Main Rig

• ​MacBook (Retina, 12-inch, Early 2015) (~USD$986.63 today)

• ​Satechi Aluminum Multi-Port Adapter V2 ($79.99). Things connected with it to MacBook:

  • ​Dell UltraSharp 25 Monitor (U2518D) ($288.95)

  • ​GIGABYTE Mechanical Cherry Blue Keyboard (GK-Force K83 Blue) ($49.99)

  • ​Neeyer USB 3.0 SATA III Hard Drive Adapter Cable ($6.99)

    • ​Samsung SSD 860 EVO 1TB 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-76E1T0B/AM) ($139.99)

• ​Microsoft Designer Bluetooth Mouse ($62.98)

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when I got home (after two years aboard doing my master's; that's six years away from this PC) and discovered just how outdated my old friend is.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:

• CPU: Intel® Pentium® Processor E5700 (2M Cache, 3.00 GHz, 800 MHz FSB)

  • ​Second-hand listings on Amazon suggest a wide range of price. I'd say mine is worth $20.

  • Taobao listing gives CNY￥11 (~US$1.60).

  • Update 08/28/19: Upgraded this to an Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor Q9650 for CNY￥205 (~US$28.63).

    • This is the highest-performance CPU that is officially supported.

• Power Supply Unit (PSU): AcBel PC7009. 430W.

  • Used price: About $67? CNY￥35 (~US$5.09).

• 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.

  • 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.

    • Specs: PDF​

  • 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?

    • While we are on it: list of compatible RAMs (PDF).

• 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!).

• HDD: Western Digital WD Green WD10EARS 1TB 5400 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5".

  • Used: $32.19 (Newegg) or CNY￥120 (Taobao).

• 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:

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.

​