Linux Lite 5.0 Running Certain Simple Tasks Extremely Slowly, decent hardware

[SubtlyInClass]

Hello to everyone,

I recently installed Linux Lite 5.0 on an old Dell Vostro 220s with 4GB of RAM at 800 MHz across 2 sticks, a core 2 duo e7400 at 2.8 GHz, and an aftermarket nVidia GT 1030 I put into the top PCI-E slot. The install went fine, the nVidia graphics driver install was a royal pain, but now everything seems to work. I had to revert to the older 390 driver for the GPU driver to not crash Xserver right after logging in. Apart from tor browser, a torrent client, and the nVidia drivers, there is nothing extra on the installation, it is basically fresh. It is also worth noting that I am using this as a home media PC, so the only display output it is connected to is a 4k TV (hence the GT 1030). After I boot, opening programs is fine and so is navigating files and dragging windows around, it's all nice and quick, however the second I try to do something a tiny bit demanding like browsing the web (not even youtube or anything, just the google search results) or playing back a 1080p h.264 video in VLC in fullscreen (with hardware acceleration on mind you), the framerate drops to something like 4 fps. Initially I thought this might have to do with nVidia's hardware video decoding on the GT 1030 not working, but the e7400 shouldn't have any issue with playing back h.264 in 1080p even if hardware decoding wasn't on, and that wouldn't explain why the framerate in the Firefox browsing window was also incredibly low. Also this isn't to do with the network connection being slow, I have a gigabit connection at my house and connect this PC straight to the router via ethernet, I got download speeds of 27 MiB/s (~240 Mb/s) while downloading a file.

Anyways, thanks to whoever read all the way to here, my question is how can I fix this? Being that this is a home media PC, I would love it if at an absolute minimum I could play back 1080p h.264 files smoothly, and ideally I'd like to be able to watch web video like YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, or Netflix just fine as well. Is this a hardware problem, could the CPU be throttling due to a worn out thermal paste layer? Or is this more likely to be a software problem to do with video output or drivers or compatibility or something? Any insight would be greatly appreciated, and thanks to anyone in advance.

- Class

[Şerban S.]

[...] an aftermarket nVidia GT 1030 I put into the top PCI-E slot.
[...] the nVidia graphics driver install was a royal pain, but now everything seems to work.
[...] the second I try to do something a tiny bit demanding like browsing the web (not even youtube or anything, just the google search results) or playing back a 1080p h.264 video in VLC in fullscreen (with hardware acceleration on mind you), the framerate drops to something like 4 fps.
[...] my question is how can I fix this?

Hello!
Sadly, the problem IS the NVidia video.
On my machine (Dell Precision T1700, Core i7 4790) I thought an extra GPU, might give me some room to test. I chose a GK107, which is a GeForce GT630 OEM, that was supposed to work with NVidia 440 driver kit.
I made the installation and started to test.
While generally everything seemed to work fine for trivial tasks (net, YouTube, Chrome) when I started to do video editing tests, things got ugly...
Using NVidia 440 I got 37 FPS rendering speed. With the Nouveau drivers, I got only 31 FPS.
So, I switched to the Intel HD Graphics 4600 internal GPU.
Using VA-API, I got 46 FPS.
I guess this is what it is.
On a Core2 Duo without HT, it is unlikely that you will be able to get better results. The  GeForce GT1030 is close to GeForce GT630 OEM and since on my machine (4 cores, 8 threads, max 4000 MHz) I could only go that far, I doubt you will ever be able to tweak the graphics more than you already did.
Far more, hardware decoding works only on newer CPUs. Chrome and other browsers, use software decoding so your CPU will go maxed quickly.
I have a Lenovo ThinkPad T400 so I know exactly where I can get to with it and the CPU (T9400@2,53) has an Intel GM 45 Express GPU, which works far better than NVidia.
The only thing I can think of, is testing a Radeon (something close to NVidia).
I've spoken with some people and they said that Radeon (R9 280(X), HD 7850, R9 270) works better on Linux than GeForce.
The other workaround would be a CPU upgrade, if the socket supports a better one, with an Intel GPU.
For a more powerful CPU, I found This:

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/...z-fsb.html
and:
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/...z-fsb.html

On an Intel GPU, you should be able to have a very pleasant experience with Linux Lite. If you add a 240 GB SSD, that might surprise you a lot!

Finally, I noticed that your RAM is DDR 2. I have 4 GB too on T400, but mine is DDR 3, at 1066 MHz. The 266 MHz less, means a lot of computing power loss. Adding this to the NVidia, gives the result you outlined here.
On the laptop, (T400) I have Linux Lite 4.8, but I also had LL 5.0 and worked fine. So maybe tweaking a little the hardware, you can get a nice working machine.

All the best!