Having decided to upgrade outdated PCs as good as possible for getting the most out of any generation I had to overcome a great fear of mine regarding messing with hardware: CPU upgrade.
I avoid removing CPU coolers and CPUs because I’m always always worried of breaking something. Bending CPU pins, pushing too hard on the cooler, too little thermal paste, too much thermal paste, installing the cooler crooked, breaking plastic levers.
I’ve installed CPU coolers a few times and successfully so far… but I never get used to it and avoid it. Avoided it too much.
Connection to the Past
I have a PC with an ASRock ALiveXFire-eSATA2 motherboard. BIOS is updated to latest version. It serves as connection between past and present: With excellent support for Windows XP and outdated connections – PCI, IDE, limited floppy drive controller, RS-232, IE1284 – using old soft- and hardware works like a charm. On the other side there are modern connections as well – SATA, PCIe.
Nvidia GeForce GT-640 has perfect driver support for Windows XP and 10. While 8GB of DDR2 RAM is arguably relatively weak for modern Windows systems, it does work for the most. I guess I’ll just have to bite the bullet and buy four of those overpriced 4GB DDR2 RAM modules.
Side note: Due to insane price increase for DDR4 and DDR5 they are selling brand new laptops with 8GB RAM right now. Are you out of your minds or something? This is what my main computer from 2017(!) named BigWilma currently running openSUSE Leap 16.0 has:
Back to the ASRock based PC. Complete specs:
- ASRock ALiveXFire-eSATA2
- Athlon X2 5200+ ←This had to be replaced
- 4x2GB DDR2 800MHz
- 2x2TB WD Raid Edition HDD
- Samsung Series 830 128GB SSD
- Geforce GT-640
- Plextor Premium writer
- LG GDR-8164 capable of dumping Wii/GC discs
- Modern Asus DVD-Super-Multi writer
- Standard 3.5″ 1.44MB floppy drive
For running Windows XP and doing experiments with copy protected PC CD-ROM the machine is already severely overpowered. It also runs all the old games if I actually decide to play a game instead of just playing with disc based DRM.
The same cannot be said for Windows 10. Because freedom is burning away faster and faster I cannot possibly store any unencrypted data! CPUs from that era lack AES-NI instruction which is more or less a must-have for full disk encryption (FDE). On a modern CPU you do not feel any slowdown because of using encryption → There is no good reason to not enable BitLocker, LUKS, VeraCrypt or FileVault on current computers.
The dual core Athlon CPU struggles at keeping up with the task of doing constant encryption and decryption. It maxes out at about 250MB/s, which might sound like enough, but this is only true if doing nothing else at the moment. A CPU has a lot more to do on a modern OS than taking care of FDE.
Upgrade CPU
Fortunately nobody cares anymore about AM2/AM2+/AM3 CPUs and they go for a few Euros on eBay. I decided for an AM3 CPU, Phenom II X4 945. With four cores, a little higher clock rate and more cache this is a serious upgrade leading to more than double performance in VeraCrypt benchmark. There are a few Phenom II X4 with even higher clock rates, but their thermal power design is 125W instead of 95W. I neither trust the power supply nor the cooler in this regard.
I overcame my fear, removed the cooler and old CPU. Gave the cooler a good cleaning and installed my new Phenom. Windows XP booted like always. No problems. Played a game for an hour, ran a CPU stress test. No crashes, no overheating… All good? How about Windows 10? Did the real world performance improve as well?
No Booting Windows 10!
After entering VeraCrypt’s passphrase Windows 10 started booting, but it failed. Took ages to reach login screen. Crashed. Repeatedly. Did I mess up? Is the new CPU defective and only shows this when running software utilizing all features? Is the computer dying?
Windows XP from HDD works like a charm. Mounted Windows 10 system partition from SSD with VeraCrypt 1.25.9, it is still compatible and promptly explorer.exe became unresponsive, a minute later a dreadful BSOD. On second try, using cmd.exe instead I could successfully backup the very few user files before another BSOD.
What could be the reason for this? Is VeraCrypt by using Twofish algorithm (a bit faster on Windows 10 compared to AES without hardware acceleration) triggering something weird on my CPU? Enough is enough! CPUs acting up this way is not very commong and this self-doubt about my own abilities is going too far. Focus on something else. How about checking the 128GB Samsung SSD from 2012?
SSD Went Belly-Up?
Booting Ubuntu Mate 24.04.x from DVD takes ages. Live Linux just isn’t optimized for optical discs anymore. No errors or bad values could be seen when running smartctl.
Formatted whole SSD with a single ext4 partition and mounted it. Then:
dd if=/dev/random of=/mnt bs=32M count=100 status=progress
This command ran incredibly slow and journalctl -f showed a lot of sector errors coming in. 💩SHIT!💩 Another reason for using encryption everywhere on time! If a device refuses deletion, strong encryption should give you peace of mind when discarding it. Well. It doesn’t give me enough peace of mind.
hdparm --user-master u --security-set-pass pwd
hdparm --user-master u --security-erase-enhanced pwd /dev/sda
These commands went through. Guess what. The old Samsung SSD did a factory reset in a few minutes and now works normally as if nothing happened.
I might want to add: it seemingly works for now with an unencrypted test installation of Windows 10. Old flash cells, high overwrite count and many power-on hours. The problem will most likely be back soon. And this happened right now when I ran out of spare SSDs with current prices almost as insane as it is the case for DDR4 and DDR5 RAM.
Lesson Learned
Check if the f…ing PC works before replacing the CPU, you stupid little Sinchen! That would have saved a lot of time and nerves.
I hate my life!