PCI-E question

[ikonix360]

I went ahead and wired in the plug for the USB hub into a male molex connector so it could plug into a power supply cable versus just being hard wired.

I also put some heat shrink on the end of the terminals where the wires are attached so that there was more strength there since the cables could be subjected to movement.

This way the USB hub will be powered whenever the computer is on so that I don't need my stereo to be on for the USB hub to be powered as the power brick for the hub was plugged into the power strip my stereo stuff is plugged into and I use the switch on the strip to power the whole stereo on.



This is how the power supply is connected for the time being.

Power cables are a mess, but I do plan on straightening them up at some point. Most likely when I finish the other mods.

Now once the mods are finished and the power supply is permanently mounted I may shorten the wiring

 

[ikonix360]

The capacitors came in today so I looked at the power supply and determined I could do it with the soldering equipment I have at home.

Got the caps installed and the computer works great.

Originally I had an issue that I thought was a problem with the 32" HDTV where it looked a little like ghosting and moving the VGA cable could change it, but it might have been the stock power supply.

I don't remember if the issue was still present with the 500 watt supply before the caps were replaced, but it is gone now and that's all that matters.

 

[ikonix360]

It's been almost two months and so far the computer is still working great.

Have yet to do anything further about adding a video card though.

Also when I wired up the external power supply I used some good quality double sided tape to secure the hard drive to where the original power supply was as that got it off the hinged back panel.

What's nice is if the internal DVD drive fails I can add an external SATA DVD drive as I have several power connectors I can use to power it. The motherboard has four SATA ports.

What's nice is that the power supply generates so little heat (air being blown from it doesn't get warm) that the fan is totally silent being run so slow. When I add a video card I suspect the supply will run a bit warmer and at that time I will possibly need to speed up the fan some which will be fairly easy to do.

 

[ikonix360]

I've got another question.

Will a PCI-E SSD work on this computer since it is from 2010?

 

[PP Mguire]

I've got another question.

Will a PCI-E SSD work on this computer since it is from 2010?

An NVMe wouldn't unless you used a USB3 enclosure for it.

 

[ikonix360]

True, but aren't there other PCI-E types that would work?

Of course I could always add a PCI-E USB3 card and get an enclosure if it would be just as fast as a PCI-E SSD.

Thing is I'm wanting to boot from it so that this computer is faster unless I could just use it similar to how RAM is used.

 

[Joe C]

Just get a Sata SSD, on a 2010 pc you would not see any difference in speed even if it could boot from the PCIe slot

 

[PP Mguire]

Eh depending on task he would, especially in Windows 10. I only say this because on my 940BE machine I could tell a difference between a Neutron GTX and HyperX 240 PCI-E in XP and Vista. The problem being he would need an AHCI based PCI-E M.2 and those are getting pretty rare and shoehorning NVMe based M.2 SSDs in older machines isn't really a thing (I tried custom bios in my P67 and X79 stuff and they see them but it's buggy). Is the difference worth it? Ehhh, it is to me because I have one. Would I tell him to scour Ebay looking for one, no. So I agree on sticking with SATA.

Sidenote, they make NVMe drivers for XP too, but you can't boot from them sadly.

 

[ikonix360]

I already have a SATA SSD so I'll stick with that.

I'm just glad that this PC from 2010 can run Windows 10 and do most things aside from more modern games which I don't play anyways.

I have two of these computers and I noticed the one with 4 gigs of RAM and Intel Core 2 Quad Q9100 isn't quite as good as the computer with the 8 gigs of RAM, Intel core 2 extreme QX9300 and external 500 watt power supply.

The one with the 4 gigs of RAM seems to run out of RAM faster and uses more processor percentage than the other one.

That said it's pretty sad when a 2010 computer is faster at doing things (booting, loading programs ETC...) than the 2-3 year old HP computers at work even though the much newer computer has better specs, but they do have standard hard drives and mine have SSD.

 

[ikonix360]

I've got a question.

If I do get a video card will the computer be powerful enough for forrnite or would i be money ahead getting a proper computer?

Not sure if its posted here but processor is quad core 2.5GHZ all cores. I can get the specific processor when I get home.

Here's the video card and extender I was looking at.

https://www.amazon.com/EZDIY-FAB-Ex...keywords=pci-e+extender&qid=1616821383&sr=8-9

https://www.amazon.com/MSI-GT-710-1GD3H-LP/dp/B01AZHOWL0?source=ps-sl-shoppingads-lpcontext&psc=1