hey welcome to the second episode of my series thrift store tech this also
turned into a hackintosh build and I took a $15 machine that I got
at a thrift store and turned it into this all right maybe it was more like
this so here we go
so this latest fine was $15 at a local thrift store it's a Dell Optiplex
755, 2.33 Ghz Core 2 Duo E6550 processor, 2 gigs of RAM, DVD Drive
had no hard drive and just had the Intel HD graphics the machine came with the
serial number for Vista but obviously I'm not gonna put Vista on this thing
the obvious choice would be Linux but that's kind of expected and a little too
easy so I wanted to go a step further and found out that these machines are
actually pretty good to turn into hacking Tasha's so if I'm going to load
OS X on this thing I'm gonna have to beef it up a little bit it came with 2
gigs of RAM I added an additional four gigs that I had on hand I also had a
SATA hard drive already on hand and a USB wireless adapter that's compatible
with Mac OS the only other thing I needed was a video card I opted to go
with the Radian 5450 video card so this is an old card it's underpowered by
today's standards but it was only 25 dollars and it has incredibly good
support for a build on these specific machines so to keep it simple and cheap
I decided to go with that card so with the things I had on hand and the 15
dollars I spent on this the 25 I spent on the video card this whole build is
costing me 40 bucks so my first attempt was to load Sierra
on this which completely failed I spent hours on this could not get it to boot
turns out that Sierra needs a processor with the SSE 4.1 this processor this is
the 65 50 this only goes up to sse3 so Sierra is out of the question
next step down is El Capitan so after a couple hours I had OS X 10.6 El Capitan
and I decided to put it through its paces to see how it worked for
day-to-day activity this thing works great web browsing word processing
playing music watching YouTube videos all works really flawlessly the caveat
to that is with the YouTube videos anything over 1080p will not play and
that's not too surprising because even local content over 1080p I tried some 4k
footage it just doesn't play back on this the processors underpowered the
video cards underpowered so 1080p is the best you're gonna get apart from the
day-to-day stuff even things that I wouldn't expect to work worked pretty
well on this machine for instance video Antony I loaded the
trial version of Final Cut Pro X and it actually worked a lot better than I
thought editing in 1080p video without a proxy
was actually workable scrubbing wasn't exactly smooth but it wasn't too bad and
it was you know definitely a usable experience the only problem is when you
start adding in transitions like even a simple dissolve it would just choke it
wouldn't render that transition correctly so the way to fix this is just
to do a quick proxy for those clips and once you do the proxy scrubbing is
completely smooth all the transitions work and it's a really workable solution
for $40.00 to load Final Cut Pro on I was surprised really at how well that
worked all right so I got to talk about gaming I talked about the day to day
stuff I talked about the advanced stuff you're not gonna expect much out of this
machine in the gaming realm processors underpowered the video card I'm using is
underpowered the RAM is older the bus on the machine is pretty slow so as
expected I didn't get great performance and games the only thing I really
recorded was minecraft I got about 25 frames per second on that so that was
sort of playable ish the other stuff I didn't even bother recording I tried a
bunch of games from my Steam library and the experience was not good so it's
pretty much what you would expect from this machine so one place this machine
works really well is with the steam in-home streaming I hooked up this
machine to my gaming PC streamed a few games over and it worked flawlessly
there was no drops everything was smooth very responsive it's not too surprising
because all that processing is being done on the gaming machine and it's just
sending signals back and forth to the hackintosh but it actually worked really
well so if you're looking for a machine that you don't necessarily need to run
games on natively and you just want to stream from from something like steam
in-home streaming this actually worked really well for that so overall for
$40.00 total I'm really happy with this build it performed way better than I
thought day-to-day activities if you're just looking for a regular machine work
great the video editing it's actually workable for basic video editing gaming
as long as you're streaming that stuff it works really well for that
and I can't complain too much for the price that I got this stuff for so
thanks so much for watching guys as always come see me on Twitter Facebook
and Instagram I love meeting new people and chatting with them and I will see
you guys in the next video thanks for your support