I WOULD build a new PC, I WOULD install some cool shit, BUT I don’t want to. A) My money is being used already, and B) I have computers that will do the job. I decided to look at this realistically.
What do I do with a desktop?
I game, stream, work on images / drives, work on packages, host game servers and services, write shit either in a terminal or in a notepad-esque app or abiword, once in a blue moon open libreoffice, and lounge on youtube.
VS What do I do on a laptop
Because my laptop is what it is, a Lenovo X230T (3320M, 16GB Hynix 2RX8, Dock, 128GB msata, plan to run 2 HDD’s in raid but need to find matching ones) with a dock and upgraded hardware, soon to add an expresscard gpu dock and either a 250X, 6770, or GT730, its really really capable and rather fast.
Mostly do my coding stuff, document management, photo management / editing, video editing (soon to add small G5 farm via Olive), basically all my personal shit is on here. I even draw in blender.
So What Am I Doing Right Now?
Right now I want to work on my youtube channel. I’m not going to be doing anything amazing, but I will be playing tarkov, Fable TLC, and maybe hacking computers and doing music stuff. Since my editing is basically going to be done MAAS style, and all my other shit can kinda be done on other systems, my mac really only has to worry about Tarkov, OBS, and not exploding.
What can I do to make the machine better?
What can I do to make this a better machine? ATM I’m thinking about it’s power supply. I have, just laying here, a 750 G+. I would love for it to be used in there, esp knowing that its lije a 800W supply that is in there that may or may not be silver rated.
I’m looking at getting an NVMe drive mount when I have 7 bucks spare, but could I get a thunderbolt card and have it work? I understand I don’t need it, but hotplug multi-adapter sounds nice, especially for a third ethernet jack lol.
Speaking of, I don’t have a gigabit switch. Just a 10/100. So, I have both ports plugged in. Can I tie them together? Get a 25mbps DL to steam rather than 13?
As well, I have 64GB of DDR2 ram. FBDIMM’s at least, but still DDR2. It seems to run at 800MHz, half speed of the FSB funnily enough. ECC so far has actually saved my butt a few times I think as stream performance is rather good on this machine. I’m not great at pipeline math, but given each set of 2 cores has an FSB attached to it that runs at 1.6GHz, and that the ram itself is running at 800mhz (although I want to know if theres 1066 and if that would work), even with a bit of buffer, that is still… Well… I’m not sure it matches my laptop but its pretty close.
Would a ram disk be a good use of ram? Would 1066mhz ram be an option? Would it work? Is there a way to overclock the ram thats in here? Are there other options I’m unaware of?
I guess lastly, I have a wifi card slot with no wifi card in it. What should I put in there? Bus expander? Put a GPU or something on there? Maybe a titan ridge card or something and have a hole in the front?
I’m looking to just make the machine better with as little money as possible. I need to keep dumping cash into gas for my van until its effectively full.