New Cheap as Chips PC

[Dave Rice]

A customer came in with a 7 year old 3rd Gen Celeron I’d built as it was getting slow. Being 32 bit there was nothing I could do with the ram. Cloning the HDD to an SSD was incredibly fraught, even just getting the cloning software running (needed a Linux based USB stick in the end) and kept failing.

I had a feeling that even an SSD wasn’t going to recuse this so, time for an upgrade. Low end CPUs from AMD are non existent and the lowest Intel was a Pentium Gold G6400. With a basic mobo, ram and M2 SATA SSD that added up to £200 + whatever I would have to pay for W10, so didn’t seem particularly VFM bearing in mind the rest of the unit, especially the PSU, was 7 years old.

So I had a look at pre-built units on E-Buyer. Nothing special required, literally all he does is webmail, invoices in Word, some very simple spreadsheets and web browsing. I didn’t want to go down the refurb route unless I had to, these are starting to get expensive these days anyway.

Some A10-9700 builds, one with a 240GB SSD and 8GB ram for £219 (+ W10). Not too shabby but that CPU really is a slug compared to more modern kit. Then I came upon this:

HP 290 G3 SFF Celeron 8GB RAM 256GB SSD FreeDOS Desktop PC for £219

With a bit of digging I found the SSD is actually an M2 Kioxia (Toshiba) NVMe job and it’s speed tests are right up there with the pack chasing Samsung. The 3.5Ghz Celeron G5905 benchmarks 17% faster than the A10 (about the same as a 3000G) and there was also room to put in his old 3.5″ spinner as a backup target (better than the nothing he does now).

And it’s an HP with all the design and build quality that goes with the badge, so it seemed worth a punt. The next viable alternative was an E-Buyer’s own 3400G at £100 more, a total waste for him but worth a look if you’re after something a bit sprightlier.

As expected the build quality is fantastic and tool free. The drive bay can take a slim DVD plus either 2 x 2.5″ or 1 x 3.5″ drive. All the (correct length) SATA and power cables are present for the HDDs, just screw them into the cradle and plug them in. That still leaves an empty SATA for the DVD.

There is a plastic shroud from the rear to the CPU but everything you need to access is in the open and given it’s an SFF there loads of space. One ram slot is empty and there’s a second M2 for combo Wi-Fi and BT cards.

Turn it on and it boots to a menu giving you the choice of FreeDOS or the documentation. Once I’d worked out how to get into the BIOS (Esc then F10) to boot from a USB stick, Windows 10 installed in the incredibly quick way it does with an NVMe, even given it’s the lowest of the low modern CPU and it was a USB 2 stick.

It boots in <10 seconds and runs very sprightly indeed. It’s easy to max out the CPU when doing a large install but in everyday use that doesn’t happen. To replace his old Office 2007 I put Open Office 4 on (I really couldn’t justify the cost of O2019 for what he does). The Free EaseUS ToDo takes care of the backup duties and Kaspersky Free the AV.

So with W10 widely available for a tenner this really does make an excellent PC for most home users. He uses Firefox and it really gallops along browsing the web. To put it in sharp perspective, that “lowly” Celeron benchmarks faster than my laptop’s i5-6200u.

It’s a shame the higher end i3 / i5 versions are so out price wise (even compared to Dell), otherwise I’d be looking at these 290 G3 SFF as office boxes. For an SMB on a budget they’d certainly do.

[keith with the teef]

Once I’d worked out how to get into the BIOS (Esc then F10).

Arf arf.

Another happy customer.

Installed windows from a pen drive. Yeah I need to get on to that.  I’ll put it on my to do list. 🙂

[Dave Rice]

Download the latest ISO from Microsoft, ignore their offer of making the USB for you, I find it hit and miss.

Download Rufus and run it (no need to install). Change the Boot Selection drop down to Disk or ISO image and point it at the downloaded file. I change the volume label so I know which version of W10 is on there and then hit Start.

I also have a folder ready to copy to it that contains a Ninite installation script for all my favourite utilities plus Anydesk and O&O Syspectr. Once Anydesk is on there I retire somewhere more comfortable and do the tedious stuff that takes the time, like installing office, copying data and setting up backups, from my laptop.

[keith with the teef]

Fanx Dave. I’m on it. 🙂

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