Hello old, unused, friend

Sunday morning, breakfast was consumed and the coffee is being installed, so I was out at my bench and removed most of the innards from the backup PC I created in April 2021 and installed the Z170 motherboard with the i5-6600K and cooler, an M.2 drive a Gigabyte WiFi card. 

Yesterday we had an afternoon near Victoria and I bought a used Gigabyte GTX 1050TI graphics card and 16GB of ADATA DDR4 RAM, that I will run at 2133 MHz.  These were also installed along with Windows 10 Home edition, which is the digital licence that the UEFI carries on the Z170 board, so more value there with a free operating system that will be supported until June 2025

There it all is, installed in the Rosewill case, top down you can see the Cooler Master Hyper 212, a single stick of DDR4 memory, the Gigabyte GTX 1050TI which impressively does not need an additional power connector as it pulls all it's power from the PCIe slot. In addition, a feature of this card is that it has a 0db feature, it stops the fan when the load is low, so it is quiet. There right at the bottom right of the motherboard is a Western Digital 256GB M.2 NVMe drive, which will suffice for this backup build.

The post mortem on cost, I like this bit.

Case $35, NVMe drive $52, WiFi card $15, Power supply $60 which is all cash spent years ago so that adds up to $162 and I'll add a generous $15 for the fans, so $177 old money there. Then $120 for the motherboard, CPU and cooler, $90 for the GTX and $30 for the DDR4 (which was quite a deal) and that lot adds another $240 for a grand total of $417 which I think, for this level of machine in early 2023 is a very good value.

After installation of software and some testing, this box will go under my bench once again, it has been more "computer therapy" for me, will this build be needed in the future? - who knows, and who cares really and perhaps in another two years I will report that the computer is to be upgraded once more.

The other exciting part of this, is that I now have another set of spare parts that can be built into a case, and I think I have just the case to do that in....