“Why that title?! What emergency?!” You could be asking, well… My computer room/bedroom have a huge problem. Having neighbors can be a good thing, or be a total pain in the rear when they don`t do a proper maintenance to their own homes. In this case we recently discovered when I was about to move the Ryzen computer into the room that an old damage caused by leaky water pipes in the bathroom of a neighboring house was much worse than initially measured and that was even a bit of an active leak from a shower still going on and we ended with severe damage to the old wall plaster and floor plus fungus build up between the wood covering that was installed and the wall itself (photos of that at the end of the post). So I have to remove every bit of sensible equipment from there (The Ryzen 5600G and A8 5600K computers), due to the amount of cement dust and debris that are going to be flying while removing the damage sections and making the repairs.
At the same time, I'm way too used to watch/listen videos when I`m ready to unwind and rest in my bed at the end of the day, so having nothing is not an option for me if I can avoid it. That is when enters the picture: The HP Compaq 6005 Pro MT!
I was thinking in writing a small review for this system anyways since now I`m seeing a surge in videos testing this type of machines due to global economic recession, like this one from Linus Tech Tips (and I will not dwell too much about how bad we are doing here with an inter annual inflation of almost 100%). You can get this type of computers for cheap or even free, like in my case, since they are used in business or government environments.
But the question is, they are good? What potential they have? As everything, it depends of what is below the hood! So avoid old Celerons or single cores CPUs, but anything from two cores and above, especially if its DDR3 can put you in a good track. DDR2 is still an option, but good luck trying to run well Windows 10 in that generation, of course you can go the Linux or Windows 7 route.
Starting with the history of this particular unit, I got this computer in a relative recent “Cyberciruja” event here in Córdoba (thanks as always @nwolovick!) it came from a batch that the Córdoba province government discarded. This unit was a “backup” for a documentation office located in Cordoba Bus Terminal, according to the piece of paper that was glued to the case. Was able to verify that since the Windows 7 32 bits installation present in the machine was still booting (yep, 32 bits lol) and everything needed for something like that was installed, including the old documents templates... of course the first thing I did was to format that hard disk.
The general state was… not completely awful, but was needing a good quick clean up. Luckily the toolless design of the case allows a quick removal of the side panel and front to get inside the computer.
As you can see, it need some love. Even the side panel was presenting a lot of small scratches and dots. It’s not surprising given it was placed in a location with a lot of traffic and surely was secured with some device against possible robbers to the desk where is was installed. But nothing that some windows cleaner, microfiber cloth, furniture polish and a Sharpie cannot improve.
Even looks like it suffered an encounter with some water or very high humidity environment in some point, but thankfully not enough to cause any damage and cleaned right away.
Regarding specs, even if I’m including links for the official documentation, aside the one at the start. It came with:
CPU: AMD Athlon X2 B24 3.0 Ghz
iGPU: ATI Radeon HD 4200
RAM: 2 GB DDR3
HDD: 160 GB Western Digital Blue – SATA II
Optical Unit: HP DVD-RAM GH60L (it reads ok!)
4 frontal USB ports + 6 in the back, 10 in total!!
4 internal SATA ports
Onboard Gigabit Ethernet Broadcom NetXtreme
VGA and Display Port (that was the first thing caught my attention in the event)
PS/2, Serial and Parallel ports (retro support ftw!)
Built-in speaker in the case.
The motherboard is a proprietary design (more on that later), but it comes with 1 PCI-E x16 slot, 2 PCI-E x8 and 1 PCI slot. Plus enough internal SATA and USB ports to cover any possible need. My plans for this machine for the future is to creating a NAS servers with it using TrueNAS.
So after the cleaning, was time to quickly improving it a bit and obtain something functional for this emergency situation. The first thing was to expand a bit the RAM¡ adding a 4 GB additional bank. This board supports a maximum of 16 GG DDR3, so there is a lot of room for improvement.
To not overstress the old hard drive that is still good (taking in consideration that the SMART data says that is around 6.9 years of total hours running) and since will be using the ATI Radeon 4200 that came with the system for the moment, I went ahead and installed Windows 7 64 bits. There is room to install my old GeForce GT 1030 or Radeon HD 5750, but it makes no sense given the situation.
The performance is what I was expecting for something like this, having no problem at all to handle all the basics needed for having a good experience browsing the internet and playing multimedia content.
Even resulted with a better score in Cinebench R15 compared with the Intel Dual Cores I tested some time ago in this other post!
I was extremely and happily surprised when I started to test the system with the performance and reliability of the cooling solution used for the CPU, it maintains the CPU at a very good temperature even when running a 100% usage for long periods, far better than other similar CPUs temperatures with their stock coolers. It’s worth mentioning that the TDP for this processor is 65w, relative low, but even there… I have seen Celeron 420 cooking eggs thanks to bad coolers.
So I went ahead and leave the CPU running overnight with Moo! Wrapper and the processor seems to be very stable given no errors in the results so far, completing the task in a quite reasonable amount of time! Even much faster than my A8 5600K! (27 minutes vs 56 minutes, you can check my previous post)
So aside allowing to watch videos at night, I`m going to be running a few light distributed computing projects from BOINC ;)
And of course, since I cannot help myself I have to put together a more or less proper setup, which has to be easy to cover while not in use given the situation with my bedroom. So I went ahead a used one of the black Samsung 592v that I found on the street the other day along a HP mouse and keyboard, making this overall setup quite compact and pleasant! And very planet friendly since everything in the setup was picked from people would consider e-waste.
So let`s summarize the pros and cons of using a computer like this one….
Pros:
Excellent CPU cooling solution that with minimal cleaning is perfect for almost every usage situation.
10 USB ports!
Good PCI slots selection for expandability. I used the PCI slots to install an old Realtek 8185 (54Mbps) in case of needing a bit of Wi-Fi, found this card in my stash, no idea where it came from lol
Good amount of internal SATA ports, you can install up to four devices.
Excellent toolless design for easy access to the internals and cleaning of parts like the frontal panel.
Enough room to expand the RAM up to 16 Gb DDR3
If you don`t have speakers... it´s has its own installed in the case! If not the same that full stereo, but hey! Better than nothing given the case!
Compact design.
Cons:
Proprietary power supply, if the original PSU goes bad is either fixing that, get another or see if adapting a generic one is possible with some adapters (sometimes it can be complicated)
Proprietary case design for its motherboard, that makes almost impossible to use to case for non-HP boards of similar line unless you are very skilled with working with metal to retool the case.
Proprietary motherboard and BIOS that denies you the possibility of using the board in another case and can limit options related to the BIOS configuration like overclocking or fine tuning the configuration of some aspects.
It’s somewhat heavy, around 10 kg, so don`t drop this one in your foot!
The proprietary designs are a really the bad side of this type of units, that is sadly still practiced by companies like HP and Dell (not couting Mac, that lives in it´s own universe) . There is no logical reason to choose this path aside leaving costumers with no options aside official services and parts for their computers and only magnifies the chances of a given computer to end in e-waste quicker than it should.
Aside that, if you can put your hands in a computer like this one for cheap or free, go for it! It can get out of hot waters with a very reasonable performance and used even for gamming with a few more upgrades, like a solid drive and a bit better GPU.
I will close this post with the current bedroom situation photos that triggered this emergency... is going to be so “fun” to deal with it….. Thanks in advance for any coffee and see you in the next one!
