Cascading PC parts to upgrade old PC's

[Lesthegringo]

Hi all, with the recent acquisition of a new CPU for my gaming rig, the usual flow down of parts is starting where I upgrade my son's PC with any better parts and then those to upgrade the wife's desktop etc.

Most is pretty clear but my workday desktop runs on an old (2011) vintage i7 2600 processor on an Intel DH67CL mobo, and the spare CPU from my son's gaming desktop is an i5 6400 on an ASRock Z170 Pro mobo . For me it is not clear which is the best CPU to have, although clearly the DDR4 RAM on the later mobo must be better. However it is not a gaming PC, so would I really be gaining anything worthwhile over a perfectly functional PC?

Another question - I still have not weaned myself off Solidworks, with my SW2008 installation functioning on an old Dell E6400 laptop running XP, which is required for SW2008. As you cannot now convert SW files to Fusion360 compatible files, I still need to use SW, and actually prefer it in many situations despite it's peculiarities. What is the latest type of CPU and motherboard type that will run XP? The laptop is slow and crashes if you get too complicated with the assemblies, and (stupidly) I gave away a good Core2Duo rig before coming to Hungary that would have been ideal.
***line below edited to clarify intent***
Any ideas on a more capable dedicated rig that is XP compatible so that I can improve the SW2008 performance would be appreciated (VM box aside - tried it and it was nothing but pain...!)

Cheers

Les

 

[Pedro Azevedo88]

Hi Les,

It's not clear to me what's your main goal, if you want to use old parts, or just simply build a new PC.
Between the I7 2600 and the I5 6400, the 6400 is clearly better and uses a more modern platform (DDR4 etc.) than the 2600, which will allow you to make upgrades easily. Regarding it's update, the inclusion of a new capable GPU would probably not give you the performance expected, since the CPU would probably be a bottleneck for it (it all depends on the usage). Upgrading the CPU on that platform (not sure of the prices for used CPUs) I supect that it wouldn't give you much gains (assuming you would upgrade the GPU for gaming) and you would be wasting money on such an upgrade.
I guess in the end it all depends what you want the PC for.

Regarding the usage of Windows XP, I looked around and saw people using Ryzen 3000 (and previous generations) with it. Taking that into account and the fact that you want a PC for SolidWorks, I would say a Ryzen CPU would be the best bet for it.

Please give us more details regarding the usage, how much you want to spend, etc.

 

[Lesthegringo]

Thanks - the dedicated rig question at the end was for the Solidworks usage, I was not clear in my original post. I will edit it to clarify this.

As for the parts usage for the old parts, I am not not looking at spending any money, just maximising the use of what I have. I am not interested in any more upgrades, I have my dedicated gaming rig working fine after getting a new good CPU cheap, so rather than put the 'old' i7 8700K from the rig in a box somewhere I improved my son's gaming PC from an i5 to an i7 for free. After that, what is left over will be frankensteined to improve the other PC's around the house

Cheers

Les

 

[Pedro Azevedo88]

So, if I understood correctly, you now have a 6400 and a Z170 laying around (since your son's computer was upgraded to a 8700k) and also a 2600 that you would like to use in order to improve other PCs around the house.
If you're trying to decide which one of the platforms to maintain, clearly the 6400. Like I said in the previous post it's a more recent platform and compatible with more modern components (like DDR4 for example), which will allow you to pass other components from the actual PCs to it.

Compatibility with XP using modern hardware will probably require some tweaking. Like I said, for Ryzen I already saw some reports of people doing it, for Intel didn't found much.
Core2Duo or Core2Quad might be the best bet in terms of compatibility.

 

[Lesthegringo]

Thanks again. I'll see if I can get a second hand Core2Quad, maybe swap it for some newer and better stuff that I have!

Cheers

Les

 

[Lesthegringo]

Hi guys, a knock on question. Having inherited a 1070TI card from a guy lucky enough to get a 30 series card, I want to best use what is left. My two sons have virtually identical PC's that have 1060Ti cards, and one of them will get the 1070Ti. What I want to know is whether two 1060ti's in crossfire is better for their (non racing or even sim) games. They are COD, CyberPunk, GTA type games. One of their PC's got the cascaded i7 8700 CPU, if that makes any difference.

Cheers

Les

 

[Pedro Azevedo88]

SLI is not officially supported on the 1060 series. You can still use them both without a bridge I guess.
Now regarding the question if it's better, I think it's a big no honestly. SLI is basically dead and current games don't take advantage of it (you can see that Nvidia only has it on 3090s for the current generation), so in the end you'll just spend more energy without much benefit.
Maybe you would gain more in selling both of them and buying a 2060 for example.

I don't know what's the other CPU in question, but a 1070 will probably be the bottleneck and not the CPU.

 

[Lesthegringo]

Cool, thanks - selling them sounds like a good option. I must admit that I have always heard that SLI never lived up to expectations

Cheers

 

[RasmusP]

Cool, thanks - selling them sounds like a good option. I must admit that I have always heard that SLI never lived up to expectations

Cheers

SLI is for when you need more performance than there currently is available on a single card.
Like 2x 980ti for project cars back then on 4k triple monitors.
Sometimes SLI works nice, sometimes it doesn't work at all..
For most games you'd need to go into the nvidia inspector and try different, in forums suggested "SLI Custom Bits" that will reset on every driver update.

Sometimes, when it works, you gain 10%, sometimes 70%.
What you always get: a lot of heat and some issues like microstuttering (both GPU modules share the same memory...).

Just a few words about SLI...
GPUs are currently going away for good money so yeah, selling what's left over would be my guess!

 

[Pedro Azevedo88]

Specially after seeing people selling their 1060s for 250€ each.

 

[Lesthegringo]

Hi all, I'm back with yet another dopey question!

My trusty desktop PC will be upgraded using the spare parts left over from my other upgrades from an i7 2600 on an intel DH67CL mobo to an i5 6400 on an Asus B250 plus mobo, which is M2 drive capable. The OS (Win10) on the desktop is on an old 3.5" 128 SSD (it's nearly ten years old!) and of course one of the advantages of the upgrade is that I can get a 500Gb or 1Tb M2 drive and use that for the OS.

The problem I have is that all the 'clone / transfer OS' articles I have found online seem to deal with cloning from the older type drives to larger ones of the same type, but as the M2 drive will be the OS, I have no way of getting the OS on it without having an OS on it to boot from, if you see what I mean.

What do I need to do in this case, is there a special procedure to follow and how do I make sure that I don't end up with a 128Gb partition on the M2 drive?

Cheers

Les

 

[RasmusP]

Hi all, I'm back with yet another dopey question!

My trusty desktop PC will be upgraded using the spare parts left over from my other upgrades from an i7 2600 on an intel DH67CL mobo to an i5 6400 on an Asus B250 plus mobo, which is M2 drive capable. The OS (Win10) on the desktop is on an old 3.5" 128 SSD (it's nearly ten years old!) and of course one of the advantages of the upgrade is that I can get a 500Gb or 1Tb M2 drive and use that for the OS.

The problem I have is that all the 'clone / transfer OS' articles I have found online seem to deal with cloning from the older type drives to larger ones of the same type, but as the M2 drive will be the OS, I have no way of getting the OS on it without having an OS on it to boot from, if you see what I mean.

What do I need to do in this case, is there a special procedure to follow and how do I make sure that I don't end up with a 128Gb partition on the M2 drive?

Cheers

Les

I usually use "clonezilla" for this.
It's a little program that looks like from the ms DOS years but it's fast and it works.

You download the zip, extract it to a USB stick, run the "make boot bat" and then you can boot into it.
Simply plug in the sata ssd and the m2 ssd and clonezilla will see both.

Then you copy the whole 128gb ssd to the m2 drive, shut down the pc, take out the USB stick and unplug the sata ssd.

Normally when you now switch the pc back on, it should automatically try to boot from the m2 drive and it should work.
If not, select it as the boot disk in the bios.

Then when you're in windows, you simply extend the partition.
If you don't know how to do it, Google it, it's simple.

The only issue that might happen:
My old windows 10 put the recovery partition directly behind the windows partition so I can't extend the windows partition.
I didn't really bother to find a way. Apparently you can delete the partition and create a new one after resizing.
Or you can move the recovery partition with some program made for moving partitions and then let windows "find" it again.

That would be my way of doing it. I'm sure there are better ways, but I never searched for another way.
Just be careful with clonezilla and read everything!

From my experience you don't have to do much. Just keep everything at default, select "copy disk" and not just one partition and then select the 128gb disk as source and the m2 drive as target.

The good thing about clonezilla is that it doesn't care for admin rights or hidden files or files in use.
It runs on a USB stick and just copies all the 0s and 1s from one disk to the target disk.

 

[psynusoid]

Jay-Z did a little video on this a while back

 

[Lesthegringo]

Great, thanks guys, I will take look at the vid and Clonezilla!

Cheers

Les

 

[Lesthegringo]

Ok, final question for you regarding the tail end of my cascade - I am left with these two motehrboards, for use with an i7 2600
Intel DH67CL
ASROCK H61M-HVS

A quick check online doesn't show which would be the better Mobo, so any steer on which would be better is appreciated! It's for a Win 7 setup

Cheers

 

[Case_]

Some cloning software will actually allow you to resize the partitions as you clone them. Not sure if Clonezilla, the "little program from the MS DOS years" (because Rasmus apparently likes to live dangerously by describing a Linux program like that ), can do that. Not by default, but there might be a way to do it.

 

[RasmusP]

(because Rasmus apparently likes to live dangerously by describing a Linux program like that ),

LOOKS like from the MS DOS years!

And no, it can't afaik. I never needed more than 250GB for Windows + Programs that should be installed on C: like Office for example.
So I always tended to keep that size and copy it to bigger SSDs and only gain more space for data/games/stuff that doesn't need to be on C:.

 

[Case_]

BTW, just remembered - apparently Clonezilla can adjust the partition. I was just cloning a disk the other day and such an option seems to be there (the -k1 or -k2 switches), provided you use the advanced mode. I didn't test it, though, so not sure how reliable it is or if there might be any issues when using that option.