best cheap/free scores 1.1

[Compgeke]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

HP XW8600 tower for $10.

Has a Xeon X5260, 4 gigs ram and a Quadro FX1700. Not entirely sure why you would get the XW8600 for that config but whatever floats your boat.

I'll put Two E5440s, 24 gigs of ram and whatever video card I have around into it to make a fairly decent workstation tower.

[ratdude747]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Not one of my best scores, but certainly one of the oddest: $12.50 Sony Cybershot U20. Had a 64MB MS and old Porter carry case. Not sure if it will USB charge (testing it to see) but I do have a sony AAA/AA NiMH charger at home... I'm out of town and I'm running some HF 900mAH AAA's for testing.

Also grabbed a rosewill (IIRC) 2 USB/VGA KVM for $0.99... needs the selector module replaced (aka stripboard and a switch, I have some nice ones left over from a project).

[goodpsusearch]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

What's the meaning of buying things you wont use?

[ratdude747]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Who said I bought things I wouldn't use?

[goodpsusearch]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

http://www.dpreview.com/products/son...ts/sony_dscu20

I don't know how this could be of any practical use

[ratdude747]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

^ Why NOT? Everything I upload to BCN is 2MP anyway, I used to use a 2MP Canon Powershot S110/S100. This thing (while not having optical zoom) is even smaller yet... Small enough to stash anywhere.

Yeah, many of you are saying "use ur phone"... but I hate taking smartphone pictures. Not to mention they are a bit of a pain to get off the phone sometimes and all. Not to mention it has a little bit of "charm" to it... Not what one would normally see.

If it was $15 or more I wouldn't have... but hell, it was too oddball and unique to pass up.

[goodpsusearch]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Quote: Not to mention they are a bit of a pain to get off the phone sometimes and all.

That's true!

I found best for me to take pictures with my compact camera 12MP and then resize to 2000x1500, the badcaps limit. This makes the final outcome full of detail and contrast without the digital noise the original photos suffer from.

[ratdude747]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

^lower res sensors of the same size are also somewhat noise immune due to the source of noise being physical distance between signal paths.

Hence why the highest MP camera I have in use is a 6MP Canon A540 (although I have a olympus 12 MP with a smashed screen and a questionable 10MP Kodak in the junk pile, the former was noisy as shit).

[Compgeke]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Noise is also why I use a Nikon D90 over a cheaper 36MP or whatever Walmart special. It might be "only" 12 MP or something like that but at least my pictures look a lot better than the cell phone.

[Compgeke]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Great day, found a $5 Dell Vostro 3450.

Has a Core i5 2410M, no ram, 320 GB HDD, DVD Burner, Windows 7. Only problem is one of the screen hinges ripped out but I can put a small bolt through it and trim it off level - no big deal. Not sure if it's ATI graphics or not but I'll find out when I get home.

Also picked up a free Sansui G-5000 and Sony DVP-CX777 ES 400 CD\DVD\SACD changer.

[3d0]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Saw this pc case outside, all smashed up on the front side. I thought someone had ripped everything out of it. But I was wrong.
Took a sneak peak from behind and there is a PSU and mobo present so I took it home. Opened up the panel, and I was surprised, nothings missing!
Fired her up. fans are spinning but no display.
Upon further inspection the mobo had some bad caps. KZG 6.3V 3300uF replaced them and now she works.
Spec:
Cpu - AM2 Athlon64 3000+
RAM - 1GB
HDD - Hitachi 160GB 3.0Gb/s
MB - Biostar NF61V Micro AM2
DVD/RW - Philips

Surprised to find the HDD inside.

[ratdude747]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

^Nice score... And the PSU?

[3d0]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

It's a no name brand, model lpa2-23 400W not even worth mentioning.
If I find a cheap X2 cpu it would be a decent machine for web and office work, the psu would need a upgrade though.

[momaka]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

You can probably overclock that 3000+ a good 200-400 MHz or so without a bump in voltage. It won't beat the performance of a X2, but still worth it. I juked around with one of my trash-picked PCs yesterday, and I managed to push the 2 GHz Athlon 64 3200+ CPU up to 2.4 GHz no problems.

I'm not sure how overclock-friendly your BioStar mobo is, but if it's anything like my GeForce 6100-M9, it should be easy and painless.
Nice find!

[3d0]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Exactly what I did!
Overclocking it @2.2Ghz was easy but ran into troubles with the HDD. The read/write speed are stupidly slow..less than 10MB/s. It takes ages just to open up the browser on a freshly installed win7. It's constantly "writing-reading" something.
Tried swapping the sata cable, defragmenting, DMA is enabled???
Any software worth trying before I toss the hdd?

[retiredcaps]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Any software worth trying before I toss the hdd?

Maybe try a live linux distro like Lubuntu and run

sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/sda

This will report something like

$ sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/sda
[sudo] password for administrator:

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 1784 MB in 2.00 seconds = 892.43 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 120 MB in 3.00 seconds = 39.97 MB/sec

Mine old used hard drive gets almost 40MB/sec.

Maybe also try resetting the bios to default settings and retest. Maybe the overclocking has something do with the slow disk performance? I'm not an overclock expert and have no idea of the ramifications.

[momaka]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

... but ran into troubles with the HDD. The read/write speed are stupidly slow..less than 10MB/s.

Try the HDD in another computer. If it does the same, then it's the HDD. Otherwise, it could also be a setting in the BIOS or perhaps controller issues.

[stj]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

slow harddrives can be caused by a faulty cable.
the transfers are checksumed and a corrupt packet will be re-sent.

[3d0]

Re: Your Best Dumpster Finds

Problem solved. It was the chinese sata cables I had causing trouble. It works flawlessly with the one from my main rig.

@retiredcaps

Just what I was looking for:

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 1114MB in 2.00 seconds = 556.57MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 224MB in 3.01 seconds = 74.35MB/sec

Thanks guys

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

was given a 32" rca LCD from a friend today. has a standby light only, does not power up. I'll get into it over the weekend and see whats up with it.