Dumpster Bin Special PC.

Remember, I installed Linux Mint on a Lenovo M715q with Athlon 200GE? That system has been running perfectly! Very impressed.

Then I made a "Parts Bin Special" PC (R5-3600, 16GB RAM, RX-6600, 500GB SATA SSD, 4TB HDD) and installed Bazzite on it. Very nice, although I haven't done much with it after that.

I thought, let's shovel deeper! How low can I go?

I had some old parts from 2012, so hacked together something that WILL boot Linux Mint. Some of my attempts wasn't successful, so this is the oldest parts I have tried that works.

Case & Power Supply are from an old Acer AX1935-UR20P that originally came with Intel Pentium G630 and Windows 7 Home Premium, but for some reason, Linux Mint didn't like the BIOS of this board. I imagine I can make it work if I messed with it some more, but meh.

I swapped the board with an Intel Executive Series DQ67EP, powered by Intel Pentium G630T. T-series is their lower power (35W) variant. Remember the short period in history when Intel made and sold their own branded motherboards?

I scavanged two sticks of old memory, so it's loaded with 8GB RAM. Wow!

For storage, I put the oldest SATA SSD I still have: 64GB Kingston SSDNow V Series from 2010!!!

This baby is equipped with a DVD-RW drive!

I hacked up the heatsink that came with Acer by putting an AMD-branded fan (made by Foxxconn) on top of it. LOL

It works... fine..., I guess. But the iGPU on this 12-year old Sandy Bridge CPU lacks modern video decoder, and the CPU itself lacks grunt, so it can't even play 1080p 30fps YouTube (VP9) video without dropping frames. It played 720p just fine, though.

If I can find a small, low-profile GPU that will fit in this case, maybe it will be more useful. Neither of my Gigabyte fanless GT 1030, nor an MSI GTX 1050Ti would fit, because the optical drive gets in the way.

For basic browsing, emailing, and maybe some video conferencing, I think it'll do just fine, but compared to pretty much everything else I have, it is annoyingly slow. I've no plans for this Dumpster Bin Special PC. Back in the closet it goes, I guess.