cMiel

Lol I'll try. Engineering money is fun to play with lol

I see. Well, thank you!

ram you may be able to upgrade
cpu ... unlikely ... it most likely would involve modifying the bios to add microcode and other code required by the new cpu
also, these boards typically are very fine tuned, for example if the current cpu peaks at 10w power consumption, the dc-dc converter on the motherboard may be designed for maximum 12w ... so you may not be able to install a more powerful cpu because that one may peak at 15w so it may just shut down when it doesn't get enough power

Not really, but I recommend robbing a bank.



No, don't actually do that.

Do some odd jobs and scrap a little cash and you might be fine with general upgrades.

A couple years back, through the glory of being given department store vouchers, I managed to get a then-new GTX 1050 Ti Strix card for my desktop. It was glorious - previously I'd been using a Geforce GT 6 card that cost me about $30 on eBay. Now I could play Tomb Raider with averages of above 30fps, instead of 20. Rise of the Tomb Raider would ...play. With quite decent settings to boot!
 
I put this card in my most powerful machine of the time, a 2013 Celeron with 8GB of DDR-1600 running at 1333 because $50 CPU. It's served me well, but the truth is - I wanna play Shadow, Final Fantasy XV and 0AD-with-actual-good-framerates. And the bottleneck is my trusty Celeron chip. So, it's time for me to upgrade.
 
Only one problem. I'm poor. Luckily, 2013 was a long time ago, which means much more powerful hardware is now available for a bargain price. Point in fact, I already had a second workstation - a 2x4 Xeon Mac Pro that handily outclassed my Celeron in most things. This left me with a quandary. My Mac Pro is FSB-based, so has a limited total bus bandwidth. On the other hand, it has dual-channel DDR-667, putting it in similar hypothetical transfer class for memory as my single-channel Celeron. The machine wasn't expensive, either. $160 with 12GB ram (I had a set of 32gb sticks just lying around, so never mind) and a reasonable chunk of spinny hard disks.
 
This leaves me with a quandary. $30 gets me a decent 128GB SSD from a recycling company for either machine. $50 gets me an Ivy Bridge i5 or Xeon, 4c4t, 3ghz. $80-$100 should get me a 4c8t Xeon of similar speed. Either will work in my five year old motherboard, unlocking 1600 ram speed, moving my GTX1050 Ti from PCI-e 2.0 to 3.0, doubling my cores and adding a huge chunk to my per-thread performance to boot! But an extravagent $1.50 gets me a PCI-e power cable that lets me put my GTX 1050 Ti into that dual Xeon machine. Four times the ram, eight *real* cores...
 
I honestly don't know which would be faster. So, I bought two $30 SSD's and a $1.50 cable. Currently bidding on CPU's.
 
Any guesses about the benchmarks?

Wait nvm

The only thing that matters in this scenario is keeping your data safe. Everything else is replaceable.
 
But if you must insist, the smallest Threadripper option at the moment is ASRock's X399M Taichi which is a MicroATX board. You can find reasonably small MicroATX cases that will fit an AIO water cooling unit too.

So, I'm paranoid that the FBI (or CSIS) will break into my house and destroy my stuff while I'm streaming, so are there any portable workstation-grade cases (preferably for thread ripper) that you guys would recommend? Go wild idk.

depends on the skill of the person, shit needs to be lightweight & need to have a textured grip so it wont slide off from your palms.

Yeah, I mean that. XD SATA 2.5 inch is the most common SATA (socket) drive form factor.
There are SATA based SD card readers, there are SATA over m2 (IIRC, or is it a different connector?), and lots of other stuff.
 
But most stores list "SATA" and "M2" and "PCIe" as the connection, and have a single form factor for each (minus the M2 length options I guess).
 
Just mentioning how, while only a PCB like the M2, 2.5 inch drives come in a full case. It could be exposed like the bottom of a HDD is, or like the entire M2 card is. Actually, is anyone doing a potted/case covered m2 drive?

True. If it falls off though, it could short. Electrical tape will work. You could also fashion up a small caddy.
 
Sata SSDs are different as they come in cases. But M2s will have exposed boards.

no broken cable & no shorts = safe