I purchased this apparent six-core AMD machine on xfurbish for the grand sum of 70 pounds and from what I saw in the picture as well it’s in need of a tiny bit of an upgrade so in today’s one we’re going to clean it up to do a little bit of cable management.
Where necessary and give it a tiny bit of a GPU and ram upgrade in order to get this thing gaming again but of course, it’s gaming performance totally relies on what’s already inside this system so let’s get it out of the box here and take an in-depth look at what we’ve got so as you can see this machine doesn’t look to be in too bad of a condition there are a few marks and scratches as described in the listing but overall I think it looks ok there’s a couple of sticker marks here too but the case has held up pretty well throughout the shipping process and since whenever this has been built so let’s take a look inside and here.
Perfect Budget?
We are well it certainly looks like we’ve got the FX 6100 CPU as described in there listing and I can see that this is indeed an am3+ motherboard aside from that the cables are a bit all over the place and there is a tiny bit of dust so I guess we should probably get that cleaned up as well just to make sure it doesn’t interfere with thermals later down the line first of all though every time I purchase a brand new PC I like to give it a bit of an exterior clean just to make sure we get rid of any fingerprints it sounds like I’m cleaning up a crime scene testing, hey it’s there are any you know greasy marks on it bits of dust things like that it was then time to remove all of the internal components that we could give the case a quick.
once-over on the inside removing any of that loose dust that I previously mentioned now the first step in doing this is just to disconnect basically every cable that goes to the motherboard because we’re just going to be removing the motherboard CPU and RAM combo today but I’ll leave the hard drive and power supply in place as these seem pretty clean and there isn’t much gathered up here though you can take everything out if you wish to once this was done well I gave the case a nice clean inside with this microfiber cloth here and to be honest it really wasn’t that dirty overall I think the previous owner must have already cleaned it up and that’s nice to see because sometimes a PC will turn up and it will be absolutely caked in filth and that isn’t pleasant, to be honest especially.
If it’s 10 or 15 years’ worth of dust if you’re opting for an older machine now to give this thing the best chance of gaming I decided that we should probably replace the 4 gigs of RAM as you can see we’ve got 2 2 gig sticks in here I thought we should replace those with 2 4 gigabyte sticks instead and so I swapped these modules out for the Ballistics sport memory just standard speed nothing special ballistic sport for gig ddr3 this will just give us generally better results in everyday usage as well as gaming it’s also a good idea to replace the thermal paste on the CPU whenever you purchase the second-hand PC because it’s always impossible to tell how long the original thermal paste has been under here as you can see here the thermal paste on this heatsink has obviously been here quite a while because it literally flaked off all I had to do was pretty much look at it and it just started to fall off both the process and heatsink here you can then just replace this with a little pea-sized amount of new thermal compound and that should keep things nice and cool now I always find that AMD heat sinks are a little trickier than Intel stock ones to reinstall but it shouldn’t really be that difficult all you’ve got to do is line these hooks up and flip the retention lever over once you’ve done that when I first built in AMD PC I remember thinking this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done I don’t know why but I just could not get the hooks in the right place but now of course it’s a pretty simple process to do you’ll know it’s secure because you should be able to pick up the whole motherboard using just the heatsink as I’ve done here and once we’ve done that we can put this combination back into our newly cleaned and dust free case usually on micro ATX woods there should be about six screws.
If you’ve taken it out of a prebuilt system in the first place the motherboard that is then you should know how many screws you removed and therefore you’ll know how many screws you’ve got to put back in next up it’s time to wire everything back up now although we’ve got a cheap power supply in here I didn’t think of replacing it because the graphics card I’ve got doesn’t require a lot of power so one will run slowly off the motherboard power I think this is some sort of CIT 400 watt power supply it does have one six pin connector, we won’t even be needing that and the good thing about these cheap power surprises risky as they can sometimes be for more powerful graphics card users is that they don’t often have a lot of cables so cable management it’s actually made a little bit easier now that does not make up for the fact that they could blow up and take your whole system with them but in this case I’ve used CIT power supplies before and they seemed ok especially if you’re using a weak of GPU and if I was building this system from scratch.
Then I definitely wouldn’t have picked this one output it that way it’s also very important to remember that you’re probably going to want to install a fan at the rear of any PC you build I haven’t done so for this video because mine hasn’t arrived I thought this was a hundred and twenty-millimeter slot here but it turns out that this requires a smaller fan and I just don’t have one of those right now so I’ve purchased one and as soon as it arrives I will be putting it at the back of this system to help with airflow it’s essential that you have at least one extra fan in your PC to help deal with the hot air and also put the other side panel on because we’re not going to be doing any cable management around this side because there simply isn’t enough room here.
I’m going to keep all of the cables inside the main part of the PC just use a few cable ties to keep things a bit tidier now these cable ties are so handy especially if you want to keep things neat inside a PC system you literally just loop the round pull them tight and cut off the excess bit here you know I still have no idea how you’re supposed to remove these I always just cut them off if I need to but I think you can pull a little lever on them somewhere and they undo again so they can be used more than once I think it’s probably important to hook up all the important cabling first before you do any cable management with these cable ties because you never know when you might need to rearrange things a little bit and if you’ve tied the cables up tight you might not be able to put them where you want to as you can see here I’ve connected the motherboard up the four pin connector as well as the SATA hard drive and DVD drive as well and I’m trying to be as careful as I can about where I put the cables so that they’re both neat and there isn’t too much tension on them I usually save these SATA cables until last because well I don’t know why really it’s just the way I’ve always done it I’m sure you all will have your own unique way of putting together a PC and an order in which we do things and I’ve always just put the SATA cables in last the front panel connectors in this case were also pretty simple because they were color coded so the correct cable matched up to the colors on the motherboard which was quite handy and it saves you trying to see how they’re labelled on the board itself this is probably the most fiddly part of any computer build is getting those front panel connectors hooked up but once it’s done.
It’s a pretty good feeling so as you can see our PC is a little bit cleaner now a little bit tidy as far as cables are concerned and it was time to put a graphics card inside this thing because we wouldn’t be able to game without one now I chose an 80 pounds gtx 1050 that I found second-hand on the over clockers website in fact I think this was an open box product it requires no additional power and so work just fine with this cheap 400 watt power supply this is the sort of situation that 1050 was designed for being put into pcs with sort of questionable power supply units and you should be absolutely fine though as I say if you’re building a system from scratch I would certainly recommend a better PSU because you never know when your wants are up gray and with that done now it’s time to check out some games how does the FX 6100 handle games when paired with a GTX 1050 and what is a pretty cheap PC build now because I seem to be having one of those weeks all of the footage I captured from this PC went missing I swapped the hard drive.
I recorded it to back into my PC and the folder was no longer there which was an excellent start so I’ll just have to talk about the results to some non-represent background gameplay now in Cinebench r15 the CPU tests the FX 6100 set between an old core 2 extreme as stuck and overclocked speeds as you can see here this gives you some idea of the level of performance of this older processor and I have to say that actually using it doesn’t feel all that snappy now these FX processors were never really regarded as very good in all honesty I had one a while ago and it seemed to be ok when paired with a 7950 but it was certainly the bottleneck in the system when it came to games we’ll start off with battlefield 5 here you’re probably going to have to expect closer to 30 frames per second than anything else now this isn’t solely because of the CPU but the GTX 1050 will also be the limiting factor in some instances however this is still a vast improvement over what we would have seen should we have no graphics card in here.
The intention here was just to get this old PC gaming again and I think we’ve done that at 1080p you’re going to be ok with low or medium settings throughout most of the titles that you try and this isn’t just for battlefield 5 but it pretty much replied to all 4 games that I tested out today just calls for as well averaged just over 35 frames per second just don’t expect to turn things right up I think this is a more GPU intensive game anyway so the higher load was definitely with 1050 here and the actual effects both of these pair quite well together in the grand scheme of things it’s just that overall both of these are sort of entry-level components shadow of the Tomb Raider 41 frames per second on average here with the low not the very low present.
Just the low-preset here with anti-aliasing turned off I just ran the in-game benchmark test it’s a good job we upgraded to that eight gigs of ram as well because I’d consider that probably the bare minimum for modern triple-a titles for might still work okay in some instances but I found eight gigs are still perfectly acceptable for 1080p gaming and that’s certainly the better way to go as we move into mid and late 2019 finally I ended with player unknowns battlegrounds and this ran the best with 53 frames per second on average the one percent lows and point those were also quite stuttering here as they have been throughout I think this is the processors doing I saw quite a few statuses here and there but as I said before it’s a big improvement.
Over what we would have seen should we not have the 10:50 all the eight gigs of RAM in here the idea here was just to get this thing gaming again on a small budget and I think we’ve done an okay job of that this would make a pretty decent basic PC and there’s something just exciting and very satisfying about taking an old computer that seems somewhat forgotten about and turning into something that can actually handle certain situations again so with that I’m gonna win this has been the FX PC restoration I hope you guys have enjoyed it let me know if you still use one of these FX 6100 processors in your PC because I’d be interested in hearing how it performs.