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  • ARGB LED strip and three fans. Picture related:
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    It's only fluff. Or, like my folks jokingly say, LPAJ (luz para agradar jacu = lights to please hillbillies). But I like how it turned out.

    The second last upgrade was the Radeon RX 6600, visible in the pic. I bought it juuust before all that tariffs ruckus; I had to get one because my old video card was ancient. (I remember mentioning this, but my nephew was crawling around my computer when I installed that video card. The same nephew is now studying to get into an university.)

    Overall I'm rather pleased with my current rig. It isn't top grade, but I think I got a good cost/benefit.

  • Last week from a Ryzen 3700x to a 7800x3d, so new mobo, cooler and ram as well. The 3700x was a bottleneck in some games for my GPU. Performs well now.

    My niece will upgrade from an old 7 series Intel to my old 3700x, x570 chipset mobo, Deepcool double fan CPU cooler and 32 GB ram. I will give her my old GTX1080 as well. Whole system perfectly fine for WOW classic.

  • A couple years ago I moved from desktop to laptop. Now I'm moving back to desktop. Building a humble sleeper in an almost new-old-stock Dell Dimension 4600 case (that black and grey one they modeled the CS Source pc after) to fit in with my pile of beige Windows 95/98/XP machines.

    I recently learned that Asus still makes motherboards with green PCB's, which is amazing for this kind of build, and I just bought one today. The motherboard also has a full regular DB9 serial port on its rear I/O, a second COM port header, and a PCI slot (not PCIe... the original PCI, which is excellent because I have so many weird interesting PCI cards)... All that retro/vintage goodness, but it's rocking an A520 AM4 chipset, and a PCIe gen 3 x16 port (with 2 more x1 ports). They also make an AM5 and several iterations of Intel socket versions! The AM4 board was on sale for ~$70 USD, and I happen to have a Ryzen 7 2700 kicking around. (Which I just now discovered that isn't compatible with the A520 chipset... oops. Cheap Ryzen 5 5500 it is!)

    I'm keeping the floppy drive since I actually still do a lot of work with floppies, I've got a floppy-to-USB board for that, and also picked up a SATA DVD burner, and have 1 additional 5.25" bay that will likely host a rotating cast of random vintage nonsense.

  • A 4070 to replace my 2080S. The improvement was fairly noticeable.

  • The Mobile Athlon CPU, with unlocked multipliers I was able to overclock like crazy. It was something like 20 years ago.

    Seriously, replaced a 2x6Tb raid1 of mechanical hdd's with 4x4tb raid 5 SSDs. Amazing update in terms of noise reduction and power consumption. As for speed, I don't care, the content is consumed over the network anyway.

  • I built mine in 2023, so no hardware upgrades yet, but I recently swapped from W10 to Fedora KDE Plasma. No regrets.

  • Additional storage, and installing the RTX2060 Super from my old box it was replacing. That was in 2020 when this system was new.

    Oh, I did upgrade my rear chassis exhaust fan to a fancier one because the cheapo one was too loud.

    I dont really play new AAA games, so it mostly does fine. When I bought it, I had planned to wait for GPU prices to return to sanity ...

  • I finally bought a 7900xtx after my gtx 1080 died.

    • I saved several paystubs from shitty fast food jobs to buy the 1080 too

    I saved up for 8+? years to try and buy a flagship as I really didn't want to buy a low tier gpu every year.

    As the SI/tech person that's built PCs for my friends and referrals for several years I've seen firsthand just how awful the gpu landscape is especially if you choose to buy whatever's the cheapest tier card.

    I typically recommend saving up to buy a good gpu first as it's the most expensive and excruciatingly painful part to buy last.

33 comments