We are in the middle of watching "Once Upon A Time In America", a 4-hour Sergio Leone gangsta extravaganza.  :-|

 

I've got that film and only made it all the way through once. James Wood's performance is good though.

We're watching the "directors cut extended version", which has discarded scenes restored from assorted damaged/unfinished takes. A bit jarring but the story has continuity.

Pricing out a component build since the refurb thang ain't working for me. Here's what I'm looking at:

Nominal budget: $500. Already got: 1TB HDD, 750W PSU, Case [-ish]

$69 MSI 760GMA-P34FX mutherboard https://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813144119
- refurb!
- apparently can run XP!
$75 Athlon X4-950 (3.5G) CPU https://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113456
- allegedly this model is only a year on the market
- 65w (!)
- believe it or not, out-benchmarks an FX-4300 (3.8G X4 w/ double the cache)
$156 16G (2x8) DDR3
$90 R7-250 2G GPU https://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127763
- seriously clobbers similar-priced GT-730 models in benchmarks

What's bad: this stuff's already obsolete
What's good: this stuff's already obsolete
(I /always/ buy obsolete)

Potential future expansion(s): SSD, GPU, CPU (but memory's maxed out)

I reckon it would do me for ~5-10 years

SSD prices have been crashing over the last few weeks, you should absolutely get one as your main system drive. There is no other upgrade comparable to the speed increase you'll get with an SSD.

Are they free? 'cause already got = free.

I believe you, but it snot in the budget ATM.

As you're someone who uses Linux, do you game on Linux?
Always used to hear nvidia is better on Linux (using the official driver and not nouveau)

Also why I used nvidia because I knew it would "just work", or as close as Linux gets to just working.

Even the one I bought last week has already come down in price.

No, I don't game on Linux... haven't really had any problems with free radeon drivers in the past though I understand some of the latest gpus aren't well supported, pretty sure the R7 is ok.

Not seen anything with that spec on sale here for any price.

I meant the SSD. Don't think I'll see much or any reduction on the base system.

Oh yeah, I see what you mean. Hadn't checked prices in a while.

I agree with Ant. If you're struggling to afford it, personally I'd drop the RAM to 8GB (tbh) and go for an SSD. RAM is easy to upgrade in the future, and you'll get a faster and more responsive system in general out of an SSD/8GB RAM than you will from a mechanical HDD and 16GB RAM.

75 bucks still won't buy much ssd here. What slows me down isn't booting or launching programs (both which I do infrequently), it's swap thrashing. So a small SSD might "feel" faster out of the box, I'm not sure that would translate into significant time savings for actual productive use moreso than lotta ram. I can wait for ssd prices to fall more before making the plunge.

Why not get a small SSD and have that solely as a scratch/swap/page file area then?

I would do that if I was going to keep my current, 2GB pc. For the stuff I do, 16GB it will rarely hit swap.

Anyhoo... PHEW! I was all set to wrap up the order, when I happened to notice the Athlon X4 processor was listed as "socket AM4". The selected motherboard is AM3+. X-S (the motherboard spec said it was compatible with "Athlon" processors)

The good news is, I found an AM4 mb that supports twice the memory (32G DDR4) and I can get a single, 16G stick for a bit more than 2x8G DDR2 (which would max out the other board). Also, AM4 is Ryzen compatible (for future upgrades).  (dance)

Is there still a benefit from running two sticks for a dual channel speed improvement?

Ah, the pitfalls of incompatible hardware.

I like this site for getting around those:

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/

It'll continually whittle the parts options down to only those that are compatible depending on what other kit you initially choose.

Yeah maybe. OTOH if I want to max out the memory later, that's ~$200 in the bin.

I'm usually pretty careful about buying new parts. I've been caught out by cannibalized parts (latest was trying to put "mac" memory in a pc, which is 1 notch off). Oh yeah, also had to put a new PSU into my case upside down.