Ohhh boy.

An older friend of mine brought me a couple of computers he's had laying around for a while. One is from 2007, and one is from 2013. To put it mildly, these things were overkill at the time.

When he opened the trunk of his SUV I couldn't believe how MASSIVE these things were.

To give some perspective without giving it all away: The one from 2007 is an OEM system with its original 1000 Watt power supply, and it has two video cards in SLI. The one from 2013 is a custom prebuilt that was built with... get this... 64GB of RAM, two 512GB SSDs, a Bluray Burner and a Corsair AX1200i 1200W 80 Plus Platinum (!) PSU... yes, built that way in 2013. It also had two GPUs in SLI, though he said it never quite worked right with both, so one had been taken out and put in storage somewhere for a while (he will get it to me when he finds it).

To temper expectations: Neither one has top of the line GPUs for the time, sadly, but they are both really unique and (as far as I can tell) somewhat rare systems these days.

They are quite dusty from many years of use, so I want to get them cleaned up before doing their photo shoots. I will post pictures and more detailed specs later.

Also, these are two of the largest computers I own. The 2013 one is by far the largest tower I've ever seen in person, and I own some full towers from the early 90s and had an early 2000s Gateway server\workstation chassis for a while as well. This is bigger than all of them.

Stay tuned. 😮

Ozzuneoj wrote on Today, 02:26:

Ohhh boy. […]
Show full quote

Ohhh boy.

An older friend of mine brought me a couple of computers he's had laying around for a while. One is from 2007, and one is from 2013. To put it mildly, these things were overkill at the time.

When he opened the trunk of his SUV I couldn't believe how MASSIVE these things were.

To give some perspective without giving it all away: The one from 2007 is an OEM system with its original 1000 Watt power supply, and it has two video cards in SLI. The one from 2013 is a custom prebuilt that was built with... get this... 64GB of RAM, two 512GB SSDs, a Bluray Burner and a Corsair AX1200i 1200W 80 Plus Platinum (!) PSU... yes, built that way in 2013. It also had two GPUs in SLI, though he said it never quite worked right with both, so one had been taken out and put in storage somewhere for a while (he will get it to me when he finds it).

To temper expectations: Neither one has top of the line GPUs for the time, sadly, but they are both really unique and (as far as I can tell) somewhat rare systems these days.

They are quite dusty from many years of use, so I want to get them cleaned up before doing their photo shoots. I will post pictures and more detailed specs later.

Also, these are two of the largest computers I own. The 2013 one is by far the largest tower I've ever seen in person, and I own some full towers from the early 90s and had an early 2000s Gateway server\workstation chassis for a while as well. This is bigger than all of them.

Stay tuned. 😮

A lot of people tend to overspend on cpu and ram and the video boards suffer. I overspend on everything.

Shagittarius wrote on Today, 02:52:

Ozzuneoj wrote on Today, 02:26:

Ohhh boy. […]
Show full quote

Ohhh boy.

An older friend of mine brought me a couple of computers he's had laying around for a while. One is from 2007, and one is from 2013. To put it mildly, these things were overkill at the time.

When he opened the trunk of his SUV I couldn't believe how MASSIVE these things were.

To give some perspective without giving it all away: The one from 2007 is an OEM system with its original 1000 Watt power supply, and it has two video cards in SLI. The one from 2013 is a custom prebuilt that was built with... get this... 64GB of RAM, two 512GB SSDs, a Bluray Burner and a Corsair AX1200i 1200W 80 Plus Platinum (!) PSU... yes, built that way in 2013. It also had two GPUs in SLI, though he said it never quite worked right with both, so one had been taken out and put in storage somewhere for a while (he will get it to me when he finds it).

To temper expectations: Neither one has top of the line GPUs for the time, sadly, but they are both really unique and (as far as I can tell) somewhat rare systems these days.

They are quite dusty from many years of use, so I want to get them cleaned up before doing their photo shoots. I will post pictures and more detailed specs later.

Also, these are two of the largest computers I own. The 2013 one is by far the largest tower I've ever seen in person, and I own some full towers from the early 90s and had an early 2000s Gateway server\workstation chassis for a while as well. This is bigger than all of them.

Stay tuned. 😮

A lot of people tend to overspend on cpu and ram and the video boards suffer. I overspend on everything.

Yeah... I was really hoping for a pair of 8800 Ultras and a pair of 780 Tis in these machines, but that must have been where the budget started to limit things. Also, to be fair, he said he bought the 2007 system at an estate-sale auction in ~2008 and got it for like half it's MSRP, which was probably a good deal at the time (if you like crazy high end proprietary OEM systems).

Personally, I always went for the absolute best bang for the buck. The only time I would ever overspend on something is if it was a relatively small price difference between an entry-level and a high-end product. For example, I will spend $130 on a 2TB NVMe drive to get a higher end model with DRAM and a better controller, versus $90-$100 for one without even if the general consensus is that the difference is unnoticeable in 99% of situations. I may forget about the $40 relatively quickly, but if some situations arises where the storage speed is a limiting factor, I cannot fix that, and I keep my drives forever. 😀

Same goes for RAM. I had 16GB of some fairly basic 3000Mhz RAM in my AM4 system when I built it in 2019, but a year or two ago I had an opportunity to get 64GB of faster 3600Mhz RAM for an excellent price, so I bought it just to be the "last RAM that this system will ever need", no matter what I use it for. Can't imagine paying for that much 12 years ago though. Whew!

I don't think it's really possible to overspend on GPUs unless you don't play recent games, have a 60Hz 1080P monitor, or you are literally buying things beyond your means. Overspending on high core count CPUs is definitely a thing though. I would gain almost nothing from a 5950X in my rig vs a 5800X3D.