Building a gaming rig for my dad...

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Building a gaming rig for my dad...

I've used quite a few ADATA SSD's, they've been very solid & reliable for being 'lower-end' SSD's.

Sounds like they are a ton better than the PNY CS900s!

[Topcat]

Re: Building a gaming rig for my dad...

You didn't get hurt too bad considering that GPU. I've used quite a few ADATA SSD's, they've been very solid & reliable for being 'lower-end' SSD's.

Dont toss that Xeon & bad board, I wouldn't mind tinkering with it if you have up on it. That no-name RAM....meh...

[ratdude747]

Have a good story for y'all.

My dad has been wanting me to build him a gaming rig... nothing too crazy, just something that can run Sufferfest and Zwift (both are electronic bike trainer games) well while streaming (he's on a few teams... at age 64 no less!). A back burner project due to all the other stuff I have going on.

Anyway, a coworker approached me with their teenage son's dead gaming rig... no POST, wanted me to troubleshoot it. Took it on (out of morbid curiousity more than anything)... oh boy, what a POS. This thing is clearly a bargain basement build... cheapass bling bling gamer case with a junk PSU (jumper wire special!), noname motherboard (later find out it's a circa 2010 "x79" aliexpress wonder), 16GB of noname ("TT" chips) DDR3, a DVD-ROM of all things... but oddly enough name brand GPU (EVGA Geforce 1060) and a 480GB adata SU630 SSD. As I later found out, has a Xeon E5-2670 of all things. She's dead as a doornail, not even spinning fans. Quickly ruled out a bad case switch, and plugging in one of my spare PSUs (an Antec Earthwatts 650W) didn't help.

The coworker wasn't wanting to fix it... as they got ripped off something fierce, having bought it for $800 on Amazon a year ago... They'd rather get a PS5 as all their son was doing on it was Fortnite and casual crap. At least they won't get ripped off as bad!!!

I was able to work out a deal for the remains... $200. Not a slam dunk cheap/free score, but from what I can tell (ebay BIN prices) the GPU alone is worth that (I did test it first, and I confirmed it is legit!), the SSD being icing on the cake. The rest... the board, being fried (and noname!) is wall art, the case and PSU scrap metal (may reuse the case though???), and the rest IDK. Which means for my dad's build, means I need to figure out the rest.

(I'll get pics of the remains later; I ain't rebuilding it and didn't take too many pics due to this not being thread-worthy at first)

Looking for some suggestions... looking to go for something that will be reasonably future proof, but not needing somthing crushing either. Stability is a good thing, as while my dad used to be pretty good with computer stuff (he's who got me into this originally, and is right now back in community college learning web design), he's lost his knowledge ever since he stopped using win2K . Personally, I was thinking uATX (for space reasons) but otherwise, not sure where to start (AMD vs. Intel, what platform to use, etc.). While I do have Xeon... it's a sandy bridge Xeon, not exactly modern (and as cheap as these are on eBay, it's not really worth much assuming it's still good).