I've been talking about it for years, but in early to mid January, I finally got a Windows.

It's nothing much, but it was a deal I was excited to get.

• AMD Ryzen 2400G
  
• 1050 Ti 4GB
  
• 8GB RAM
  
• 1TB HDD
  
• 24" Curved Samsung Monitor
  
• Blackweb Keyboard + Mouse
  
• Speakers

For just $300. The CPU and GPU are worth that alone, and the monitor is another ~$150. I plan to sell the monitor since I don't need it, which will pay for the 1TB WD Blue NVME SSD I recently bought. I bought it because I've been wanting to play the Portal series again and also because I play Golf With Your Friends a bit and the game play poorly on my Mac, to no surprise. I've of course bought a few other games and I've been playing a lot of Forewarned and Uno.

Looking forward to playing with some of y'all at some point! I'm comicIDIOT on Steam.

Congratulations! That's really an incredible deal, and should be able to handle those games without a problem. This would be neat to see in your desk setup as well.

What version of Windows is this? If you're on 10, probably stick with it, 11 isn't very good in comparison.

That's a solid setup! Especially for the GPU crises and chip shortage we're in. I hope you're not selling your only monitor

I, too, am quite impressed that you managed all of that for $300. Good call on making it a gaming machine given your previous Mac usership. Does this help your Minecrafting at all, or do you find that it performs similarly to on your Mac? And are you planning to stick with your Mac for your photography/editing work?

It'll help because of the mouse, as the Magic Mouse is a touch enabled mouse, any perceived directional flick of a finger will scroll through my inventory in MC (happens a lot when moving the mouse), macOS has so great thresholds so I don't scroll the webpage or switch between virtual desktops accidentally, but it seems Minecraft has no threshold when it comes to the touch inputs.

I haven't minecrafted from the Windows yet but I anticipate it'll be leagues better. I plan to install some shaders and stuff once I get around to it. On a tangent, the guy I bought it from had the monitor plugged into the motherboard instead of the GPU.

I'll still do Video & Photo on the Mac for now, but I'm super stoked because now I can run the editing software for my Lytro camera again so I'm starting to use that camera more as well.



Yeah! I feel kinda like he got ripped off on such a deal, but I also believe someone else would have bought this unit and resold the guts for profit. I'm selling the monitor the PC came with for $60 today, so brings my total cost down to $240.

There's some upgrades to be had, it's super slow when starting up and when I first load into a game there's some massive loading times. But once the game has loaded all the resources into RAM it's a lot faster.

I'm hoping the NVME drive helps and I plan to upgrade RAM to 16GB at least. It's tempting to go to 64 but there's only two RAM channels so I'd need 2x32GB instead of 4x16GB. For a GPU upgrade, I'll need to get a bigger case since all the ones I'm looking at are too long. I basically have a PC I need to replace everything in to upgrade because the Motherboard is maxed out with what it can hold.

But I'm thinking if I can get a bigger case and move everything over, I may be able to upgrade slowly. Just the motherboard is what's killing me, everyone is saying it's proprietary so I need to replace it with a non-HP brand to support a new PSU & GPU. The CPU is a standard socket, as well as the RAM and NVME slot, so I should be OK-ish.

I have two 4K Dell Monitors that I use. I have the Windows plugged into one via HDMI and the Mac plugged into both through DisplayPort. I plan to get a KVM switch at some point so I can have both PC's plugged in to both monitors without having to physically switch the inputs on both monitors.



When I get the NVME SSD, I will likely need to buy a Windows license or maybe I'll just clone the HDD to the SSD. But if I buy Windows I was thinking of going with W11. I will certainly post a desk photo soon! I had forgotten about that thread!