If everything works it's a real bargain. Also, some people would've listed that as already retro.

Ryzen owners, make pls the input in DOSBox benchmark
DOSBox 0.74 CPU Benchmark

It's interesting about the improvements AMD could to do, as FX behaved badly.

New half TB SSD, I'm throwing last spinning HDD from my desktop. It's basically for games, so I don't care about quality too much, and I don't care about TLC cells too because of these reasons. My other drive is good old Intel SSD with MLC cells, and I will hold on to this drive until it dies (which hopefully will not happen for some time).

Found a Logitech G500s for $4 in a thrift store. Works perfectly, looks barely used.

Wasn't even looking for this:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07KLZYKHW/ref=cm_s … a_5TQ-BbD1M3NMC

775 isn't retro. I'm just curious if it even shows up. Hell the damn dimm is worth the $5 risk.

hmm, strange!

Also scored a Dell 2405WFP for under $45 shipped so that's pretty nice.

Cyber Monday 2018 purchases:

Seagate FireCuda 1TB SSHD
IQ Shield for my Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge that desperately needs a screen protector <-- this counts, right?

Black Friday 2018 purchase:
Western Digital 4TB External HDD for my Xbox One S since it's very low on storage (4K HDR games take more storage than Full HD games)

Got a pair of RGB strips for my desktop... what have I done?!

oeuvre wrote:

Got a pair of RGB strips for my desktop... what have I done?!

That is only the start, before you know it, you'll be adding swirling RGB fans

it is a slippery slope... perhaps the gateway to a downward spiral

Bought a Motorola G6 Play. The nicest smart phone if owned since my old Sprint LG G3. Oreo, a nice screen and unlimited everything is rather nice.

Haven't gotten a boxed graphics card in a while! New beauty:

This is an upgrade for the HD4670 in my workstation. It's not a particularly fast or powerful card (it's R7 250 or ~HD7750-equivalent), but it ticks all the boxes I wanted. Namely:

- 2GB
- Cape Verde/GCN1.0
- Supports Vulkan
- lots of outputs
- Single-slot, no PCIe power connector needed
...and most importantly, it's supported by the new AMDGPU & AMDGPU-Pro drivers under Linux. That's a big deal.

So it's mostly a feature upgrade rather than a speed upgrade. That said, it should be a fair bit faster too, especially in Steam/Proton gaming and GPU-processing stuff like Blender.

Can I haz quad monitors? YES I CAN. Unfortunately I have several more regular-DisplayPort dongles kicking around than mini-DisplayPort, but I'll manage.

It doesn't fit in my PCI slot though, unlike my other FirePros. Where's my hacksaw...

A Dell Optiplex 9010 i5 3570, 8GB RAM, 180GB Intel SSD + 640GB 7200RPM HD, GTX745 4GB

Fractal Design Focus G White/Black case and a Seasonic Focus+ 650W modular power supply. Gets me out of having a too large case (Fractal Design Define R5) and a not good enough power supply hole.

AND... I wasn't expecting to score anything this modern anytime soon, but I lucked out on this Optiplex 7010 for all of thirty bucks. It's completely stripped out (it didn't even come with any RAM), but it has an i7 3770 which is far and away the most powerful CPU I've ever owned, and is in pretty good shape all around. Even came with a valid Win7 Pro sticker.

I might end up re-building the workstation (see above, currently an LGA771 Xeon) with this setup, or this CPU in my other 115x board, although neither of them have as many PCI slots as I want. Or I'll use this for my video capture PC and replace the HP Athlon 64x2 box. Or I'll replace my Win7 gaming machine (which is a Core 2 Quad.) Or I'll just combine all three into one and dual-boot. Options!

^^ nicely, unlike the virtually identical Optiplex 3020 under my desk at work, this one uses a standard 20+4 ATX PSU. Seems Dell reverted to the Bad Proprietary Days of Old between the 3010 & 3020. I don't even think one of these is older than the other. Y u do this?!

Stuck in my only stick of DDR3 and it fired right up:

BTW this thing is dead silent when running. Pretty pleased!

Then on the way home I stopped in a 2nd hand shop and scored a Ti4200 for $5 and a badly-needed desktop microphone stand that I've been after for ages for another $5. Today's been a good day.

Purchased a Sound Blaster X-Fi Surround 5.1 Pro external USB on Amazon last Friday during the Cyber Week sales and received it today. Installed the device on my desktop, installed the software and drivers, and it works great. Planning on getting a better motherboard for my system since my current one has a USB port shorting issue.

xjas wrote:

AND... I wasn't expecting to score anything this modern anytime soon, but I lucked out on this Optiplex 7010 for all of thirty b […]
Show full quote

AND... I wasn't expecting to score anything this modern anytime soon, but I lucked out on this Optiplex 7010 for all of thirty bucks. It's completely stripped out (it didn't even come with any RAM), but it has an i7 3770 which is far and away the most powerful CPU I've ever owned, and is in pretty good shape all around. Even came with a valid Win7 Pro sticker.

I might end up re-building the workstation (see above, currently an LGA771 Xeon) with this setup, or this CPU in my other 115x board, although neither of them have as many PCI slots as I want. Or I'll use this for my video capture PC and replace the HP Athlon 64x2 box. Or I'll replace my Win7 gaming machine (which is a Core 2 Quad.) Or I'll just combine all three into one and dual-boot. Options!

CameraZOOM-20181206182402146.jpg

CameraZOOM-20181206182515566.jpg

CameraZOOM-20181206182551402.jpg

CameraZOOM-20181206182632907.jpg

^^ nicely, unlike the virtually identical Optiplex 3020 under my desk at work, this one uses a standard 20+4 ATX PSU. Seems Dell reverted to the Bad Proprietary Days of Old between the 3010 & 3020. I don't even think one of these is older than the other. Y u do this?!

Stuck in my only stick of DDR3 and it fired right up:

CameraZOOM-20181206183333921.jpg

BTW this thing is dead silent when running. Pretty pleased!

Then on the way home I stopped in a 2nd hand shop and scored a Ti4200 for $5 and a badly-needed desktop microphone stand that I've been after for ages for another $5. Today's been a good day.

Nice! Bump up the RAM to 8 or 16GB, toss in an SSD + HD, replace the PSU + add in a better GPU if you wish, and nab a couple of HD caddy's and it'll be good for a long time. I really like my 9010 actually, pretty quiet and versatile machine.

Bought a new ASUS M5A97 R2.0 on eBay (15% off + an additional 10% with the coupon code) for my main PC since the board has a USB issue (randomly shuts off/disconnects for no reason and the board is installed properly in the case with none of the solder joints touching the case itself).

***NOTE:*** The link I provided is a closed one since I bought it. However, if I need to remove the link, please let me know. Thank you.

EDIT: Sorry for lying, I was having a bad day yesterday. 🤐

Thanks guys! To top it off, check out what I picked up for a whopping $20 on the way home today:

Eight gigs of beautiful red DDR3!

I've decided to leave the workstation as-is (I need some of its "legacy" features, like IDE for my Zip & LS120 drives), although I'll be opening it up to install the FirePro & some faster RAM this weekend. The Optiplex will replace my underpowered video capture PC (Athlon 64x2 / 4GB / 8500GT, have a Phenom II but haven't installed it yet) and my Win7 gaming rig (Q9300 / 7GB / GTX750Ti.) Should be a comfortable upgrade from both systems. I'm now a whopping fifty bucks into this thing and hopefully will be able to sell off the other two to make some extra cash for b̶u̶y̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶j̶u̶n̶k̶ ̶o̶f̶f̶ ̶c̶l̶. fiscally-sensible uses.

It'll get the 750Ti from the gamer, and the Lightscribe drive & one of the DataPath VisionRGB-Pros from the video rig, so DNA from both will live on in my setup (I wish the Optiplex had a second old-PCI slot, but oh well.)

^^ Call me vain, but this stuff actually looks gorgeous in there. Nicely, this thing has four slots, so I can just add another 2x8 for 24GB when I'm feeling flush.

Unfortunately there are no memory tweaking options whatsoever in the overly-businessy firmware (seriously, they made it look like Windows Vista with the "Boringest" skin applied), so I'm not sure how I'm gonna optimize for this. It's running at 1600MHz (PC3-12800 speed) right now but obviously I have a ton of room left.

Here's the new hotness running Haiku for no real reason (had the LiveCD handy.) Look at those threads:

Nothing you can do off this CD comes even close to stressing this system. Don't get me wrong, a Q6600 or 771 Xeon is still perfectly capable in today's world, but the extra grunt of this thing is a pretty sweet luxury. 😀