Well, I'm just about now set with this new machine.....
Storage setup is now 4 TB, all internal. The 1 TB Toshie is the default installed HDD; the 3 TB is the Seagate Barracuda, which has been 'removed' from the fancy external case with USB 3.0/SATA adapter it originally came in, and is now plugged directly into the mobo's SATA3 ports.
The WD 500GB Caviar 'Blue' is now a 'spare', in case I ever need one.
RAM has been upped from 4 DB DDR4 to 8 GB DDR4 - still 2400 MHz (this is the max the custom HP board supports, though it's interesting they supplied it with a stick of 2666!) This is, I feel, a perfect amount for my use case; allows plenty of multi-tasking if necessary, and gives Openshot a good chunk of space to play with when rendering. Which leads me nicely onto my latest, and probably final purchase.....
.....an Asus GeForce GT710 GPU, with its own, dedicated, 2 GB of GDDR5 VRAM. Far more modern than the very basic GeForce 210 I'd purchased a few years ago, and with which I was experimenting some weeks back.....never having been able to use it in ye olde Compaq tower due to a damaged PCI-e slot. Plenty of folks have been recommending GTX 1080s and 2080s, and look at you 'gone-out' when you explain that you just want a usable GPU for every day stuff, with enough grunt for the odd mad session. Serious gamers just seem incapable of understanding anything
other than their passion.....
This is one of these silent, 'passively-cooled' cards, with a large, oversized heatsink and no fan. 'Passive radiation' is the cooling method of choice, y'see. I definitely didn't want a fan anymore after playing with the 210; the teeny fan on the 210's diminutive heatsink did a fair impression of an angry hornet trying to break out and win its freedom. I wouldn't have believed it possible for something so small to create such a persistent, intrusive whine.....3 or 4 days of that, and I had to take it out, or I'd have gone bonkers!
Specs-wise, it's not much of an improvement on the Pentium 'Gold's on-die UHD 630 GPU; a few more cores, a few more execution units, slightly higher memory and base clock speeds, etc, etc. Increased performance wasn't the overall reason for the 710's purchase; I'm happy enough with the UHD 630's performance, but like all on-board graphics, it eats into system RAM for its VRAM. I wanted, essentially, to keep all 8 GB for Puppy & what
I want to do, yet have a card with the same level of performance that had its own pool of dedicated RAM to play with, and which would have enough grunt to handle video rendering in Puppy.....Openshot likes to offload this stuff to the GPU whenever possible, and this thing will handle it nicely.
I think power draw was the biggest surprise. The older 210 pulls around 30W from the slot itself; the GT 710, despite having a vastly higher number of cores/execution/shader/texture units, etc, because of being built on a much smaller fab process, sips a mere 19W from that small, 180W PSU.
(Which was quite a relief, 'cos research has already shown the PSU on these HP 'mini-towers' is not easy to upgrade; not only are they a weird size to start with, but HP, being sneaky, have carefully fitted it with custom, one-off connectors, haven't they? No 20/24-pin ATX connector here; the entire board is supplied via just 4 pins, plus a 4-pin for the CPU supply.... (*Grrrr....*))
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Overall, though, I'm satisfied with my new set-up. It'll keep me productive for quite a while to come, I feel..!
Mike.