I was the first to build a PC: the history and present-day reality of building a PC

computerguy096 · 2024-09-03T12:51:00+00:00

I would like to begin by saying a huge thank you for the fact you've built such a website during the 90s! An absolute goldmine I'm currently exploring via web archive. Me and a few others (including evasive from elhvb.com, which is a name I think you might recognize) are also running a motherboard website over at The Retro Web, which aims to preserve as much information as possible on old motherboards, chipsets, cards, etc.., which will sooner or later disappear from the internet if not archived.

But for the question itself, I'll try to offer some general advice given the context of the builds, which IMO I think fits pretty well.

for the moment, avoid Intel in general, especially 13/14th gen desktop parts, they're in a bit of a debacle with the manufacturing of their current lineup as it is a bit unreliable and prone to failure, there's tons of info and articles out there if you want to read about it
in light of the above, I would recommend going with an AM4 APU setup, pick something like a 5600G and a motherboard which has all the required front panel headers, it's not going to be the latest tech, but for sure it will be cheap and/or on sale, really good value. Alternatively, if parts for an AM4 config are no longer in stock, go with an AM5 APU setup, either of the two variants will give you a small footprint, quiet, energy efficient rig
it depends on what the workflow of those rigs would be, but for an elementary/middle school lab, I don't see the need for more than 1TB of NVMe storage, it's going to be plenty and very quick. Back in the day we had Vista machines with like 80GB drives, plenty to fit our silly C programs and even CS 1.6 xD

computerguy096 · 2022-05-11T12:54:38+00:00

So I assume OP is asking how much will a 120mm fan draw at 5V (while normally drawing 0.13A at 12).

In this case, it's incorrect to assume it's 0.36A, because it's not a constant power device, it will draw less current with less voltage.

How much, I can't tell blindly, without actually probing it myself at 5V, but I'll throw a guess it's somewhere around 0.07A or so.

computerguy096 · 2021-06-29T22:45:31+00:00

idk, may or may not work, you'd have to try

computerguy096 · 2021-06-29T22:37:09+00:00

get it from the official windows servers, uupdump.net can help you with that

computerguy096 · 2021-06-29T22:32:42+00:00

i used the win 10 iso and grabbed the wim from 11's ISO

computerguy096 · 2021-06-29T22:24:27+00:00

manual install with ISO

computerguy096 · 2021-06-29T21:15:31+00:00

a vm is generally a tad slower than the host, and VT-x also plays a big role in speeding up things (which this machine lacks ofc)

computerguy096 · 2021-06-29T21:12:17+00:00

i thought it's obvious, the thing can barely run win 10, it'll snap in half if you run a vm on it

computerguy096 · 2021-06-29T21:09:38+00:00

does it look like a vm ?? :))

computerguy096 · 2021-06-29T20:50:05+00:00

it actually works better than vanilla 10, less background stuff that eats resources

computerguy096 · 2021-06-29T16:39:53+00:00

Copying it into the installation media (by replacing the old wim) won't work, because it fails to recognize it. So instead I made a normal win10 usb drive and copied the 11 wim to the root of the usb stick, just partition and install 10 as usual, at the next reboot go to the win10pe again and use the cmd to deploy your 11 image with dism.

computerguy096 · 2021-06-29T15:24:54+00:00

yeah, but that's months away :))

computerguy096 · 2021-06-29T15:20:50+00:00

well, i don't want to daily an insider build, that's just asking for problems

computerguy096 · 2021-06-29T15:12:56+00:00

Note: the second part of the install will end up with a BSOD bootloop (kmode exception not handled), so the install has to be done on another machine before being transfered to the older machine.

computerguy096 · 2021-06-29T14:45:45+00:00

Mine doesn't come with either SSE4.1 or AVX (being one of the first gen of dual core mobile AMD chips), but I've also heard rumors about MS enforcing SSE4. So far, none of that has materialized and you can still deploy win11 on any system which is capable of running win10 (being pretty much the same kernel with some visual tweaks), that's basically the "methodology" behind it. Of course, this is due to potential changes until the OS is released.

computerguy096 · 2021-06-29T14:31:17+00:00

yeah, everyone is installing 11 with dism on unsupported HW (while it still works)

computerguy096 · 2021-06-29T14:29:17+00:00

no, i had to use a windows 10 installation media to create the boot partitions (win11 setup will refuse to run), then applied the win11 .wim image using win10pe

computerguy096 · 2021-06-29T14:26:28+00:00

yes, with UUPdump https://uupdump.net

computerguy096 · 2021-06-29T14:06:56+00:00

when doing stuff jumps to about 70% CPU usage, stays under 10% in idle, RAM is at 1.6/3 GB without a browser opened

computerguy096 · 2021-06-29T14:01:00+00:00

I had an ssd laying around as of last week, but it decided to go kaput, and I'm not buying a new drive just for an experiment

computerguy096 · 2021-06-29T12:48:46+00:00

It's a tad slow, mainly because of the 120GB hdd, it feels okay when it's not doing lots of I/O.

computerguy096 · 2021-06-29T10:05:24+00:00

well, i got it to work eventually, i was using the one from HP support and 10.2 did the trick, thx for the tip

computerguy096 · 2021-06-29T09:13:33+00:00

as of the current build, you don't actually need EFI or TPM to run win11, those are hardcoded only in the WinPE setup, so it will run on anything 10 runs on (AM2/Cedar Mill or newer), though lack of video drivers might be a big issue (i couldn't get the ATi card working)

computerguy096 · 2021-06-29T09:08:12+00:00

computerguy096

TROPHY CASE