jnjnilson6

Distinguished
I would be delighted if you should share the system specifications of your current machine or a favorite machine from the past.

We're not aiming to outdistance other users by making this a performance competition. It is just about the hardware you love and the system you're most fond of. In the end - it is not the hardware that makes a machine valuable, it's how we feel about it - whether we find working with it comfortable and through years of usage have grown accustomed to it like a bit of fancy décor, a favorable object in the room, the mellow sunshine falling tepidly in a circle on the floor through a sunny day.

A machine is not special through higher and higher hardware, but through the vision of it in its owner's eyes.

So I would be glad to see what you've got! :)
 

Cj-tech

Admirable
Jan 27, 2021
534
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8,940
I would be delighted if you should share the system specifications of your current machine or a favorite machine from the past.

We're not aiming to outdistance other users by making this a performance competition. It is just about the hardware you love and the system you're most fond of. In the end - it is not the hardware that makes a machine valuable, it's how we feel about it - whether we find working with it comfortable and through years of usage have grown accustomed to it like a bit of fancy décor, a favorable object in the room, the mellow sunshine falling tepidly in a circle on the floor through a sunny day.

A machine is not special through higher and higher hardware, but through the vision of it in its owner's eyes.

So I would be glad to see what you've got! :)
Well, I recently got a new laptop for keeping all my software, VMs, some games, and other stuff running with ease. It has a Ryzen 5 5600H and RTX 3060.

Aside from that, the most notable systems I’ve acquired are two older CAD desktops from my workplace both with a GTX 760 and i7-7700K. Neither worked, so I used the parts from one on the other. I’ve turned that into an Ubuntu Server to aid in processing data (mostly photogrammetry for 3D modeling with drones which is a hobby of mine). Still working that out to get it fully optimized.
 
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bignastyid

Titan
Moderator
Currently my main rig.
Ryzen 5900x w/ Barrowch block
X570 Aorus Elite
32Gb DDR4 3600 Gskill Trident Z Royal
EVGA 3080 FTW3 Ultra w/ EK Quantum Vector with active backplate.
OS drive is a 1TB Aorus Nvme Gen 4
Game drive is a 2Tb Samsung 970 Evo
AX1200i
Case is a Black Lian Li O11 Dynamic Evo with front distro plate
Hard tubed with dual EK Quantum P360m radiators.
 
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jnjnilson6

Distinguished
Currently my main rig.
Ryzen 5900x w/ Barrowch block
X570 Aorus Elite
32Gb DDR4 3600 Gskill Trident Z Royal
EVGA 3080 FTW3 Ultra w/ EK Quantum Vector with active backplate.
OS drive is a 1TB Aorus Nvme Gen 4
Game drive is a 2Tb Samsung 970 Evo
AX1200i
Case is a Black Lian Li O11 Dynamic Evo with front distro plate
Hard tubed with dual EK Quantum P360m radiators.
If it wouldn't sound presumptuous, how much did it cost?
It's quite an exhilarating system; brimming up to the latter part of the enthusiast level and maintaining a rock-solid stance on the ladder of computer hardware.(y)
 

bignastyid

Titan
Moderator
If it wouldn't sound presumptuous, how much did it cost?
It's quite an exhilarating system; brimming up to the latter part of the enthusiast level and maintaining a rock-solid stance on the ladder of computer hardware.(y)
Never added up the full cost as I kinda don't want to know. But just the loop was north of $1000, so a bit over $3000 altogether.
 
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jnjnilson6

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Never added up the full cost as I kinda don't want to know. But just the loop was north of $1000, so a bit over $3000 altogether.
Totally worth it for such masterful specifications, I'd say.

I had a friend who'd got a PC w/ Radeon HD 5850 and AMD Phenom II X6 1090T (or 1100T; forgot which) and 4 GB RAM in 2010 for $3190. And in 2011 there were already machines with Core i7-2600 and Radeon HD 6870 and the same amount of RAM for about $600-700 (harboring both faster CPU and GPU performance).

A friend of the family had told him to get a machine with the aforementioned specifications and basically robbed him out (he was unaware of this until I told him).

However, in your case, I would say it was a very good investment and totally worthwhile for the unlimiting performance. :)
 

jnjnilson6

Distinguished
"I bought"
"my friend told me to buy"

And of course, the plethora of blinken lights.
And let's not forget the final and sempiternal,

'But why is it running so slowly?' ... Or

'I gave so much money for the PC and the games aren't working well?' ...

Or the evermore frightening calls describing hardware issues and software incompatibilities leaving the computer on an unusable key and the 'lustful buyers' in dispassionate discomfiture.

Such is the world of hardware and such are the buyers of hardware. Well, a large amount of them. All we can do is help those we know and those that seek help in the appropriate places. After that it's

'Good luck and good night!'

(Not to disparage the choice of the individual in any way. Sometimes buying a machine without looking at the specifications may end up being worthwhile and working very well, while a computer bought by computer enthusiasts in which every detail seems to be measured may end up having serious or fatal problems. And it is a very good world, the hardware world, with the buyers of today. My opinion would be to buy what you like and what you like only. Sometimes it would be good to ask for further assistance; whatever leaves you satisfied and makes you happy in the end. Buying new hardware always comes with the beginning twinkle of happiness which just grows as the machine performs well through the years and proves what the purchaser has been searching for from the beginning. All that matters is the joy of the experience and it comes from within.)
 
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jnjnilson6

Distinguished
"I bought"
"my friend told me to buy"

And of course, the plethora of blinken lights.
Not that I've been playing any games personally, that has become a pastime surrendered to the inevitable past for other mediums have arisen to arrest my general attention, but I've been getting information that games like Crysis 2 from the new Trilogy (the Remastered games) could only be run well on Medium (at 1080p) on a Ryzen 5500 and Radeon RX 590. Now, even a 5850 could run the original Crysis 2 at those settings fine.

Either one of two things is happening:
1) The newer games were written very badly and so ended up being indefinitely demanding.

2) Some other piece of software is seriously hindering performance.

Funny thing is the guy with the 5850 was told by the person who'd told him to buy the entire thing that it would last 10 years. Well, 12 years later, it seems that the faster cards of the day are performing not much worse on the same thing (only coated more modernly) than the cards of the good ol' days.

It's almost sarcastic what hardware has done. We're having machines with incredible amounts of RAM and processing power and yet badly written software eats it all up and keeps on asking for more recurrently. I remember opening 30-40 tabs on an AMD Sempron 3300+ @ 2.0 GHz (single core) and 896 MB RAM in Google Chrome (many of the tabs being YouTube) and everything running fine. Nowadays those requirements have risen more than tenfold.

I remember when Xpand Rally could run on 256 MB RAM and GeForce2 MX 400 (64 MB) back in the day; and it had great graphics. It was just a time in which software developers were of a different strata and software was written much better than it is today.
 

Exploding PSU

Honorable
Jul 17, 2018
461
147
10,870
Ah, if I may... Here's mine :

CPU : Ryzen 5 2600
Motherboard : MSI X370 SLI Plus
RAM : T-Force Delta R DDR4 3000 32 (16x2) GB RGB
GPU : Yeston RX 6800 XT "Sakura Hitomi edition"
SSD : Samsung PM1725a 1.5 TB
HDD : An old 500 GB Seagate Momentus Thin and 8TB Seagate "green ones"
PSU : Seasonic S12G Gold
Cooler : Cryorig H7 QL
Case : some random chinese $20 case, along with 6 random case fans

My PC kind of "evolved" with the times. To be honest I was never a "desktop computer" guy before this one. I was a staunch laptop user, and it was enough for my needs. I didn't really play demanding games, so even an ULV i5 with integrated graphics were all I needed.

Until I learned about this game called "Mirror's Edge Catalyst". I was so stunned with how beautiful that game is. I saw a demo PC on a trade show playing that game, and I was like me watching Avatar at the cinema for the first time and getting wowed by the visuals. So I grabbed a copy (Steam copy, just to be clear I know this site's stance on piracy) and installed it on my laptop. It was the most demanding game I've played up to that point. I knew the performance would be abysmal, but as long as I could experience the environment, that would be enough.
And abysmal it was, even in lowest resolution and graphics settings the laptop only managed around 5-10 fps average. My microwave display had more FPS than that! I was dead set on playing that game, so I decided to build a PC.

I didn't want to go overboard, the PC was built to play that game and ONLY that game, so the part I picked was the exact same as its recommended requirements.

The PC started its life with a Gigabyte GTX 970 paired to a Ryzen 3 1200. Wanted to pick a GALAX but it was too expensive. Everything else was the cheapest parts I could get (A320M ASRock board, 8 GB chinese RAM, no SSD, 500GB HDD pulled from my laptop, random FSP PSU (mistake), and a no name chinese case). Monitor was (and still is) the cheapest 1080p panel I could find. I sourced the keyboard, speaker, and mouse off an internet cafe that was closing (again, basic parts, was a logitech value pack something something). The PC was very basic, but it was able to play Mirror's Edge in high settings, and that was enough to make me happy.

RAM :
But soon, the allure of the PC world started to grow on me. I heard Ryzen didn't like single-channel RAMs, so I switched it to a 16 GB T-Force Delta, and years later, the 32 GB version.

PSU :
Then the PSU blew up. Loud bang and a flash and the PC shut down. This incident was the reason why I signed up to the forums, and it's where my name came from. I picked a Seasonic PSU, thanks to the help of this forum, which has been rock solid since then. Luckily, none of the other parts were affected by the fiery death of my PSU.

Motherboard :
Then I installed 6 RGB case fans, just to make it look less barren. I realized the fans needed a RGB header to work properly, so I upgraded the motherboard to a (used) X370 SLI Plus. Someone local sold the board at a strikingly low price, great deal. X370 was overkill for my needs (and still is) but I picked it for around 140 AUD, X370 was still the cutting edge back then, I believe the street price for the board was around 210 AUD at least, so it was almost half price.

Cooler :
With the RGB case fans installed, I wanted my PC to look even better. I kind of didn't like Ryzen's stock cooler, I wanted something to make my PC "look" powerful. I saw many higher performance PC use tower-style CPU coolers. I chose a Cryorig H7 QL, which was WILDLY overkill for my PC. I basically strapped a 160W cooler to a low-end 65W Ryzen, just because it looked good. I was satisfied though.

GPU :
At this point, I was knee deep in PC gaming. I replayed many games that my laptop couldn't run all these years. I wanted more. Mirrors Edge still had two graphics settings above "High", they are "Ultra" (which stuttered on my setup) and "Hyper" (refused to run at all). I was enamored by Sapphire's line of GPU, specifically their Pulse series of cards. I find them really cute. After some pondering, I finally snagged a Sapphire Vega 56 Pulse at slightly above MSRP. I was lucky though, because soon after I bought it the mining craze reared its head and the GPU was either out of stock or skyrocketed in price.

Was it a wise decision? Yes and no. I paired the Vega 56 with a Ryzen 3 1200. When I described my specs to the PC store guy, he literally laughed at me on how bottlenecked my setup was. But hey, I was there for the cute GPU, not performance.

CPU :
Later on, someone special gifted me a Ryzen 5 2600. Which makes the CPU all the more special, not just some silicon on a plastic substrate covered in some metal. You know how it is. The Ryzen 3 1200 was finally laid to rest (not for long).

SSD :
Then came the SSD. For the longest time I was an unbeliever when it comes to SSD. I had only saw it as a "faster hard drive". My 500GB HDD is fine, so why should invest in wildly-expensive-yet-low-capacity drives?? It took me 15 minutes of me using one of my mate's SSD-equipped laptop to change my mind. I swear, when I first used that laptop, it was so quick and responsive, it felt like an alien-tech to me. Never in my life I thought Windows could be that smooth. One of three instances of technology that managed to amaze me to such extent (after Windows Vista and AMOLED screens). I ordered a Lexar NM600 512GB SSD when I had the chance, and I never looked back to using HDD as a main drive.
Years later, I picked a Samsung PM1725a from where I worked, they were decommisioning some servers and I could get the SSD essentially for free.

HDD
I never really cared about backing up my data. One day my external HDD that contained irreplaceable pictures died after being dropped. Luckily, I had an "unintentional" backup of them (automatic Google Photos backup), and I simply brushed it off as "ok whatever, stuff happens".

hahaha...
We often see people here complaining about performance issues, when having 1500 browser tabs open.

But one day when randomly scrolling through the site I came across your sig. And that image actually got me thinking for the first time. : "That sig is right, what if my hard drives decides to randomly die again? Google Photos might won't save me next time.".
So I got right into it and bought two 8TB Seagate "green" hard drive (couldn't remember the exact model, it was the cheapest one I could find as performance didn't really matter in this scenario). I backed up all of my data (ALL of them, not just important ones) to one of those drives and used the other one as a "daily" in my PC. I was EXTREMELY LUCKY because the 8TB HDD I used daily died in just two weeks since I bought it followed by the factory-installed 250 GB HDD on my laptop dying two days later. If I HADN'T backed up my data, I would've lost all of my memories when I was still a young child. Brutal.
This incident sobered me on how important backing up is. I bought another 2 of those 8TB HDD, copied my backed up data to them, and kept them in different places. One here, one in my parent's house, one in one of my relatives. I returned the broken 8TB HDD and got the warranty replacement, which still ticks to this day inside the PC.

That sig was a godsend. I swear I can't thank you enough. If I hadn't seen that image, my memories of my childhood would've simply, literally, just memories.

GPU (again) :
The latest upgrade to the PC was the GPU. I was still on track on making my PC looking as great as possible. I saw the Yeston RX 6700 XT "Sakura Hitomi edition" randomly when reading videocardz and was royally stunned on how CUTE that GPU is. I don't know anything about anime or that "japan cartoon" stuff, so I have no idea who that character on the GPU is really. I simply find the GPU's shroud model and paint really cute, nothing more. I don't really need the power offered by a 6700XT, by this point I don't even game anymore. But you know how I always choose my GPU : cuteness first, performance later.
It was a chinese-only model AFAIK so I had to pull a few strings and ask for a few favors to procure the model (and even then, the guy could only source a 6800XT, so I ended up picking a GPU even more overkill than I needed). Currently that monster of a GPU (by my standards) is powering a 1080p 60Hz monitor and mere excel spreadsheets. I only use the GPU to output images to the monitor.

So, where do we go from here? I don't know. In my opinion the PC is complete. There's just nothing more to upgrade.

I get told rather often that my current CPU is holding my GPU back, and there are plenty of great affordable Ryzen CPUs that is compatible with the platform I'm running, so supposedly it's high time for me to upgrade that Ryzen 5 2600. But, due to the circumstances of that CPU....... that CPU has deep sentimental value for me, so I don't think I'd upgrade it anytime soon.

That's the story of my PC...
 
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Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
CPU: Ryzen 5 3600XT (With Corsair H100i RGB Platinum 240mm AIO)
MB: Gigabyte Aorus X570 Elite Wifi
RAM: 32gb Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro CL16 3200
C: Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1tb
D: 3tb WD HDD
GPU: Nvidia RTX 2070 Super
PSU: Seasonic PX750
Fractal Design Meshify S6

My current PC, I don't really have a Fav. GPU likely to change in coming months.

My story seems lacking after last one :)
 
Hey there,

I don't think I have a favourite. I mean, I guess all of my machines are my favourite at a given time and moment.

I have 3 rigs at the moment, all in my sig (CPU validations).

Gaming Laptop, which I love. repurposed to a mobile VR station for PC VR games with Quest 2.

My first Ryzen rig with 1600x and GTX1060. I still love that machine.

And my current Ryzen 5600x based system. This is my current gaming machine. Does nothing else but game.

Each and all of the systems have given me immense joy/fun at various times. So, no out and out favourite.

I'm waiting on a refurbed Dell 7280, which I got for cheap-ish, and am going to use it as a Plex server. Even old machines have their use.
 
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Current box.
Asus Prime X570P
R5 5600x 4.5-4.6 all core boost.
16gig Patriot 3600 cas 16
RTX 3060TI FE
1 tb 970 evo+ m.2, boot /data
500gig 870 evo , steam games
RM850X Corsair
HAF 912

Favorite?
Asus TUSL2
P3 1.26@1589
512 mb Crucial 133cas3 @167fsb
6800 ultra
Sparkle 400w power supply
WD 40 and 120gig hard drives.
Antec Sonata

Honorable mention
Asus M5A97
Phenom2 960t unlocked to 6 cores@3.6
8 gig Crucial 1600 cas9
Pair of GTX 460s @850
Rs 850 Corsair
256 gig Micron m.2 boot drive
1tb WD black


Folding boxes
Asus prime Z170
I5 6600
16 gig Patriot 3200 cat 15
GTX 1070
256 gig ssd
Seasonic 550w

Asus prime X570
R5 3600
16gig Crucial 3600 cas 18
GTX 960 4 gig
GTX 1060 6gig
120gig ssd
Superflower leadex 3 850

Also have a Dell G5 laptop I5 8750 /1050ti for camping and the wife's computer
M5A97
Phenom 2 X6@3.4
8 gig 1600 cas 10
GTX 650 TI boost 2 gig
256gig ssd
550 watt Antec pure power.
 
Current PC:

CPU - i9 10850K (0.095v undervolt)
CPU Cooler - Asus Strix LC240 Liquid Cooler
Mainboard - MSI Z490 Mag Tomahawk
RAM - Corsair Vengeance LPX 3000 32GB
Case - Fractal Design Meshify C White
PSU - Seasonic FOCUS GX Gold 1000W
SSD1 - Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB
SSD2 - ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 1TB
SSD3 - Cruical BX500 2TB
SSD4 - Samsung 970 QVO 4TB
HDD1 - WD Black 4TB
HDD2 - WD Blue 4TB
Case Fan 1 - Fractal Design GP12 120mm
Case Fan 2 - Fractal Design GP14 140mm
Case Fan 3 - Noctua 80mm (creatively secured inside hard drive bay as drives were getting hot)
LED Strip - Asus Strix LED Strip
LED Strip - Cablemod LED Strip
GPU - Palit Nvidia 3080 Gaming Pro
GPU Support - upHere Graphics Card GPU Brace Support
Network - TP-LINK AX3000 Wi-Fi 6 Bluetooth 5.2 PCI Express Adapter
Optical - Pioneer Usb Bluray

Current latpop:

Lenovo Ideapad 720S 14"
CPU - i5 8250U @1.8Ghz
RAM - 16GB DDR4 2400Mhz
GPU - Nvidia MX150 2GB
SSD - Sabrent Rocket Q 1TB

In terms of favourites I have a soft spot for my previous machine because I used it for the longest. It was also the first time I bought all the parts:

CPU - i7 6700K
CPU Cooler - Cooler Master Sedion 120v
Mainboard - Gigabyte Z170MX Gaming 5
RAM - Corsair Vengeance LPX 3000 32GB
PSU - OCZ 700W
Boot SSD - Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB
SSD1 - Sandisk Extreme Pro 480GB (previous boot drive)
SSD2 - Samsung 850 Evo 500GB
HDD1 - WD Black 4TB
HDD2 - WD Blue 4TB
Optical1 - LG 5.25" Bluray
Optical2 - LG 5.25" DVD
GPU - Gigabyte Nvidia 1060 6GB
 
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