Upgrading my first PC
I’ve named this article Upgrading my first PC, however I did once, many years ago, assemble a PC when I was about 13, that was almost half a lifetime ago, and even though I have kept up to date with articles about PC components and how to build and upgrade a PC, I haven’t actually done anything since then. I thought this would be a great opportunity to show the challenges I faced and the outcome of my upgrade project. My goal with this project was to find out if I could upgrade a slow almost unusable PC and turn it into a usable PC for today’s computing requirements. My aim is to dispel or confirm the fears that people have when thinking about upgrading and working on their own PC and show how easy or difficult it actually is. In addition I am interested to see if upgrading a PC is a better option than buying a new one as in the long run this is a far more environmentally friendly way to use an old PC and save money.
The PC I decided to upgrade is a Lenovo Think Centre M72e that has been sitting in my loft (English attic) for about seven years. The PC has a HGST 320 GB hard drive, 4 GB of DDR3 ram and a G645T Intel Pentium Processor. I chose this particular mini PC for several reasons. Firstly, I had it sitting in my loft collecting dust as it was bought as a desk PC but was slower than the laptops we had at the time and never got used. Secondly the PC is really easy, to take apart with loads of tutorials on how to strip it down online. Thirdly since this PC was a spare, not being used I wouldn’t be too upset if I did something to completely spoil it.
Now the first thing I did was to monitor the basic performance of the PC to see what components were causing the PC to run so slow. I did this by just opening the task manager and monitoring it during daily use.
I noticed that the real bottleneck seemed to be the hard disk, with basic web browsing and saving documents causing the hard drive to sore to 100% usage. This would also explain why it takes almost three whole minutes to boot up and a further three to four minutes before you can start to use any applications in Windows.
So I went online to find a suitable replacement and found a relatively inexpensive Crucial BX500 CT120BX500SSD1 240 G SSD from Amazon for £34.98.
After following some instructions online and using a USB to SATA connector I picked up from e-Bay for a couple of pounds I managed to clone the existing mechanical hard disk over to the new SSD. This took about three hours to do.
After booting up Windows again I noticed that the PC performance had improved dramatically with boot times now sitting at around 40 seconds to get to the log in screen and under a minute to getting the web browser open and loading a website.
I then decided to test the CPU to see how it performed. To do this I installed a program called Cinebench which is used to test CPU performance.
I noticed two things whilst running Cinebench. The first thing was just how long it took. This test took me almost half an hour and although I didn’t have anything to compare it to I really thought this was too long. The second observation I had was that the CPU tended to get very hot and hit its maximum CPU temperature several times which caused the CPU to thermal throttle a couple of times(slow down).
The Maximum temperature for the G650T is 85°C with an average idle temperature of about 50°C. This seemed too hot to me as I would have hoped that any cooling would stop the CPU from hitting it’s maximum temperature.
So now there were two issues to solve. Firstly to upgrade the CPU to something a little faster, and secondly to resolve the heating issue.
I decided to start by finding an appropriate CPU before tackling the overheating issue. The main issue with picking an appropriate CPU was the fact that I didn’t want to spend too much money on the PC. This meant that not only did I have to find a CPU that would run at a low 35W but also one that would fit into a LGA 1155 socket that would be compatible with DDR3 memory and not cost too much. With no idea where to start I typed my parameters into eBay, Ali Express, Amazon and many other sites. After about three days of searching I finally found a suitable processor. The reason it took so long to find the processor is that most of the listings wouldn’t give you all the specifications of the processor, for example they would have the socket type and name of the processor but no power consumption specifications or ram compatibility options. This meant that for every processor I would find I would then have to do a search for the specifications to find out if it was compatible. This was the most time consuming part of this project.
I found a used Intel i3–3240T on eBay that had all the specifications I was looking for with the added benefit of having a higher thermal limit so if I was unable to solve the thermal issue at least the processor would run at a higher temperature without throttling or getting damaged. The CPU cost £10.99 and took about a week to arrive.
To attempt to resolve the temperature issue, I first thought of changing the heat sync sitting on top of the CPU for an active cooling method such as fan or a larger heat sync. Unfortunately due to the nature of this PC the case would limit the options because of the small form factor. After many hours of searching I found a video by Linus on his channel Linus Tech Tips that explores the importance of thermal paste to allow the CPU to disperse it’s heat efficiently into the heat sync.
Since I had no idea which thermal compound to buy I chose the one that came up as ‘Amazons choice’ on my Amazon search. Thermal Compound MX-4 had great reviews and as a bonus only cost £4.99.
To install the CPU was far easier than I expected, with a simple clip to release it I popped the i3 processor in, added the thermal compound and put the heat sync back with the four screws. After booting up I went straight into Cinebench to see how the i3 would compare to the Pentium. I was excited to see that with the i3–3240T the Cinebench rendering task got complete in half the time. A great success.
The other thing I was monitoring was the CPU temperature. I was pleasantly surprised that the thermal paste had such a massive impact on the thermals. During the test the CPU was kept at 100% load and the temperature went to a maximum of 66°C. This was despite completing the task in less than half the time and having a higher maximum temperature threshold of 91°C. I would suggest running Cinebench and monitoring thermals as the first step before spending any money on upgrading as thermal paste is relatively inexpensive and has a dramatic impact.
The total cost of this project was £52.98 and I can safely say that I have saved this PC from being something that was going to be scrapped to something that is perfect for desktop web browsing and basic office work.
Now that I have successfully improved the performance of this PC I need to find it a new home. I am considering turning it into a retro gaming PC which would mean that I would look to upgrade the RAM from 4GB to at least 8GB. Unfortunately the PC does not have a dedicated graphics card so using it as a high end gaming PC for modern games would be out of the question.
If you would like to see what I do with this PC then make sure to follow my posts or if you have any suggestions of what I should do with this PC then leave a comment and let me know.