[SOLVED] The Battle of the old HP Pavilions for Gaming

Sep 20, 2019
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So, I have been gaming on an old HP Pavilion p7-1254 running on a AMD A6-3620 4 core for about 10 years now. I really do enjoy some PC gaming, which leads me to pumping games into the system that definitely should not be there (they really aren't intended to run on a system this old). Some actually run pretty well; props to the Elite Dangerous team for optimizing that game to look that great on a system that old. Some are abysmal. It is not bare bones and has had some tweaks over the years. Running a 2t SSD to get it to boot faster and years ago I bought a radeon R7 200 series.
Long story short, as a married man with a house, car, land, etc to spend my money on, dropping a thousand dollars or more on a gaming pc is not feasible (which I would gladly do, but would probably land me in divorce court shortly after).
So, I have been recently handed down a HP Pavilion elite e9280t. I am trying to clean the beast up, but from everything I can read it is a step up from my current system. It's got an Intel i7, 18 GB ram as opposed to my 8, and a load more storage space (it's previous owner was a disaster recovery systems admin so there are backups for the backups as you could imagine).
I am wondering if it is worth migrating some things to the new PC to make a Frankenstein amalgamation of HP parts and maybe a spending a couple hundred on a new GPU to get the beast purring again or if I should just stick with my current PC. Again, I've been able to bleed my current beast dry on processing power to run current games so I completely understand that this isn't going to be a bleeding edge gamer rig, but as a cheap bastard, I'd love to coax every last bit of juice out of these babys as I can.
 
Solution
The i7 hp is definitely the way to go. The power supply is under powered and from the looks of it, uses a standard atx psu, so upgrade that before picking up a gpu. I wouldn't add anything more powerful then a gtx 1060/rx580 unless the i7 in there is the 975(6 core variant) where the gtx 1070/1660ti would the limit.
The i7 hp is definitely the way to go. The power supply is under powered and from the looks of it, uses a standard atx psu, so upgrade that before picking up a gpu. I wouldn't add anything more powerful then a gtx 1060/rx580 unless the i7 in there is the 975(6 core variant) where the gtx 1070/1660ti would the limit.
 
Solution
Sep 20, 2019
2
0
10
The i7 hp is definitely the way to go. The power supply is under powered and from the looks of it, uses a standard atx psu, so upgrade that before picking up a gpu. I wouldn't add anything more powerful then a gtx 1060/rx580 unless the i7 in there is the 975(6 core variant) where the gtx 1070/1660ti would the limit.
It is actually the 975 variety.
 
well good job! thats a great chip. I personally run a xeon x5660(2.8ghz 6 core) and my gtx 1060 is always a sore spot, so from that, a gtx 1660 should be good fit, maybe even a gtx 1660ti at a stretch. Of course it wont have as many fps as a modern chip due too the ipc, but it should hold up for now. You can always transfer the gpu over to a proper modern pc if the missus ever warms up to it. XD