I got the very cheap incomplete Athlon 64 PC I've been waiting for! It didn't have all the parts, but the parts it had were PERFECT for building something like the broken Sempron PC, which I installed 3 operating systems on a while ago.

The CPU in it is a 1.8 GHz Athlon 64, which is pretty much a stronger Sempron 2600+. It came with a heatsink and fan, although the Sempron's cooling assembly would likely work too. The motherboard is an ASUS A8NE-FM, which has an nForce4 chipset, exactly like the board in the Sempron PC! Capacitors seem to be in good condition too.

Having the same chipset and CPU means the operating system installs from the Sempron PC might just work without any driver issues. The board takes up to 4 GB of RAM too, unlike the Sempron board limited to 2 GB, but I'm still keeping this PC at 1 gigabyte.

On top of that, this PC has a silver case with a design that screams early 2000s:

You don't see cases like that often today! I think those were a thing for a shorter time than both 90s beige boxes and modern cases with RGB and all that stuff, and look cooler than both. And no, it didn't come with a floppy drive, it's only a cutout in the case for one.

What the new (old) PC lacked, such as the GPU, RAM, hard disks/SSDs and a DVD drive, I took from the Sempron PC. I also replaced the Modecom Feel power supply (they weren't known for being good PSUs) with a Seasonic one.

After assembling it, the Athlon 64 PC powered up without any issues. The fans are much quieter than the Sempron PC, as I think the old board didn't have fan speed control. The case's HDD light has a wonderful orange color almost like that of a neon light! This looks so much better than the old black case with blue LEDs, which I never truly liked and used only for having it laying around.

All operating systems previously installed on the Sempron just worked without a hitch, no unknown devices in Windows XP's device manager. With how similar the hardware is, I mostly expected it, but was ready to install some drivers.

When it comes to horsepower, the only real difference from the Sempron PC is the CPU being slightly faster (1.6 vs 1.8 GHz). I mostly play games on consoles, so I didn't test many games on this thing, but it's a great machine for Touhou. I'm also going to test software rendering performance in Unreal soon.

I was sad when the Sempron motherboard failed, but in the end I'm very happy with the computer assembled from the Sempron's remains, especially the new case! It feels great to have a working 2000s PC again, as I used the Sempron for many things, like making this website!

Update (13.05.2026): the Athlon 64 seems to perform much better than the Sempron at software rendering Unreal! The Sempron was about 30 fps, the Athlon often reaches over 60 fps. This game feels so smooth on my CRT monitor.