Pasayten's Methow Valley Bulletin Board

Alf, Alf, Alf,

Buying Chinese. Shame on you.

That is a nice looking case!

I am building very small computers that are not laptops.

There are plenty of low-cost single-board computers (some as inexpensive as $5) out there right now which are based on mass-produced chips for smartphones. While the smallest, skinniest, and cheapest aren't great for playing a 4K game they are awesome for a lot of applications.

As an example you could build an awesome PID sprinkler controller for about fifty bucks. And by "awesome" I mean technically superior in every way to one you could buy for twice (or even thrice) the price. That would include a humidity sensor, a soil moisture sensor, a solenoid to open the valve on a garden hose, and a nice weatherproof case.

https://opensprinkler.com makes about the best ones currently available to buy. But like I said if you are willing to scrounge for parts and bolt together some custom software (and components like the PID controller and a pocket web server to configure it all are freely available and well understood) you can make a far better one for a tiny amount of money.

Proudly building embedded Linux systems since 1993.

I upped to the i9-11900K... Prepar3d software uses an affinity mask to configure core use... It likes lots of cores on a fast cpu and a high end graphics card. Spendy build, but the flight simulation and scenery is amazing.

These days I'd recommend SSDs for everything but backups.

You can even run huge databases on SSDs (with configuration changes, sometimes really wild configuration changes).

Gotta go recommended min 8 core cpu for the new prapar3d software... Liking the i9-10900K 3.7 GHz 10-Core Processor...

I enjoy flight simulator (Lockheed Prepar3d) and flying terrain around the world...
The realism is incredible...

But my ol' I5-3570K system is aging and I am about ready to upgrade to experience all the newest features of Prepar3d...

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
PREPAR3D V5
Recommended
Microsoft Windows 10 1909
Octa Core @ 3.7 GHz + (e.g. Intel Core i7/i9)
16 GB DDR4/2666MHz +
M.2 or Solid State Drive (SSD) is strongly recommended - I will 500gb c:\ os and program - 1tb d:\ terrain data
8+ GB (e.g. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti)
DirectX 12 with feature level 12_0 or greater

I will use pcpartpicker to browse and come up with a suitable build...

First cut - price not important... lol
https://pcpartpicker.com/user/Pasayten/saved/4GNkJx

The recent NVIDIA RTX 3xxx cards are throttling certain features to make the cards less appealing for crypto mining and training AIs. I understand you can work around that to some extent as long as you don't mind possibly voiding the warranty on the cards and running unsupported software.

If you watch craigslist in Wenatchee every now and then you see someone who is giving up mining cryptocurrency and is selling their GPUs at a pretty steep discount, often at 25 cents on the dollar or less. Since crypto miners tend to undervolt their cards these cards are often in very good condition and all you'd likely want to do is replace the fans and then get to work. I got a pair of RTX 2070s (still one of the best AI training GPUs out there from a cost-performance standpoint) for about 300 bucks that way.

You can build a quite decent desktop computer system around a Raspberry Pi 4 for $200-$300. If you already have a keyboard, HDMI monitor, mouse, and an old USB hard drive you can build one for $50-$75.

If you want a very low-cost computer suitable for something like a motion sensing camera or a sprinkler controller you can look at the Raspberry Pi 2w, which retails for $15. After you add a case, power supply, and an SD card you might be about $40.

Proudly building embedded Linux systems since 1995.