Opera GX ain’t your granpappy’s web browser. So check them out here: operagx.gg/LinusTechTips

Beard Linus jumpscare

I remember back in 2010, when I was still working as an IT admin, it was the big SSD transition period alongside the Velociraptor, which had been around for a few years. The receptionist and the HR department got new machines... with SSDs... They complained to the IT dept. that their computer was too fast, so they where not able to "get my coffee and talk to each other" anymore.🤦‍♂🤦‍♂🤦‍♂🤦‍♂

8:05 I've been trying to choose between a Celeron and a chilled 96-core Threadripper, this helps a lot!

8:00 the "atrocious" download speed is a "decent" internet connection that costs ~40-50€ a month in germany..... gotta love the copper line vectoring

It's crazy how "newest and slowest" PCs are essentially e-waste when compared to second-hand units. Really makes you question the value of buying brand new.

Remember the Windows 10 minimum spec that said 32GB of storage, leading to a slew of $200 tablet computers with exactly 32GB of eMMC storage that then couldn't update anymore because Windows actually needed more like 48GB just to download and temporarily store update files until it could actually apply the updates on reboot?

My first computer was a dell laptop ordered from their catalog in about 2003. It proudly wore the tag "intel celeron inside". I laughed when you showed the "slowest" chip's specs (2 core 3.5 Ghz). Mine had 512mhz and 256mg's of RAM. I still played CS on it, albeit with some major issues.

I'd love to see a speed comparison between this computer and the latest Raspberry Pi.

I had a Celeron. It struggled on ChromeOS. The iGPU was at 100% just opening a new tab.

Wow, Linus' beard grew back so fast!

20MBps really isn't that atrocious for download speed. I mean, it's not fast, but many many people run internet plans at that speed just fine. I was happy to upgrade to a faster one when I moved but it served me well.

That long loading immediately brought me back to the horribly slow Windows XP/7 school computers of my youth.

My home internet is 3MB/S, to hear someone say 20 is unacceptable, and that it is hardware limited, is so depressing.

Something to note, these OEM machines very often use proprietary connectors and parts, swapping out the PSU might need special motherboard adapters and sometimes even a GPU might not physically fit

Throwback to when 5 minutes to boot into windows was common... Also when I was a teenager, my download speeds on my parents' internet averaged at most around 280 Kb/s (despite them paying for 20 Mb/s, which did eventually get fixed... sort of). Downloading games sometimes could take over a day...

How much quicker would that PC have been with 8GB instead of 4GB? The broader point is correct, but I suspect this was the most significant pain point in the build and cheap to address.

Thanks Linus for giving a shoutout to my pc!

20 mega per second is twice as fast as MOST people outside big cities get on download anyway...

I bought a used PC from an office sale in 2011 with a Core 2 Quad. It was about 4 years old when I bought it, and I got a staggering amount of use out of it. To this day one of the best purchases I've made thanks to that company going out of business. Amazing Craigslist find.

I'd love to see a video now on different companies warranty process and if they're worth paying the new price for the company warranty

i had a pc up on marketplace with a 1080ti and i7700k cpu. plenty of power despite being old parts, but i couldn't get more than $400 for it. had to drop the price so many times and someone finally took it. i wish i could have sent this video to all the idiots that didn't buy my computer

This takes me back to the days when I had a I3 2100, 8gb of ram and a gt740. Those days were only 3 years ago...

Great lessons here - I went through a similar experience with entry level sim racing stuff, used stuff is good (don't ignore), some things are more expensive because they are literally good, don't overpay for entry level stuff.

That case thankfully got upgraded a few years ago and has acceptable front intake through the mesh. Originally, it didn't have a mesh front and only had a tiny intake gap at the bottom. It was wretched.

Ive only just realised, people say sluggish, but then say a snails pace (never heard 'a slugs pace' or 'snailish') and use snails to visually represent slow speeds, never slugs.

I think it's worth mentioning that a Steam Deck is also a viable option at this price point. A refurbished 500gb LCD model from Valve goes for £300 with a 1 year warranty. Of course, you can use a desktop for more than just gaming, having SteamOS comes with many caveats, Deck is impossible to upgrade, and many popular multiplayer games have linux-unfriendly anti-cheat. Still, it's been my main gaming device for over a year and a half and I couldn't be happier. Not to mention many game devs optimise their games for the Steam Deck, and several even work with Valve directly to bring support (Spider-Man Remastered, Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate 3, Armored Core VI, Cyberpunk 2077, etc.)

The CPU is the least of your problems. You have insufficient RAM and you’re swapping to spinning rust. Spend another $15 to double your RAM and upgrade to an SSD for a $30 premium and you’d have a perfectly usable machine.

5:41 yep I still use my old computers with a I5 2400 with DDR3 and a hard drive and yeah window takes some time to load compared to my newer systems with well all the modern tech, including SSD. But hey, when it gets running and finishes loading everything it works and I basically had to force updated to Windows 11. Like my old computers would take that long loading into windows and then loading my user and then actually loading everything else. My computers, barely even load. (I have many computers because I use them for mining so therefore I don’t mind the speed or the time it takes to load into windows.)

8:12 "20 mb download is atrocious". dude my internet is 12 mb max and I pay $110 USD a month, I would kill for a 20 download.

I guess this goes to show how software has been getting bigger in size while being slower for no particular reason. Back in the day, you could still use HDDs without having to wait for every single operation.

This PC is still faster than mine

For comparison, three months ago I bought a used HP Z840 for $340 (shipped) that came with: XEON E5-2667 V4 MSI GTS 1080 32gb DDR4 1150w Power Supply 1TB SSD DVD R/W drive Win 11 64 bit (registered)

Just made a used PC from an Optiplex 3050, i5-7500 and GTX 1660 S, all for 200 euros, it's amazing. And the process of finding deals was fun actually, I even found a platinum V1200 power supply from CoolerMaster for 50 euros. I love the used market!

8:07 "20mps that's atrocious" Me at home that being my peak 😢

Few things worth mentioning: First pc wouldn't be that slow on SSD. It would simply run slowly instead of not running like on this HDD. Going for better value doesn't necessarily mean you have to go used, no warranty stuff. There are plenty companies selling used PC parts with warranty. The price will be somewhere between used from private person and brand new from shop, but it is some choice, probably also shipping will be possible. Games download from Steam differs from game to game. One game might not be possible to compress, so it will use a lot of your internet bandwidth and not much of CPU while decompression, others will use a lot of CPU power to decompress and you might end up with tiny download speed, because Steam client will wait for your CPU/hard drive to decompress and write game files to your hard drive. Still, even if this video is not fair for cheap pc, the point of it remains - Cheapest possible stuff is almost always bad value. By adding a little bit more to your budget you can get much more performance.

Man this especially the last segment just makes me miss scrapyard wars,

Slowest PC would have been useable with a sata ssd, and dual channel (2x4GB) RAM, and the cost difference would be miniscule. I would have liked to see how much faster it would be with those upgrades mentioned.

I think it's worth remembering that their 'slowest' system was a completely custom build, not from an OEM. In other words, no one is trying to sell a new system with those particular specs.

When the last big CS2 update landed at the end of Feb there was a bug to do with the audio settings that caused ridiculously low frame rates in the menu. This could have been that depending when the video was recorded.

12:23 that does not look like the GPU you used in the build? im a bit confused, yours looks like an NVIDIA FE and is clearly not the card you showed in the screen shot...

The boot time is actualy pretty interessting! It shows that MS has eaten quiet alot of the performance gains of fast storage by bloating it up!

That aint nothing compared to a laptop I helped to fix the other day. My friend's parents' budget laptop from 2015 had some issues booting into Windows, nothing major, I got it sorted out quite fast. But boy the darn thing is slow! I legit was staring at the login screen for over 10min to get to desktop😴

I use an i7-3770 with a 1050TI as my main setup, 240gb ssd, 2x 500gb 7200 rpm hdd for storage, 4x 4gb at 1600mhz, sure not great but without any money theres nothing better to get and a lot of stuff is still running, and the only thing I had to actually pay for was the 1050 TI which was 30 bucks, everything else was scrap parts I got either for free or got from places I worked at, else I'd have probably planned to go with a 1650 if the friend didnt offer me the 1050 ti. Always have to lower the settings but as someone who grew up with only outdated hardware and as someone who isn't too much into gaming (especially not the modern gaming), this build is fine, I am basically used to playing on PS2 and Nintendo DS so something like 1600 x 900 on medium settings and 30 FPS looks fine to me already (on more modern games) you can think whatever you want about me or call me out for anything but while I am not "happy" about this setup it also isn't anything I can complain about, especially considering it cost 30 bucks for me get, just because its old it doesnt mean its bad, I love using old stuff, especially if it still works just fine. The high end standard many people see and aim for is such a negative result of society saying you need it and making you want it to not feel bad, but honestly, as long as YOU like the setup you're using and it works for you, be happy with it, no matter if its 100 bucks or 2000 bucks, as long as its fun, its good! Also, a little tip, if you want to get a deal by taking older hardware, make sure theyre still compatible with stuff you wanna use, my cpu as an example doesnt have AVX2 which some modern games want you to have, I had to sacrifice ability to play one game when I gave away my laptop with a Ryzen 5 3550H/rx560x to then use the i7-3770/1050 ti combo

13:31 I have a i5-6500 in an office style computer I got my hands on and I can download games 800-900mbps over local network (so like ~110MB/s).

Average school pc

While I never do used pc components I do keep old ones, then I give them to family/friend/coworkers who might need them and are usually better than what they currently have.. When I upgrade/build a new pc and have it up and running and tested out then I offload the old one..Much luv from Tokyo,Japan.

Windows minimum requirements. The hard drive was a mistake, but another big mistake was just having 4GB of RAM. Windows will boot with that much installed but it will not like it, as you can see. I had a laptop with a similar spec. AMD A6-6310, 500GB HDD 4GB DDR3... it was stupid slow. When i added more RAM it made a HUGE difference since it wasnt using disk swap on a 5400 RPM HDD. A SSD will also speed things up too. That 2 core 2 thread CPU definitely doesnt help anything for sure. But when i took my uncles old PC with an athilon II X2 255 (2 core 2 thread) system with 3GB of DDR2 and a 500GB 5400 RPM HDD... and gave it 16GB of RAM and a SSD, it booted up in far less time. though it wasnt like you were going to play any games. I also slapped a gtx 750ti in it, that i got used. Made the system bearable for a while. Ended up snagging an i7-8700 CPU and a motherboard + cooler to boot for basically nothing and ran with that. The fact that you can still buy a 2 core CPU these days brand new is wild. Microsoft stating windows only needs 4GB of RAM is also ridiculous. In order to have a decent experience you need a minimum of 8 but id personally recommend 16 for daily use. The OS will cache a lot of files and utilize it.

Dell enterprise workstations can be had for a good price second hand. I picked up a Precision 5820 with 6 core Xeon for $400. Maxed out the RAM at 256GB, and might upgrade to an 18 core Xeon CPU in the future. It may not be the latest and greatest, but it's still an upgrade from my aging i7 2600k with 32GB RAM.

You should compare that system to one of the mini PCs you can buy for about the same price - like a BeeLink, MinisForum, etc - any number of decent and cheap options all in for less than $380. They all use laptop parts but they would run cycles around this thing - even fine for casual gaming (30fps at 1080p on low settings). Or, consider comparing this system to a decent "value" system with good parts for the same cost (or less) - really showing the difference in picking up the right parts for your budget.

Would have been interesting to see them upgrade each post in the slow machine, one "tier" at a time to find what the low budget limit is for a serviceable machine and how much difference each upgrade makes per dollar.

6:17 damn, might as well pick up a book and start reading at this point lol. You could probably read an entire Light Novel volume and still be waiting 🤣

You looking up craigslist reminds me of the good old scrapyard war days. I miss that competition.

LTT: Buy the cheapest business laptops and... roast them... They're very very very very very horrible and bad price value.

The GPU at 12:21 aint the same one as whats in the machine, the GPU in the machine is an Nvidia/Founders style card. How much price difference is that card to the one shown in the screenshot?

Always using the landfield viewpoint however I'm now wondering if recycling happens outside of Europe. In my country we have plenty of places to drop cases (metal) or pcb (rare metals) to be processed/recycled. So, is the landfield always the go-to answer in other parts of the world?

7:00 granted it depends highly on the harddrive too, cache and the performance of the hdd itself can make allot of difference.

"if it hasn't failed in 6 years it probably wont fail" A good tenet for solid state parts that are locked from overclocking. Also, needs an explainer for what a "bathtub curve" is :). (where failures occur either immediately, or after a long time, but little or none in between)

To be fair: The 500GB WD Blue HDD were slow in 2013, compared to a normal HDD with 7200 rpm. We had 120 PC's delivered with them. And they are astrocious Slow on 8GB Systems and Win 7 with i5 4570. After Sata SSD upgrade they were completly different Machines. Interstingly we have exactly those Acer Aspire around, today i was upgrading some with their 128GB Sata SSD to 500GB, as those were dying. Great little Machines, we got them upgraded to 16GB now 500GB Sata together with the 8400 they are realy great and will live on a long time at school. Best part: Generic Parts. PSU is standard biggest Problem with Prebuild and Office Builds are the PSU, ATX, SFX or TFX Systems are great bud sadly lot of manufacturers have non standard PSU and connectors inside.

Worst PC I ever worked on was on of those cheap AMD 1GHz laptops. Ran perfectly fine when everything was on it, ran surprisingly well in fact, but setting it up so my mate could use it as a car diagnostic PC abd finding the version of windows all the software worked on nearly drove me insane. He does all the work on my cars for the cost of the parts and will come out to help you at the drop of a hat, so I was determined to get it sorted for him. Took me near a month of a couple of hours a night, as it took an hour plus to install windows along with the drivers (I replaced the hdd in it with an SSD as it was so slow but it did little other than make the os more snappy, the rest was down to that dual jaguar core 1ghz cpu. I finally found an untouched original version of windows 7 32bit that everything worked on, and after 2 days of just installing on what was only a 500gb ssd, I made multiple images of the drive (which took half an hour at most), as there is no way in hell I want to do that again, it made me look forward to going to work it was that bad :D lol 3 years on and I still have 3 copies of the drive image on some of my external drives until he gets a better laptop, though I know I will suffer again as many of the older car diagnostics he needs, won't work on newer OSs and need at least basic hardware support.

8:09 20 MB a second, for me who lives in the sticks where fibre is a myth and 5G is a whisper on the wind, that sounds so fast lmao

"20mb/s. That's atrocious." Linus, I was happy when my WiFi was upgraded and I hit, at peak, 2mb/s download... SOME PEOPLE AREN'T AS FORTUNATE AS YOU.

3:00 If you want to build a super-slow PC, all you need to do is to use HDD instead of SSD. Everything else is just a bonus.

This past black friday sales time, I bought a miniPC for like $300 before tax (like $330 after tax, USD) that has an AMD 5800H mobile apu (8 cores, 16 threads, I think 8 compute units of graphics), 32gb ram, a 500 gb ssd, hdmi and displayport and usb-c for (it says) up to 3 displays out. and it was new! bought from Amazon. I wiped Windows and put MX Linux on it. Look at AMD 5800H and 5700U mobile APU mini PC's. If somebody was gonna use Windows, I'd say get one with 32gb ram (less ram for a new computer is silly, especially at the price difference. Better to have and and not wish later you had gotten more when you could've. Even if you don't need it today, you'll be glad you got the little bit of extra ram before the end of the computer's useful life) and 1tb ssd. I think the brand I got was trigkey

love the random saul at 16:06

School Pc be like

I was using dual core Pentium E (LGA 775) and HDD until Windows 8.1 and it was performing fine. Windows relied heavily on SSD since Windows 10. Any PC without it was significantly lagged and I guess Microsoft just assumed everyone was able to get one of them back then. (I mean, it's not expensive, but still did not appealing in terms of the price couple years ago)

Funny you mention the gt730 in this video. I bought one of those brand new last week, because i was looking for a secondary gpu to accelerate my virtual machines, and i found out a 730 was perfect for that. It's relatively cheap, and this particular model was low profile, passive cooled, and uses only a pcie x1 connector, which makes it very versatile in terms of where you can plug it into your mobo without choking your main gpu. But if your looking for a gpu to actually game on, probably better off getting something else lol.

Other than booting this makes my own desktop look impressive (Intel I5-6500, H110 motherboard, 2x8gb ddr3 1600MHz, Toshiba 2TB HDD 7200RPM(OS drive), PNY 500GB SATA3 m.2 (Working on moving OS to this), ASUS TUF OC EVO GTX 1660TI, Gigabyte Aorus ax210 WIFI card, ASUS ROG 550W Gold) (other than the WIFI card, GPU, PSU, and SSD all parts were used but all in great working order. Can run Cyberpunk 2077 on mostly medium settings at around 50 FPS) (originally was a PowerSpec B659)

My school be like gimme gimme wait how did you build my schools computer my schools CPUs are a i3 3940 with windows 10 4Gb ram DDR3 all in one

"I built a really slow PC, and it's really slow" - The content is fantastic these days, guys 🤣

Reminds me of every time we get a PC "upgrade" at work. They basically pick bottom of the barrel builds from HP, including that 500GB WD Blue drive then we need to expense out parts to upgrade them ourselves.

Ive had my "gaming " G3 dell laptop for about 5 years , in its life it has been through hell , today its power is somewhere inbetween these two systems , ive not only seen all these issues of system one , but have enjoyed the snappy response (atleast with anything on my 120gig SSD)

9:50 hey don’t blame the PC for task manager, blame windows 11, even my 5800H + 3060 can take up to 10 seconds to switch between tabs in that thing.

Where'd you buy the 450W PSU from? I want one for my home server! The smallest one I could find was a Be Quiet 550W but that's still overkill for a server PC that draws

I feel like there can be specific cases where the hardware can be useful. A few years ago I bought the Celeron G4930 as it was perfect for a mining machine. I imagine there are other use cases where cheap components are viable, just maybe not all together in one build

That first boot up reminds me of my old Acer Aspire laptop 😂 literal minutes to login screen… I installed an M.2 and a fresh install of windows and it now boots to login in about 10 seconds

I bought 3 of these 8 years ago for $17 each. Perfect 1 person car camping tent. I pulled one out of storage 2 months ago and used it. Still looks new!

you really should go back to the dell optiflex i gaming pc conversion series now

I have a 7 year old laptop that I use for streaming in my living-room. Boot time got up to a half hour. When I doubled the RAM to 16 GB and replaced the spinny hard-drive with a new SSD, boot time went down to more like 15 seconds. Same I5 6300 CPu, same GPU, same spec on the RAM just twice as much. A half decent SSD is just so much better than a spinny hard -drive. I suspect that a clean Window s install helped a lot too.

If you switch steam to performance mode, much less RAM will be occupied by steam and background processing reduced . A few days ago I was able to run Dota on a very weak system with 3 GB of RAM.

after your optiplex gaming video, i decided to get one as a home theater PC. with an old 1060, and a few controllers, its now an all in one htpc that i can emulate and watch streamed tv on. i feel like i rescued a puppy.

Linus was saying how slow the pc was booting up at around the 1 minute mark - but this is how long it takes my pc to boot normally, ever since I built it. And it used what were until fairly recently totally top of the line parts. What seems to be the problem?

I was laughing at the video once that startup began and couldn't stop. It was gold

Did you strip the secure boot from the iso . That hardware is probably right on the fence for being usable on 11. Try using the stripped iso without secure book and the added checks.

The startup time reminds me of 2006: first thing i was doing when getting home from school was powering on the PC so i could play wow after lunch, that shit took about 15 minutes to boot up

I've bought a number of used workstation PCs that I still use on a daily basis for gaming, home automation, video encoding, serving media, and software development. I have 4 currently powered up right now in my rack. All are second hard PCs that I modified to add rackmount ears. They vary heavily in specs. My slowest is an i7 4770. It's too bad it doesn't support windows 11, but oh well 10 still works fine. I totally agree with keeping e waste out of the landfill, even if it's not as fast or power efficient as a new machine.

Linus - "Its still not fast" Me - *Has 10mb internet*

Lots of good used Lenovo computers that can be hand on the cheap, especially refurbs. $1500+ Thinkpads for $300 when they are 3-4 years old, work just fine. Add some memory, faster GPU and you're good. Important note: Many name brand PCs by Dell and HP do NOT use standard ATX power supplies and may not have a 16x or 8x PCIe slot! It may look like it has 4 slots in the back, but the computer itself may only 1-2 1x PCI slots.

On my first laptop I usually waited about 10-15 minutes after putting in my password to let the Laptop completey start all the background programs. A movie on VLC was leggy, even with explorer.exe killed and no autostart on anything in TaskManager..

09:49 - Reminded me of that old joke, where the task manager froze up, so he brought up another task manager to close it.

What happened to the Gigabyte GTX 1080 you bought? Because the one that is in the PC when you show it off in the end is a NVidia Founders Edition.

I literally had the i5-8400 in operation since last week for like 4 years. I swapped it out for a i5-9500 because there was a office pc (fully functional) about the be scrapped and I managed to save the CPU. Only a slight performance upgrade but it also was a free upgrade

That first machine made me feel a lot better about my Intel i3 -4130, 8gb DDR3, 500gb hdd, MSI Raedon HD 6450, 204w psu, now caseless (To fit the GPU) rig that ive been waiting forever to upgrade.

I got my three kids gaming on three used Windows 10 Dells: one 8th gen I-7, two 9th gen I-5, 16gb RAM, SSDs, added two used GTX 1070s, plus my old 1660ti, a couple of PSUs I had laying around, and displays and peripherals we already had, total for all three was under $500 and they are playing anything at 1080p with passable settings. Family LAN parties are awesome!

Having built a lot of systems back in the day, I never referred to the processor as 'celery' - Canadian thing possibly.

Our teachers were given laptops that are just as slow. That's 3 minutes or so to boot windows 10, another 3 to start chrome, and 1 min per focused window switch. They have some pentium processor inside.

I almost choked on my breakfast when I heard "Oh that was supposed to be a video" @ 13:42 . 😂

The download speed on your pc is faster than my home network with nothing else running 😭

We recognized the value of the SSD right away. A 120GB sata SSD was the price of a 2TB nvme today. I still bought it. Why? Because the online games we were playing back then didn't have a staging screen, the game starts before anyone has actually loaded. Since SSD's were still rare, by the time someone on the other team had finished loading, i was already capping the base next to their home base XD