To be clear, most of the context for mistakes here this time would be ‘mostly harmless bad choices’.
I’m trying to recall what’s transpired since the m710q arrived in its ‘for parts’ status and turned out to be just fine (still a big win). I watched another major sale on those things go by and would have loved to have more but I barely know what I’m doing with it and the m720q I’ve got as is so… no more.
I was wasting my money elsewhere anyway.
The mini-itx build is getting bigger. The price of the briefly dangerous NZXT H1 kept dropping for the holiday season and I couldn’t resist it at $200 dollars but I managed to, until it hit $150… then I was in for one. I am assuming that the fire hazard will have been worked out by now, else, it will be a call to support for a new PCIe riser. And the Inwin super tiny system will move over to the H1, pretty much just for poops and giggles since that thing was just sitting there anyway.
Separate from the world of mini-itx and the newly acquired H1, I was quite hung up on the new work workstation which is a great system based on 12th gen Intel – brand new stuff at the time of writing and in fact four days old at the time we built it. It’s an i7-12700k, liquid cooled by an All-In-One loop, on a Gigabyte Z690 Aorus Elite AX (DDR4) with DDR4-4000 MHz memory. It’s amazing, it’s phenomenally fast (it installed Win 10 in 60 seconds anyway), and the most tantalizing feature to me was actually that there are 4 (FOUR) PCIe 4.0 (not 3.0, but 3.0 compatible too) m.2 slots, even accommodating 22110 length devices. And while I held off in the same style of the H1 (even though I bought the H1 afterward, that’s not the point) the prices for some reason kept dropping on the brand new Intel CPUs, seemingly even beyond a holiday season push. The 12700k, the arguable sweet spot of the three available CPUs currently, dropped twice in price to a point I decided I couldn’t refuse, plus the suddenly elusive specific Gigabyte board magically appeared as a complete open-box return, so discounted quite a bit as well. And the holidays have dropped PCIe 4.0 m.2 SSD prices through the floor too, lower than $100/TB.
So. I own a 12th generation Intel system. Haven’t moved over to it yet. But I will. I sorta have to. I can’t waste that kind of investment.
Thought about loading my favorite hypervisor on it and doing one or two Gaming PCs off of it in a single box but it isn’t compatible.
Yet, anyway.
I don’t think I have a big enough power supply on hand for that kind of nonsense…
Additionally, more bad decisions came in the form of a whole prebuilt with what appears to be a valuable Radeon RX 5500 (non XT) paired with, somewhat strangely, a Ryzen 5 5600G. Being that the system itself comes very lowly rated, plus it can run on its own without the discrete GPU, and the street value of the RX 5500 is most of the cost of the entire computer, I’d intended to flip it – yes, become one of ‘those’ people… except I didn’t do that either because other than limited bios options and memory compatibility (which is surmountable, carefully) it’s actually a super nice little computer capable of gaming. I learned how to isolate it on the network with the help of the server discord and intend to ‘loan’ it out to someone for gaming via Parsec since they don’t have a gaming PC. I was gonna flip it, but it’s just… actually really nice.
Other than that, got an Oculus Quest 2. Nice piece of technology considering what it can do in spite of being a stand-alone headset. Doesn’t exactly knock my socks off but the audio is actually really impressive and the battery life is NOT and I spent enough time in a surprisingly fun game (Demeo) that I exacerbated my back problems so hey! Fun was had.
Just. Ah. Trying to find some form of joy, or at least interest, though a bit of the old ‘retail therapy’ I guess. Is it working?
Additionally I found out at some point that my fancy cast-off enterprise grade network switch was the model without Power Over Ethernet… so… I HAD to remedy that…
Really though, the actual goal is to re-organize. Things aren’t too bad but they could be better. Wallet’s a little light… mistakes were made.
The NZXT H1 is a somewhat unique mini-itx enclosure with a vertical orientation (ports on the bottom) and comes with meshed panels on two sides, glass on the other two for looks, and pre-installed with a 650 watt SFX PSU plus a 140mm AIO liquid cooler, making the low sale price of $150 much more appealing. It is slated to get my only itx build, based around the 5700G, although it can accommodate a full GPU like my spare GTX 1060… though it is spare because the fan isn’t doing so great.
The HP TG01-2003W is a reduced size mATX based mini-tower on the Ryzen 5 5600G (6c/12t) with integrated Vega 7 graphics. It came with 8 GB DDR4-3200 MHz RAM (1 stick) which I replaced with 2×8 GB DDR4-3200. I left it’s 250 GB m.2 nvme drive as is since it’s enough at the moment. It’s not great but it’s just a neat little package (unfortunately all parts proprietary including PSU) but it’s fine as it is, has that RX 5500 4 GB, and a really really bright down firing green light on the front…
The Intel i7-12700k has been paired with a Gigabyte Z690 Aorus Elite AX (DDR4) and I added 16 GB DDR4-3200. It’s cooled by my first personally owned AIO, a Lian Li Galahad 240mm unit, and is placed into a Fractal Design Focus G case, although it isn’t the best orientation for the AIO. At the moment, it has my test Windows 11 install on the tiny 120 GB m.2 2230 device, a small bit of irony.
And I’ll eventually be moving from my Aruba S2500-24T (no POE) to an Aruba S2500-48P (with POE) with its massive number of ports simply because it was cheaper than the -24P. I think I’ll move the quieter fans over from the 24T too, since I usually have… a lot of time on my hands…