And then I brought home a mini gaming rig

When you work in the IT field it’s inevitable to come across that "one guy" who lives on the bleeding edge of technology and buy all manner of gizmos just to toy with them for a short time before tossing them aside for the next "shiny" object. I work with such a guy. He likes the thrill of the hunt. The excitement of building or using something. Long term relationships do not apply. This explains how I have a new gaming rig. While it may not be the most powerful thing in the gaming realm, it’s actually pretty decent and is working like a charm.

The heart is an AMD Phenom X4 965 Black Edition. It rides on a lower end, but decent Gigabyte GA-78LMT motherboard that sports plenty of USB ports and SATA ports. It also allows for 32GB of Ram and can run two video cards in SLI. It also has a Cooler Master 500 watt power supply. For the video card he went with the EVGA GeForce GTX 660 with 2GB of GDDR5 ram. Some corners were cut with the hard drives, only a 1TB main drive and he got it with 4GB of ram. Not sure what the hell he was thinking there.

Since I have the 8-core machine I didn’t need to step down back to another 4-core. But he’s been trying to get rid of it for the past couple of months and the story of it wasting away in the corner collecting dust was more than I could bear.

I got the rig for around the cost of the video card and proceeded to beef it up with a full 32GB of ram. I won’t mess with the drives since it will only handle games. I added some simple Logitech speakers and added a 27 inch Samsung display. The video card pushes 1920×1280 in Call of Juarez without a problem. The display is the same one I got for my main machine. In fact, it was the last one on the shelf. And the price went up right after I got that last one.

While the motherboard may not raise eyebrows it has everything it needs and will support the same 8-core FX-8350 processor that my main machine has. And since news has come out of the new AMD chipset and the possible end of the line for the FX series and they jump to the nextgen, I might be able to double the processing power of this machine for well under $200. It’s right at the threshold now, so when it tips I’m snatching one up. This machine should have several years of longevity in it. Hell, I might even get another GTX 660 just to have the SLI.

So, who’s the guy in your office always buying machines and then turning around to sell them for dirt cheap prices? Get any good deals?