# HP pavilion parts w/ pentium e35300



## sli4 (Dec 4, 2007)

Hello,
I'm looking to build an extremely budget friendly desktop for light gaming. 

I have a HP pavilion desktop that has 4gb ram (4x 1gb) and a Pentium e35300cpu and an Nvidia GeForce 9300 256mbgraphics card that i was hoping i could throw a new hard drive into and be up and running - currently playing games like assassins creed and dishonored on the lowest settings. 

I'd imagine these components are not very good for a gaming system - but would this be usable? Is there anything i could do to upgrade this setup for under $150 total? 

thanks!


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## Masterchiefxx17 (Feb 27, 2010)

No, you would need an entire rebuild to play any modern title on something reasonable.


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## sli4 (Dec 4, 2007)

that's a bummer. Are any of the components worth salvaging?


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## Masterchiefxx17 (Feb 27, 2010)

Maybe the hard drive, but I'd start fresh.


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## sli4 (Dec 4, 2007)

is this something worth turning into a server? or a media center or...anything? Seems wasteful to just ditch all the parts.


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## tristar (Aug 12, 2008)

Probably a NAS box, KODI, or a Plex Media server or a low end HTPC solution are some of things you could do with it.


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## sli4 (Dec 4, 2007)

make a NAS or plex server could be worth doing. 
...they'd pretty much be the same thing depending how i set up the drives, right? 
though I imagine the difference is I'd have to choose an os that can run plex vs standalone NAS?
I think it has room for about 4-6hdds...


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## tristar (Aug 12, 2008)

NAS would be more along the lines of Network storage of files, common access, it allows you to see and access the file and manage permissions. That's pretty much the gist

Media servers such as DLNA, Plex or Mediatomb are more about sharing Media, help with streaming content on to your TV or other devices, some have an additional advantage of decoding on the fly while streaming, so even if your TV (Wireless enabled/SMART) is not capable of playing certain formats, the Media server will fix that for you.

Use any minimal version of Linux (highly recommended given the hardware specs), if you're new to Linux, go with Lubuntu and a minimal version, download and install Plex and you should be good to go.

If you would like to go with NAS, try FreeNAS or OpenMedia Vault they seem to do a good job.


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## sli4 (Dec 4, 2007)

thanks for the info tristar - that could definitely be worth looking into.
I currently just have a mess of external drives that i use for storage connected to my main computer. I also use the same computer As my plex server (through windows). 
So it could be nice to put everything on NOT my main computer.


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## tristar (Aug 12, 2008)

Cheers


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