding of media bias.
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Next time, .