Intel486dx33 wrote on 2025-01-06, 17:43:

I think computer companies are Hopimg for NEW PC sales to increase in 2025.

That's what Microsoft is hoping for. I did just buy an upgrade that I don't really need (I only needed more RAM, but there was a mix of Linux being broken in strange ways on my current computer and the tariff panic), but I don't want to give Microsoft any money ever again. I saw something earlier today where a bunch of lawyers were concerned about confidentiality now that Copilot is integrated into Office and got the usual home-user PR reply.

I'll be back to complain about the new parts when I get them. I'm not going to list the parts yet, but I will say that $90 for a power supply really hurt. I paid $40 for a Seasonic in 2018. The new one is more efficient and 650W instead of 520W (for a system that might never hit 100W), but that doesn't justify the price difference. Based on past experience, I got the "inferior" CPU, which means that I have a 50% chance of it actually being good.

I'm a couple of weeks late, but a sale on a X670E motherboard got me to pull the trigger early on an upgrade from my trusty X470/5800X/32 GB DDR4-3200 setup to the following build:

MSI X670E Gaming Plus motherboard
AMD Ryzen 9900X
Teamgroup T-FORCE Vulcan 32 GB DDR5-6000 (chose it because it was on the motherboard's QVL list and was affordable)

I plan on using it a lot for video transcoding as I rip some movies/TV series to digital files, along with some Monte Carlo simulation using GEANT4 for an academic project that will hopefully turn into a M.Sc project for what will be the first graduate student that I supervise in my career. Once I get some preliminary results with this personal rig, then I'll have the cash to build a workstation and/or rent some time on a compute cluster!

There's more than one person upgrading a reliable computer to Ryzen 9000 then. I only got a 9700X, but I also got 64GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD. The old i5-8500 is going to stick around because it has been so reliable. I'm still trying to justify replacing a working computer instead of running it until it's beyond upgrading. Maybe I should do something with my life besides working (which I won't do on this computer) and goofing around with video stuff.

I got the first part in today, which is just the case I'm putting the old motherboard/CPU in. It's a Silverstone PS13B. It looks cheap and cramped, but at least it has the right number of front USB ports (more than one USB 3 and zero USB 2.0) and no RGB lighting.

+1 for the HP Z- Line of business computers.
I also use a Z400 as a gaming Platform , as its my only Desktop system supporting NVME Boot and Win11 out of the box.
Most of my othe systems are HP business line as well.
Z-Book Studio (bought from refurbisher, unsupported win 11 and Linux Mint dual boot, noisy but rock stable)
Z230 SFF (unsupported win 11, daily driver with SSD for OS and 3TB HDD for storage)
Z800 (win 10 gaming system with 96 GB ECC boot SSD and SAS storage disks)
Elitebook 820G2 (my old company notebook I was oficially allowed to take home, memory and SSD upgraded, win 10)
Z400 (office PC, boot SSD and RAID1 storage, unsupported win 11)

some more Z200 SFF, Z220 SFF, Z600, Z220 and several XW6300 used previously and stored for other tasks now.
Never had any issues with any of these systems apart from a dried up cap in the Z200 SFF power supply and a blown PS of a spare Z600 still under investigation.
unluckily I only have spare Z800 power supplies in stock.

I got with some questionable Mainboard sbundle this thing:

I expected that is some telco PC on board or similar about useless thing to salvage some heatsinks, but i searched and found out that is actually advertised for gaming:
Advantech DPX-S410
I found datasheet, well more like product overview:

It has some varint Intel iGPU for sure + S3 Chrome or Nvidia or ATI and CPU is removable x86 mobile Core 2 / Celeron, SO-Dimm DDR2, 3x Sata, 2x Compact flash slot, even Soundcard and 2x PS/2.

I never was in server stuff, i wonder if i can use it standalone and what it was actually used? Is there some chance to find out some manual, where would be details how to connect some headers etc? Can someone post some picture how it looked in server? I also wonder if i can get some riser to be able to use some additional PCI / ISA slots with it.

Good buy on Advantech, did responded to my requests last year for one Pentium 430FX SBC I was looking for firmware and got it.

I recently purchased a newer but used computer, A real HP workstation! Z4 G4 to be exact. All up ready to use and is windows 11 supported. This will hold up for years for parents' computer. Believe it or not, this is to replace ancient 2011 computer was on XP, then 7 then 10.

Old computer contains: Asus Haswell cpu H41-M motherboard that mom picked up by mistake originally long ago. Story was is I specified an ATX motherboard with 4 memory slots on purchase list that mom took the list with her, by then, and was not in stock so a idiot clerk gave her a cut down microatx board instead of calling me or put on hold and head home and get me. Was cussing about this ever since, had issues with fans especially one of fan socket doesn't control PWM at all to keep noise level be quiet, and only 2 slots for memory originally 2GB then eventually 16GB.

Cheers,