How my PC has changed.

[Cosmic Puppet]

Then (although this oldest pic has 2 hard drives it started life with only 1)

20190730_185908.jpg

Now:

20210408_181635.jpg

To get the new CPU fan in I had to take the motherboard out and cut the length of the screws with my bike cable cutters and then file them. :lol:

It's kinda kept me sane (ish lol) during the lockdown.

[PaulJ_2.0]

Modern PC's are so minimalistic. This is one my new beast.
The HDD is the NVME attached between the GPU and CPU.
No drive bays, no dangling wires, nothing.

IMG_20210414_215736.jpg

[Cosmic Puppet]

Wow, that looks totally Sci-fi :o

I had to get a short graphics card because my SATA power is in the way. :lol:

I wanted a 4GB card which is the max this setup would take. Ended up with 3GB but feel blessed in light of the current GPU situation.

[PaulJ_2.0]

Yeah yours looks nice and cramped just like how I like em :)
Although a little too cramped if it cant fit a full sized GPU in there.

This is my Daily workhorse:

IMG_20210414_221130.jpg

Dual Xeon 12C 24T
48GB Ram, 4xSata HDD's of various sizes from 2TB to 6TB and a 1TB SSD.
A bit more cramped and plenty of drive bays :D

Oh and some dangling.

[exxos]

Mine had a service not long ago..

https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/forum/viewt ... 370#p54370

[PaulJ_2.0]

:lol: :lol:

My kind of cable management :D

[rubber_jonnie]

Haven't built a PC for an age, so long ago in fact that I don't even recall the spec. The GPU was likely a 3DFXcard!

My workbench PC is actually a DL360 G6 server (I think) with dual Xeons, 32GB RAM and 4TB of RAID. I am expecting to probably take it up to 96GB when I retire some other machines in the next few months. It's all around 10 years old I think.

My daily drivers at the moment are laptops, so a 2012 MacBook Pro with 16GB/1TB and a 2017 Dell XPS 32GB/1TB with a GTX1050 GPU.

I got tired of the GPU arms race around the time of the Dreamcast and subsequently XBox (original) and went console for gaming, laptops for everything else. The DL server was just a happy inheritance.

[exxos]

Think my GPU is 1060 :) I updated from 560TI I think...both secondhand cards , Was power hungry like mad.. Didn't see any performance increases tho :( think a lot of the problems are single core games and AMD CPUs :(

[exxos]

My kind of cable management :D

My cables are managed by the sides of the PC case :twisted: my SSD drives are just chucked in the bottom of the case.. I learned a long time ago that doing stuff neatly just ends up taking longer to dismantle when it goes wrong :lol: :roll:

[rubber_jonnie]

My kind of cable management :D

My cables are managed by the sides of the PC case :twisted: my SSD drives are just chucked in the bottom of the case.. I learned a long time ago that doing stuff neatly just ends up taking longer to dismantle when it goes wrong :lol: :roll:

That's one reason I like using server hardware for desktop machines. They use backplanes and caddies for disks and are cable managed to heck by default, so no tedious mucking around with boring stuff like that.

Of course they can be noisy for using in an office unless you tweak the power/thermal/fan profiles. Mine only runs when I need it anyways, so the noise has never bothered me.