HP Pavilion casual Computing and Retro Gaming PC.

HISTORY and FUNCTION:

I originally bought this PC to get into coding and emulation. This was the perfect candidate.

I found this PC at a Savers Super Thrift Store in Vacaville California. Took a risk if this PC would even work. I left a picture of the original condition I found it in. It was covered in cigarette smoke dust, had a WD Blue 500GB hard drive dating back to 2008, system came with no RAM.

I bought this PC in order to force myself to learn how to code and emulate programs. This PC was the perfect candidate as it lacks alot of CPU instruction sets. Its missing SSE4.2, AVX, AVX2 among other instruction sets needed to game. I wanted to push myself to the limits to get this system to do all modern gaming regardless of the caveats that come with older PC’s.

Heres how it all played out.

This system is a champion when it comes to batocera. Unfortunately I cant sell you my batocera because of the licensing with my game library. It does run batocera very well.

Intel instruction set emulation is done through Intels SDE CPU instruction program. This emulator does come with caveats. Because of latency to emulate it doesn’t do well online. In some cases games like Fortnite wont load. But its not because of the game. But because easy anti cheat detects software manipulation with the game. Triple A title games forget about it. It will require way to much CPU overhead.

Old school emulators if you chose not to use batocera. From OG XBOX, Sega Dream Cast, and Nintendo wII/GameCube and all previous generation console versions of emulators will run. Newer console generations from XBOX 360, PS4 and above console emulation systems wont run as it requires more CPU over head than just running the games in windows 10. So in this case its better to just use windows 10 with intel SDE emulator and download the games directly from steam, XBOX app, Epic Games, Riot, Etc.

CPU intensive games in 1080P wont play over 30FPS. GPU intensive games in 1080P will play at 55 to 65fps.

Dual boot compatibility you will either have to repartition the Hard Drive to toggle between different versions of windows. Or you can toggle back and forth in HP bios to prioritize the SSD or HD you prefer to boot first. It is recommended that if you want online support to keep windows 10 if you want access to the internet, then move files to USB stick or Hard Drive to then install on previous older versions of windows. The windows 10 version is windows 10Pro UNACTIVATED. You do not need an activated copy of windows 10 if all you are going to do is game, need minor access to internet. In the coding community I show upto. People have advised me to use windows 10 Lite edition but I haven’t found a legitimate COA copy of it, and alot of professionals I talk to tell me it will save the CPU 5 to 10% on CPU utilization overhead. If you find a copy you deserve an award.

GPU selected for this system was a workstation card. The nvidia quadro P2000 its the second most efficient card in nvidias product stack, without requiring a PCIE-E/ VGA 6pin power plug. The core 2 quad already uses 95 watts which is ridiculous power consumption so it was paired with an ultra conservative Graphics Card. In all my testing the quadro P2000 never exceeded 75% utilization. So at the wall this system will never draw more than 200watts., and on average will draw 185watts. The caveat to this is that you want to use this system purely for Windows XP, VISTA you will have to actually down grade the graphics card to a GTX 950, GTX 960 2GB card if its the 32bit versions of windows or if its the professional versions in 64bit you can use the 4GB versions of those cards or the quadro M2000 ( which is the ulta efficient version of the GTX950). The quadro P2000 the system is paired with now will work as far back as windows 7 professional 64bit version. Is not compatible with windows 7 32bit versions.

Online gameplay in windows 10 believe it or not wasn’t bad. I was assuming poor network capabilities and drop outs but that never happened. I tested this using a heavy network resource game Dead By Daylight which uses an extreme amount of network over head and I experiences little to no latency drawback for online gameplay.

If you are a self learner, are upto challenging coding and emulators. You will learn alot from this system. Its challenging, alot of it is experimentation. What will work and wont work. But over all if you are a beginner or moderate at coding it is a challenging experience yet fun to find out you can still play 98% of game titles on this thing. Even though it will never be a high performance machine.

What you see in the picture is what you get. Comes with base unit. Monitor, keyboard and mouse.