DIY PC JOURNEY: DIY PC Build #2: i7-860 Old School Workhorse

Second DIY PC Build: i7-860 Old School Workhorse

CM Storm Scout #1

This particular build was already built when I got it. It was made by my uncle many years ago(6 or 7) and he designed it to be a monster video editing rig. After many years and many videos later, he purchased a MacBook Pro and generously gifted me this build. When I first got the build, I was extremely excited. I played around with it for awhile and tested it under daily usage. I realized that even though this PC was quite old, it could still perform, although not as fast as it could 7 years ago. I used this PC as my daily driver and it was pretty responsive and did perform nicely. I wasn't really doing any CPU intensive work, or much gaming. The only thing I did to test out the graphics card was play Slither.io, and it handled it fine. Although I use my Skylake build as my daily driver now, if I get into video editing or any CPU intensive work, I will definitely switch to this workhorse. The only gripe I have with it is that the startup times are quite slow due to the 1TB WD Caviar Black hard drive. But this problem can be easily resolved by throwing in a nice SSD. Since this PC was given to me pre-built, I didn't exactly know which parts were inside. So I cracked it open, and pulled out most of the parts and put them back in. It was a pretty tedious process, but I got to know what was inside and also got a chance to clean out the PC. Listed below are the parts in this build and some benchmarks that I ran with this PC. Hopefully the benchmarks will help you determine if this PC is still worth building and using.

Parts:

CPU: i7-860
CASE: Cooler Master Storm Scout 1
GRAPHICS CARD: ATI HD5750
HDD: WD BLACK 1TB
RAM: (2X2GB) Corsair Dominator, (2x4GB) Corsair Vengeance (All RAM is DDR3-1600)
MOTHERBOARD: GIgabyte P55A-UD3

Benchmarks:

UserBenchmarks: Game 18%, Desk 41%, Work 29%
CPU: Intel Core i7 860 - 53.9%
GPU: AMD HD 5750 - 12.2%
HDD: WD Black 1TB (2010) - 57.7%
RAM: Unknown 12GB - 28.9%
MBD: Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3

Real life HDD Benchmarks

Windows 10 Startup: 1.42 Minutes

Windows 10 Shutdown: 19.5 Seconds

Copying 4K video to desktop (~800mb) 17.5 Seconds

Opening Chrome: 2 Seconds

Opening Spotify: 5 Seconds

Pictures: