I think I've outdone myself in terms of dumb project ideas...

Picture the scene - it's spring 2007, your 17th birthday coming up in May, and you've had enough of your family PC being a slow-ass piece of hot garbage. You ask for a new PC for your birthday, but not a family one, you actual own PC. With "next-gen graphics!" "Shiny Windows Vista!" "Better quality than my pesky friends with their pesky xbox 360s and Halo 2!"

With no one in my family knowing anything about PCs, my parents set a budget of £300.

And here is where this story deviates from reality - I didn't get a PC for my birthday. I had a choice of a PC or a friggin' car for my 17th Birthday (the age from which people in the UK can learn to drive). I chose the car. It was a 1996 Nissan Almera and yes, long hair was "in".

So what would I have bought and how would my life have been drastically and irrevocably changed had I bought the PC?
Now, considering it was only me using the family PC by this point, my parents were quite happy to see parts "recycled" from it - the HDD, the case, the PSU etc, if this meant I got better value for money by having more money for the components I did need. I essentially just needed a motherboard, CPU, RAM and graphics card. I could get Windows Vista through college.

This family PC at the time was a Socket A or Socket 754 thing - no idea which - which had a 2GHz single core CPU in it along with 512mb of RAM and an FX5200. It was beyond crap and bought from a disreputable OEM or builder who glued components in place. I hated it and irrationally aimed that hatred at AMD, so one thing was certain; my new PC wouldn't be AMD based.

Part Selection
What would 17 year old me have done? To get back into the mindset, I'll drink copious amounts of cheap lager; become a lot more attractive, interesting and generally be an all round more positive person; and lose about 30lbs . What I don't need to do however is any research whatsoever because I certainly wouldn't have done any back then!

I used Wayback Machine to determine the prices in the months leading up to my birthday to see what I could have bought for my £300.

I better start looking for the motherboard. AMD is out so that leaves Socket 775 really. Well, it needs to be cheap, I want M-ATX so it fits in my case, PCI-E obviously, 4 RAM slots because more = better, built in graphics as a back-up, and, er, readily available in 2020 on eBay.co.uk. I'll pick up a Asrock ConRoe 945G-DVI; £49.34 in 2007 money, or £15 today second hand on eBay.

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But what CPU? A Core 2 Duo looks like the New Hotness..

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...But will clearly out of budget when I need RAM and a GPU too. How about a similar Pentium D? Still Dual Core, and - wow - look at the high clock rate! If life has taught 17 year old me anything, there is absolutely no catch is situations like this. It seems a good middle ground regardless, with the Core 2 Duo being at the top end and Pentium 4 single cores being at the cheapo end. I think the 915 looks to be the best value. I wouldn't have checked at the time, but fortunately my motherboards supports it and the early Conroe C2Ds (the clue might be in the name 😉 )

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Cher-ching! £70.49 in 2007 or £3.50 today (although I'm sure some people would give me money to take one off their hands)

Now for RAM, I recall we quadrupled our RAM from our Windows 98PC from 128MB to 512MB, I suppose I'll do the same again. 2GB of DDR2 coming up!
£56.39 for Corsair TwinX 2x 1GB; again mid spec out of the options presented to me at 667MHz. I can't be arsed chasing down that specific RAM, and I have plenty already.

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Now, the graphics card... it's gotta be DirectX 10 so I can one-up my xbox playing buddies. I want the new shininess in Vista and the latest and greatest games that use DX10 like Stormrise (lol). I could never afford an 8800 series...

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I guess I'll look at the 8600 series? The 8800 series has been met with rave reviews and the 8 series is "feature complete" so the 8600 series won't be too different other than a bit slower... I'll just quietly ignore the ATI 1950s that cost about the same amount and are probably twice as fast in DX9 games but it doesn't do DX10 so it must be crap I'll go with the 8600GT. A mid range ASUS 8600GT for £105 card will do me...

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The total cost in April/May 2007? £281. Should every spare penny gone on upgrading the graphics card? Yes. Would I have done that? No.

The Build

The case I'm using is my very generic, very mid-2000s budget case, because this is a case I happen to own.

The motherboard arrived...

CPU, RAM and generic but fairly beefy cooler that I am going to pretend came with the retail CPU arrived...

I dug out my passive agressive 8600GT (I wouldn't actually spend money on one of these for a second time)

I then used a 5400RPM Sata HDD and an IDE DVD drive to complete the build. Oh, and my go-to powersupply.
17 year old me was far too much of a free spirit to bother with anything like cable management.

Using It

It's beyond loud. The 92mm CPU fan spins at 3,000RPM in slow mode! This is unbearable!
The CPU is hot. Despite this cooling, it seems to idle at 45c and in benchmarks hit 57c or so.
My memories of Vista are tainted from having a laptop with single core Pentium M or somethingthing with 1GB of RAM and Intel 950 graphics. However, this is actually fairly usable though. 480p Youtube is doable, browsing is generally fine other than it using the same tier / age of browsers as XP does.

Vista even looks pretty good and coming from a SP1 install disk (and letting it update from that) it's been completly stable. No driver troubles. It doesn't performed especially slowly but it does seem to make a meal out of getting to the desktop with screen flashes, the mouse appearing and then being replaced by a Windows Logo and then finally the desktop.

Benchmarks
Let’s start with a terrible game – Empire Earth III. I get 13FPS with this on high settings at 1280*1024, oh dear. Right back to trying to learn to play EE2...

Can it run Crysis? Er, quite well actually, scoring 52fps on 1280*1024 Low settings but DX10 (naturally)in the GPU benchmark. GPU limited and the CPU put in a good effort. In game this seemed to be closer to 30 in the intro section up to and including the “big island reveal”.

What about Lost Planet DX10 benchmark? Not quite so good on low settings for this with an average of 25fps.

What about Adrianna? You know, the 8800 series demo. Well, because the 8 series is feature-complete across the whole series (I think?) it can run it - but at 13fps!

How about an old demo - Dawn "Ultra". See what my old FX5200 could never do! A slightly disappointing 49fps for just rendering a 768p face.

What about Farcry - another old game. On maxium settings, without AA, I scored 35fps in the vegetationy first level.

Call of Duty 2 DX9 max settings (I remember playing this at 800*600 DX7 on my fx5200)? A steady 32fps that varied widly from 20 up to 50 depending on where I was running and looking in the tutorial area.

3DMark Vantage - It failed. Both of the game demos (the spy one and the space one) were in single digits for the duration of the demos.

Unigine Tropics DX10 High – 13.7fps | 345 Score

3Dmark 2001 – 13,827 points scored.

3Dmark 2006 – 4,388 points scored.

Verdict
This was meant to be a Windows Vista Troll PC in a similar vein to that Millenial Troll PC thread by Munx, except for a couple of things - I didn't get Halo 2 with GFWL which was my original plan, and the PC didn't actually suck as much as I thought it would.

The CPU was powerful enough for the games and I was GPU limited in every single test. I was expecting it to set my house on fire whilst performing similarly to a northwood p4 when in practice it's performance seemed more like a Core 2 Duo (as illogical as that sounds) other than being hot and loud. I'm tempted to spend 5p on a E6400 or something to see if it makes much difference to performance.

The 8600GT met my expectations but I was expecting it to be disappointing. Obviously I don't need to tell anyone here that it can't run any of the new DX10 effects with any kind of playable framerate, but it still managed to give playable performance in older games. But a 7600GT could have done that for cheaper or ATI 1950 could do have done it much better for the same price.

The verdict - getting a car for my 17th birthday was probably a better choice!