Review of the Compaq Presario SR5710F

[GWillakers]

A Review of the Compaq SR5710F.

Intro:

A while back I was visiting Best Buy with my son, and saw that the SIMS3 game had just come out. Since we both were avid fans of the Sims 2, I broke down and shelled out the $50. Reading the Hardware requirements on the back of the box, I wondered if he had enough GPU juice to fully appreciate the game. Seemed to me to be a good enough reason to buy me a $140 Nvidia 9800 GTX+, and swap in my old Geforce 6800 GS into his rig.

I was all done with the swap in, but the old geezer forgot to secure the hard drive cage with its retaining screw. When I uprighted the case, the cage containing two drives came crashing down on the old ASUS A8N VM CSM. She never did power up again.

Oh shoot now I have two problems. One, what is my son gonna use for a gaming system, and two, how much is this gonna cost me? I had enough parts home to probably piece together another complete system. People who know me, know I generally shy away from the mass production boxes from Dell, and HP. But Heck, this box was gonna be a Toy, so why not just go for it.

So Early September 2009, I go to a Home Depot and plunk down $290 for a Compaq Presario SR5710F

Specs: Motherboard: ECS MCP61PM-HM Nettle
Processor : AMD Athalon Dual Core 4450e 2.3 GHz 45 Watts
Hard drive : 250GB Sata Western Digital Caviar Blue
DVD burner, SATA, with Lightscribe.
OS: Microsoft Vista Home Premium with SP 1 (OEM)
Free upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium
Memory : 3 GB 6400 DDR2
Built in Graphics: Vidia GeForce 6150SE - 12 pin VGA DSUB
Lan: PCI Realtek RTL8201N 10/100Mbps
BIOS: Pheonix Tech V5.36 Release 11/19/2008
Audio : 8 channel high-definition audio, CODEC: ALC888

Review:
As equipped, this particular Compaq Presario was quiet and surprisingly powerfull. Its weak point would be running games off the integrated graphics. I believe, if I remember correctly it scored a 3.0 on the Vista test. As such you could run most games at medium or better settings @ (1280 x 960).
Like most cookie cutter systems, it proved to be resistant but not impossible to upgrade. After replacing the 250 Watt PS with an Antec 430Watt, I installed a Geforce 6800GS card, along with a case fan. I was able to jury rig a hard drive cage and install Windows 2000 on a second drive(PATA). The new system scores 4.6 within Vista.

Pleasant Surprises:
The Dual Core AMD 4450e (2.3GHz @25 Watts) could tackle any game I threw at it
CoolerMaster HS/Fan
Upgrade to Windows 7 came as a surprise
The DVD burner was SATA.
Dissapointments:
No system reset
Only 2 Sata Ports (both occupied)
Only 2 Dimm sockets (both were occupied).
One with 2GB DDR2 and the second with a 1GB DDR2 stick.
Doubt operating in Dual Channel.
Power Supply 250W couldn't support upgrades. However, was whisper quiet.

Problems:
The System started to drop my SATA Hard drive from BIOS. At first I thought it was a drive going bad. I swapped it out and tested with a known good cable and good drive. But then the known good drive was getting dropped as well. This made me suspicious of the connection with the SATA port. So I started to run the drive off the second port and it then started dropping from there as well.
After a bit of fanagiling, I noticed that if I set the System BIOS back to its default settings, tailored them to the values I desired and saved those settings, I could get the drive to be recognized by BIOS on the next boot.
I went to the Compaq trouble shooting site, saw that the last recommended BIOS(V5.27) was one that was produced Before the BIOS which was included in my MB (V5.36).
I loaded up the old BIOS. The old BIOS doesn't even have a mention of SATA drives.
However my system keeps responding the same way it did before. {I can get it to recognize the drive by Resaving the values}.
I am kinda aware that my troubles with the BIOS dropping a drive didn't occur untill I added a second drive. I haven't precisely narrowed down the exact conditions of when it gets dropped, but I believe it gets dropped sometime after I switch the Boot order of the drives. (I use this to switch between Vista and Windows 2000). I will narrow this down further, but my son is currently playing games.
As a side issue I am getting ready to swap in a new Battery.

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