My new-old (completely) custom built tabletop testbench! :)

[SonicPlayrite]

Hey there LTT community!

I've got a bit of a PC journey to share with you all. It all started when I was just 7 years old. We got a new family PC from my cousin for a mere $200. It boasted an i3-7100 and a GTX 950 with 8GB of RAM, which felt pretty good back then. Looking back, though, it was a bit lacking in the CPU department. Over time, we upgraded it to 24GB of RAM, and it served us well until late 2022. Keep in mind; I'm still just 12 years old, but I'm turning 13 soon!

Then, I made a decision that didn't quite work out as planned. I thought getting a Raspberry Pi 400 would be a great upgrade, but it turned out to be a letdown. The OS was frustrating, apps wouldn't cooperate, and those mini-HDMI cables were a constant headache (I went through like 3 a month).

Fast forward to early 2023, my uncle's old PC gave up the ghost, and he got a new one. That's when I stumbled upon a relic in our storage house (yes, we have those in Czechia). It was in terrible condition with some Athlon (I didn't even check the model), 4GB of RAM, and a dedicated ATI HD 3200 on a Gigabyte ga-ma78gm-s2h motherboard. I cleaned it up, bought more RAM, a spare motherboard, and an Athlon 64 x2 5400+ with a cooler. My dad contributed a PSU from work (LTT reference, anyone?). We tried to revive it, and with the help of the fantastic LTT forum, we managed to do it. Turns out, the old CPU was toast, and the new one breathed life back into the old motherboard. Oh, and that new motherboard? Yep, it was toast too. I was using this setup until May when I needed an upgrade.

So, I got myself an R5 5500, 16GB of RAM, and (I admit, not my best choice) an A520M-HDV motherboard. I also snagged a used GTX 745 for 20 bucks. To top it off, I got a spiffy new case, an Evolveo Ray 4. And with a bit of family teamwork, we decided to transfer the GTX 950 from the family PC into my rig to minimize bottlenecks. A new PSU was in the mix too. The old family PC went to my sister for her birthday so she could enjoy some gaming.

As summer rolled around, I managed to revive and clean up Granny's old Pentium D machine. Then, the same cousin who gave us the family PC (which is still going strong) surprised me with a FREE GTX 1070 TI and my sister (with a little help from me) got an i5-8600k, an MSI SLI motherboard, and 16GB of RAM. I assembled her machine and passed on my GTX 745 from the family PC. So, my PC was just sitting there, not doing much.

Today, my dad got yet another PSU from work, and I built it into my tabletop test bench made from an old building kit called Merkur (a Czech classic). I plan to install as many Windows versions as I can into this test bench to test my Python apps and dive into some retro gaming.

Check out the attached pictures. The unlabeled ones are of the test bench, and for the labeled ones, you can figure out youself :)!

Cheers, Štěpán