good news everyone I found a buyer for the valuable workstations you've all
been using now how are we supposed to get anything
done
lus I got new ones they're not brand new
but they're brand exactly I mean who needs a brand new computer when a
perfectly good older workstation that someone might deem to be obsolete is
still perfectly fine for 99% of tasks if
you aren't playing the latest AAA releases or editing 4K video there's no
reason that an older sixth or even fourth gen processor with a reasonable
amount of RAM and an era appropriate GPU
shouldn't work for basic work so to find
out we had three Brave volunteers give
up their high-end systems for about a month swapping them for more Antiquated
options just like I gave up this more Antiquated segue to our sponsor pulseway
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and start your free trial of pulseway at the link down below when we checked out
the treasure box PC we were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the
refurbished Dell Optiplex that we received so we reached out to Sky Tech
Global who agreed to send us a few workstations for this project our only
requirements were that we wanted minimal downtime enough iio to use our existing
peripherals and the ability to review 4K footage from our network storage Drive I
feared that using this old computer it would just be really slow like you'd
click on things and just have to wait for them to happen but the snappiness is
pretty much all I feared because I don't do a lot of heavy lifting with the PC
it's glorified Chromebook I honestly wasn't too worried about it I don't have
to look through a roll too often so I don't actually need that good of a
computer I'm mostly just opening word in Chrome biggest problem I figured was
going to be uh reviewing footage cuz
those are pretty big files and usually take a lot of of transfer speed really
to get them to play properly even on a brand new computer I was actually really
looking forward to seeing how much of a difference I would feel on the CPU side
because there's been a mad increase in terms of raw CPU performance over the
last 10 years and uh I haven't used anything that old in a long long time so
I was really looking forward to seeing how bad would be I don't see the big
deal businesses are right now divesting
of machines that have CPUs as recent as sixth generation Intel quad core ddr4
support I'm even talking native support for NVMe boot drives and that last one
is super handy because it allowed us to just pop the drives out of our current
PCS and toss them into these with little to no downtime now we could use a
workaround to boot from a PCIe adapter on older Generations something that we
actually did with the latest $69 PC build but our PCI slots as it turns out
are a valuable commodity we're going to touch on that later our preferred
machine for this project was the Dell Optiplex 7040 ideally with a core i5
6500 CPU 16 gigs of RAM and a dual
DisplayPort GPU but given these R refurb systems and we're Beggars we
didn't get to be choosers so we ended up with some HP proes 600 g3s and our gpus
were a complete mixed bag the Radian rx5 50 is perfect for our use case but for
office use an older 750 Ti or gt1030 could be a problem DVI that would
require a monitor downgrade what worked well that you didn't expect to work well
honestly the whole thing using this computer was not very disruptive for me
I did notice it the first day I booted it up and I was like huh why is this
taking longer than I'm used to oh right Tanner gave me this crappy computer
pretty much the computer in general I had complaints I sent Tanner a bunch of
complaints um cuz every now and then it just like
wouldn't do something quickly enough and it would drive me crazy but overall it
it was actually decent it was mostly just slower and uh when you're used to
computers being like Lightning Fast um that gets frustrating basically
everything worked pretty well there was you know hiccups here and there that
were probably unavoidable due to the the speed of the machine and just not
implementing all the current features but overall things were pretty
smooth in spite of wanting to kill you a few times now obviously even if we have an
older GPU out of the box that can be upgraded but we need to watch our power
budget when converting an older station for modern use a few of the machines we
received with lesser gpus also contained
correspondingly lesser power supplies and we just weren't comfortable
installing more power hungry modern gpus
to make matters worse clearance for larger gpus can be a big challenge in
these kinds of systems depending on Drive Bay locations luckily the HPS
allowed us to pop the drive cages out tooless no LTT screwdriver required this
time the other issue newer gpus presented was just how many PCIe slots
they took up we really wanted to have 10 gig networking working so that raw
footage from the server could easily be accessed it helps out the editors a lot
when we can scrub through and flag important moments or unneeded Clips
playback of raw footage if we were doing like a big you know 20 plus gig file 4K
whatever it would be real choppy uh especially actually after the network
card died you put in I think a 10 gig card initially and that crapped out kind
of halfway through but even with that it was still a little choppy and then after
that things definitely took a turn for the worst and I just didn't touch big
files unfortunately it doesn't matter how fast your Nick is if your processor
can't keep up with it aside from a few short bursts our experimental
workstations were effectively limited to gigabit speeds which made playback a
little bit choppy and unfortunately that
wasn't the end of our issues so parac just kind of stopped working I had to
get tanner to go and just uh completely reboot my computer and launch parseek
because we encountered a weird lock screen bug that I was never running into
before and I've been using Park on this machine well I guess my own machine uh
for the last 3 years just fine we switched to the oplex and all of a
sudden we encounter an issue and uh that was incredibly frustrating because I'm
pretty sure my computer was swapped out when the snowstorm happened so I
couldn't do a whole lot and it was very frustrating especially on YouTube I
found there was a lot of problems with playback there the screen would just
flash black randomly like weird kind of driver acceleration issues in the
browser browser plugins were another actually where we use uh something
called one page to capture a web page that worked maybe one% of the time on
the old computer and I don't really know why I had two or three main issues that
were recurring first one um the headphone jack on the front of the
machine is is just that it's not a combo Jack it seems to just be a headphone
jack so I found out in the first meeting like nobody can hear me uh that was
annoying the other thing was my RAM kept maxing out when I had launched a bunch
of tabs in Chrome and part of our job is
opening a lot of tabs and doing a ton of different research and making sure you
keep everything uh sorted so you can just kind of grab whatever little
section you need at any moment second thing was intermittent like just little
click from my monitor don't know what that was about I learned very quickly
just don't turn the computer off that was kind of the key startup took for
ever like absolutely forever and
normally I do have a bunch of apps starting up in the background Discord
teams it's normally fine now all of a sudden it took like a couple minutes at
least even with an SSD it was driving me nuts uh the first couple times I did
start up it was you know set it go downstairs make a coffee whatever come
back and it might be good after that that it was just leave it on permanently
and just lock the computer when you go home and the third thing I didn't notice
until we had an outage at the office and the internet was down so we had to use
Wi-Fi and I didn't have a Wi-Fi card um actually there was Wi-Fi in
Bluetooth for each machine it was an external dongle also interestingly it
has a speaker on the chassis so like if I unplugged my headphones in the middle
of a meeting suddenly people could just hear the meeting out in the room not
used to a tower having a speaker on it that was funny I did not really find any
solution the uh lock screen bug I think
that was when I started caving and I was like please give me my computer back I
need my computer back I think that I just slowly encountered minor issue
after minor issue after minor issue of just performance not being where I need
it to be I say My overall experience was like out of 10 I'd give it like a seven
at least maybe even an eight it was fine
snappiness uh was totally workable I think if I wasn't spoiled with the kind
of tech we have here it probably was as good as what most people are using at
work if not better I would say day one was a challenge getting things logged in
and just running in general by the end of the process I could have kept going
if I had to everything worked worse but
not worse enough to be a deal breaker in
most cases it wasn't the worst experience I think that we could
probably use Optiplex just ideally not ones that are as old as these ones were
obviously if the budget is there for it there is a reason that businesses
account for regular upgrades to their it equipment and we're going to be going
back to our modern workstations but I
think what we've shown is that if you need a PC for basic tasks even a 10year
old machine can get her done if you're willing to be understanding of longer
wait times and the odd bug which got me thinking about our own approach to
Rolling Out systems to our staff I mean compared to a more modern obviously pre
built system do we really need high-end motherboards and Overkill cooling or
could we just equip our staff with modern versions of these you know basic
computers and let them age out gracefully please don't ever give me an
Optiplex again I don't think we quite need the computers that we have
currently at least I don't but I do need something that's newer give me like a
13100 like I don't like give me or give me like a 13400 Max I don't need
anything all that crazy I don't need anything overclockable as well I mean
certainly some people like our editors or the folks who do CAD as part of their
daily work are going to need more powerful systems for tools like Adobe
After Effects or solid works but those are the exception to our standardized
workstations not the rule and yes there are some folks on our team who are more
sensitive to even the smallest amounts of system
leg why did you cut to me but with the cost Savings of a pre-built there's room
to have a fleet of identical systems on standby that can be swapped in without
the user ever even really noticing I get
it I'd notice so we aren't downgrading
at least not for now but I do think maybe it's time that we stop assembling
every PC in house and only build the ones that are really fun or Cutting Edge
or otherwise used for more demanding or specific tasks what we will still
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today if you guys like this video check out the ridiculous treasure box PC that
video literally took Blood Sweat and Tears to make all right any final notes
do it to somebody else next time