Before coming to the US, I used to own a desktop computer in the Philippines called Qube PC. It's a namesake to a computer parts and assembly store in Gilmore, Quezon City, Philippines where my brother and I decided to purchase the rig. What we ended up with was a pretty high-end system with a 2nd generation Intel Core i7 processor, 8GB of DDR3 RAM and a dedicated graphics card. The graphics card was always its weakest link but we never got to upgrade it. When it was time to leave for the US, I left Qube PC in my brother's hands and I've forgotten all about it.
After many years, I heard news that Qube PC's graphics card has kicked the bucket. The computer was still functional due to the on-board GPU but it can no longer handle most video games. Its other components were still quite decent given the number of years of service so I thought it would be a good idea to give life to it once more with a new video card.
I was planning to visit the Philippines so after checking which cards were still compatible with the rest of Qube PC, I purchased a 3GB GeForce GTX 1060 card from MSI. It was glorious!
I needed to make sure that it wasn't defective so I tested it by plugging it in my current rig. Jaeger recognized it immediately and I ran some games just to make sure.
I was in the Philippines last April, gave my brother the new card and helped install it into Qube PC.
Problem 1:
As we feared, the graphics card was indeed too long to fit the case. Qube PC's was an old case that doesn't have removable hard drive cages and generally wasn't built for long beefy cards that come out these days.
No matter, that wasn't going to stop us. We then proceeded to cut through the hard drive cages with metal shears, paying no heed to the case's structural integrity. With a big chunk of the hard drive cages removed, the new card was able to fit just right.
Problem 2:
The graphics card fans weren't spinning and Qube PC didn't recognize it. The proper drivers were installed, the graphics card LEDs were on and the monitor was displaying from the card so we weren't sure why the DirectX Diagnostic Tool (dxdiag) still showed the on-board graphics as the only display device.
After some more troubleshooting, we ended up with a reformatted hard drive with a fresh install of Windows 10. This, in retrospect, wasn't necessary after all but was a welcome upgrade to Qube PC's old pirated Windows 7 OS. The fans weren't spinning because most graphics cards these days won't even try to cool themselves if below a certain temperature, in our case, 60° Celsius. We confirmed the fans to be working after a quick GPU stress test. After a few minutes, the new card finally reflected on the DirectX Diagnostic Tool. It took a while for some reason.
A GTX 1060 is far from being the most high-end card out there but with 1080p gaming, it should be able to handle most games at high to ultra settings. As a last note, I gave my brother a few games on Steam and GOG so he can start enjoying this upgrade.
