I guess it's safe to say I've been on a little trading journey as of late.
Not crypto trading, not stock trading, I'm not good at that stuff... But electronics trading!
Some of you might remember that a while back I managed to get a really good laptop, which at retail costs $400 for less than $170. And that was by selling a computer that I traded for another laptop, that I had traded for a GTX 1050Ti I got in 2018 for no more than $80!
On this new chapter of this adventure, I traded that $500 laptop... which cost me $170, for a computer that costs about $500.
Person I traded with said they really needed a laptop that was capable of gaming, and as the benchmarks I posted here, it's pretty clear that thing was fairly capable.
So I was offered this computer.
Let me first go over the exterior of this thing, because I did find it quite sexy.
It's a Micro-ATX case with this black and red contrast to it which looks really "gamey", but at the same time has this great subtle look. Doesn't draw much attention, and the blue and red LEDs on the power and reset button don't bother me much at all, because I absolutely hate lights (seriously, I unplugged all of the RGB on my previous rig).
The front panel has 2 USB 2.0 ports, mic and headphone jacks, and a USB 3.0 port, and this is my first case with a USB 3.0 port on the front, that's gonna be sooooo damn helpful, you've got no clue.
For the side, it's a simple acryllic side panel, really dark, but still lets you see the components inside. Very nonchalant, somewhat stealthy and still elegant. Pretty much my cup of tea.
It's also nice that I can fit this case on top of my desk, my previous rig was huge and bulky, quite honestly... I hated it. Hard to carry to lan parties and took up too much space. At least the RX 580 in there kept my feet warm.
Let's pop open that side panel, shall we?
Modest. Is how I describe this.
It's got an i5-8400, which is a fairly decent CPU, but not a huge improvement over the one I had on my laptop.
I've got a pretty limiting factor towards RAM, as it is a single stick of DDR4 8GBs, of a very generic brand without even a heatsink, running at 2400mhz.
It's okay, soon enough I'll have two sticks to get dual channel in this thing, and there's one thing that worries me not about this: my RX 6400 is coming up in the mail.
Not the most ravely reviewed GPU but it's got enough horsepower to make a man happy, and I'll have the iGPU taking care of decoding so it's absolutely fine.
Of course, dual channel RAM always makes things better, but with a GPU that difference is less pronounced.
For storage I have a 500GB Western Digital SSD, which hasn't let me down one bit. It's SATA but I honestly don't mind, it's fast enough for my and I'm poor lol
And alongside that I've got a 320GB 5200RPM hard drive I found in a random drawer. It works! That's what matters. 1TB is coming soon enough so I'm fine.
This motherboard is a little bit old, being a MSI Pro whatever, but I really like the UEFI look of this thing. Really nice, pretty much my cup of tea.
This PC feels like it has some upgrade potential and I'll definitely be doing some things with it come the right time.
Tomorrow my RX 6400 arrives and I might just do and unboxing and review of it... Who knows. 👀
Thanks for reading!
All images are mine, which explains the poor quality
