The Potato of Theseus

In the world of electronics, especially PCs, it is fashionable to call an outdated piece of equipment a "potato". My PC absolutely qualifies, but what makes it interesting is that you can trace its descent from a potato several generations older. This is a neat testament to what's possible to do cheaply with AMD stuff since they keep announcing new processors on old sockets. Here's what it's in and what's in it now:

Case: Thermaltake Core V21 - $69.99 new
Motherboard: ASRock B450M Pro4 - $239.95 used with CPU and 1 memory kit, and little SSD
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 1600 (AF) with stock "Wraith" cooler - was bundled with motherboard and RAM
RAM: Micron MTA16ATF1G64AZ-2G1B1 (2 kits, 32GB total - 1st kit bundled, 2nd kit was $25.00 used)
GPU: GeForce RTX 4060 Ti WINDFORCE OC 16G - $449.99 new
Power Supply: EVGA 600W Gold - About $60 new
Storage: INTEL SSDSC2BW240A4, Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB, TOSHIBA THNSNJ512GDNU ($24.95), HGST HUH728080ALE604 ($75.03 used), SK Hynix HFM256GDHTNI (was part of motherboard bundle), Seagate Backup+ Hub 8TB

At a casual glance this is revealed to be a not-very-powerful, middle of the road PC, albeit with kind of a lot of storage devices. This is because I'm using mirrored ZFS for both OS and data, and there is a SLOG for the HDDs which is also mirrored. ZFS has data checksums, so this approach gives very good assurance that any errors in data storage will be detected and corrected. The HGST disk is 8TB internal, while the Seagate disk mirrors it externally and can be grabbed and taken places.

The last upgrade I made was to replace the power supply and case exhaust fans with 1300 RPM Noctua NF Redux units, there's a 120mm in the power supply and a 140 in the case. The case also has a 200mm thermaltake intake fan which is very low RPM, I'll keep it around until I have a problem with it and then replace it with Noctua as well. The last upgrade I made that affected the list was a simultaneous upgrade of the GPU and the case. Formerly I had a PNY XLR8 GTX 1070 Gaming OC Best Buy Exclusive ($125 used), which gave great value for money.

The old case was a NZXT Source 220, which was actually fairly nice except that the power button just pushed in one day and was always sloppy thereafter. I chose the Core V21 to replace it because I had found myself with a Micro ATX board and this made it feasible to have a horizontal motherboard orientation without a huge machine. The new case is actually considerably bigger than it really has to be, but this didn't stop me from buying it since a sleeker case would have cost around twice as much. It is also (somewhat unusually) made of steel rather than Aluminum. I'm not sure whether this was done to make the magnetic dust filters work, or the magnetic dust filters were done to justify using steel and making the case heavier, but the end result is still fairly attractive and not too enormous - and it does also support full length GPUs.

Going further back in time, before it was Ryzen-based, the system in the prior case used to be based around a Gigabyte GA-990FX-Gaming (rev. 1.0) ($131.98) motherboard, which was a pretty neat full ATX board with lots of room for multiple GPUs, and a replaceable audio amplifier chip. The CPU was the venerable AMD FX-8350, which I chose at the time based on its similarity to game consoles. Its 8c/8t matched both Sony and Microsoft's console processors, so I had a reasonable expectation that ports would run well on it.

But wait, there's a story behind why I bought that board. At the time my motherboard was a my Gigabyte GA-MA770T-UD3P (rev. 1.0) and my GPU was a Zotac GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB, but my video card died - luckily, under warranty. When that happened, Zotac didn't have any replacement units in stock, so they upgraded me to a GeForce GTX 970 Dual Fan. This wasn't actually much faster, but it did have more RAM, and it would do SLI. I checked prices, and the same board was available pretty cheaply by then, so I bought another one and then went shopping for a board that I could plug two GPUs into and wound up with the G1 gaming. But I run Linux, and Nvidia eventually removed SLI from the Linux driver. You could still use multiple cards with multiple monitors, but not with one monitor, and that's why I went looking for a used 1070.

Before I put the FX-8350 in my system, that same UD3P board had an AMD Phenom II 1045T (6c/6t) on it. And before that, it was a Phenom II 720 BE ("Black Edition") with 3c/3t. The only other components still in the system from the very beginning are the Samsung SSD 850, and maybe the serial port cable. When the G1 Gaming board died, I put the FX back on the UD3P board (which I'd saved) and sold it to a friend for about $140, with 32GB RAM. I had become accustomed to having a M.2 storage device by that time, so I wasn't going back to using that hardware myself. This Pinnacle Ridge Zen processor (the 1600 AF) is perhaps the ultimate low power/budget chip right now, and its value has actually gone up since it was new. I haven't rigged up my tester yet, but the whole system should still be under 400W at full load.

Returning to what I mentioned in the first paragraph, just a couple of days ago AMD announced new Zen 3 processors for Socket AM4, and now I have that to look forward to... after the price break, of course. I'm divided between the 5700X3D, with its 100MB of cache, and the 5600GT. This motherboard does have the ports for integrated graphics, and I could use the iGPU in the 5600GT to do desktop graphics, then use GPU passthrough to connect virtual machines to the RTX 4060. That would let me conveniently keep different CUDA versions for different software packages, and also do 3d graphics from a Windows virtual machine. On the other hand. the huge wad of cache is supposed to make a huge difference in performance.