I am going ahead with this so I have been busy over the last few days installing and removing things around the place. To date I have installed the old mediapc chassis with a new board, CPU and RAM, GA-B250M-D3H with Kaby Lake Pentium G4560, and moving all three disks across from serverpc. It was a pleasant surprise for it to boot straight up especially as turning off UEFI is still possible even in these relatively new boards (although this model is about 2 years old and in fact is end of line).
The next to be treated will be mediapc going in serverpc’s old chassis with another new board and CPU as above and reusing some of serverpc’s RAM and keeping the mediapc disks.
The board from serverpc will be going into playerpc with some of its original RAM and keeping its existing disks. The chassis will be modified to allow it to be bolted in place like the others except sideways to the wall of the desk a distance off the floor for ventilation and a means of supporting the scanner sliding shelf to be arranged.
I was able to get wholesale pricing on everything which meant I was able to accomplish a lot more than I had expected for the same money so the result is the best outcome and better than I was originally planning as it’s been possible to upgrade all three of the PCs apart from mainpc which is still pretty good even although it is about four years old and in fact, now the oldest.
So to recap we now have a H97 Haswell Pentium G, a H110 Skylake Pentium G and two B250 Kaby Lake Pentium Gs. Why take the Kaby Lake boards and CPUs when Coffee Lake is available? Coffee Lake Pentium G and Celeron CPUs are in very short supply worldwide and therefore the Coffee Lake board would have had to be fitted with a Core i3 CPU. These are basically double the price of a Pentium G although the performance is somewhat higher, it could not be justified for the extra money.
It is interesting Kaby Lake Pentium Gs have two cores and four threads, whereas that Haswell that I have would only have two cores and two threads. So the Kaby Lake Pentium G is basically specced about where a Core i3 was a few years ago. However the graphics performance has been downgraded somewhat in the Pentium G, certainly a lower processing frequency. In my case the amount of times you would see the CPU maxed out is rare so the higher cost simply can’t be justified in any way.
All of the systems are now using Intel graphics in Linux. The Ivy Bridge system used to have a NVidia two head card made by Gigabyte which cost only $50 and provided for two digital displays as the board only had a VGA and DVI output and only supported one display onboard from memory. This system was the last one on my desk using a non Gigabyte board, back when I was still buying Intel made boards. Apparently Intel doesn’t make desktop boards any more. This board CPU and RAM are now looking for a new home around here but I have plenty of spare chassis it could go in. The NVidia cards were OK until nouveaux drivers started causing problems of various sorts and because Intel stuff is better supported and on all the boards can drive two or three displays it suits my setup to go onto Intel although Google Earth still seems to have an issue with mainpc’s particular onboard graphics.