Lying around in my home at China is a PC that I held dear the most during my six years of middle-to-high school era. I barely touched it anymore after entering college. Therefore, the computer was only "powerful" as I remembered it, till mid 2019 when I got home (after two years aboard doing my master's; that's six years away from this PC) and discovered just how outdated my old friend is.
Without further emotional reviews, here's the specs:
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-EP45C-DS3 (w/o R) with BIOS version F5
The on-board CMOS battery needs replacement. With a power outage, the BIOS always falls back to a last-known-good configuration, which holds CPU running at 1.7GHz instead of 3.0GHz.
That's a total of US$119.44. All of sudden (not that fast; it has been six years away since I last actively used it), the PC entered a race of budget builds. Now the question is, can it run crysis?
I don't know exactly how much my dad paid for all the parts throughout the years of building & upgrading it, but I'm very sure that it would probably not worth my while investing more time in actually using this machine. Let me see if I can repurpose it.
Philadelphia $200 Build
This is a PC I held for about 15 months when I was doing my graduate studies at Penn. While I have described in detail what this machine came into, let me repeat the specs here for the sake of centralized note-taking:
Optiplex 7010 MT: A decent refurb I won from an eBay bidding with USD$70.
Nvidia GeForce GTX 460: A little piece of impulse shopping that I got for USD$30.
Patriot 4GB DDR3 1600 RAM x 2: Because the stock 4GB memory just won't suffice. USD$40.
Kingston SSDNow 30GB: A cheap piece of Solid State Drive that I got for USD$10.
DELL S2209W Monitor: A decent 1920x1080 display unit that I got from CeX before it ceased business from the US. I really liked them. $15.
I brought the GPU and the RAM modules back to China because I didn't wanted to waste the space in my checked luggages. They didn't turn out to be all compatible to my PC at home, it turned out.