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Computer Hardware Setups
Main Rig (Sept 2020)
- MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2020, Four Thunderbolt 3 ports) ($2,951.79)
- Kinesis Advantage2 Quiet LF Ergonomic Keyboard (KB600LFQ) ($371.21) *
Total: $4,129.90
Asterisked are components that belong to my company, and the prices are only an estimate.
Main Rig (End-of-Year 2019)
Total: $1,615.52
Middle-School-Era PC
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when I got home (after two years aboard doing my master's; that's six years away from this PC) and discovered just how outdated my old friend is.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:
- Taobao listing gives CNY￥11 (~US$1.60).
- This is the highest-performance CPU that is officially supported.
- 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.
- You can get an used one for CNY￥250 (~US$36.32).
- RAM: 2x2GB=4GB.
- Model: Kingston 2GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 Desktop Memory Model KVR1333D3S8N9/2G. Remember that I have two pieces of this occupying the only two DDR3 slots.
- Current worth per piece, per Newegg: New from $34.031; Used from $17.95.
- A relevantly newer pair of RAM modules does not work with this particular motherboard (or CPU). Maybe I just need to tweak the BIOS settings?
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 460. I just brighout this back from the USA to China, simply because I had that space in my luggage.
- Seems that you can get a piece of these with CNY￥160(~US$23.25, about right!).
- There are also a DVD reader, a CD burner, and even a 3.5-inch floppy drive in the system, but, hey, who cares.
Now, just a brief summary:
Part
Model
Used Part Price in CNY
in USD
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.
Last modified 1yr ago