What's your normal PC setup?

[Clym5]

just in case this thread becomes about biggest and best

That wasn't the intention, but if someone has a really powerful system, don't spare the details!

I've also got craploads of unintentionally collected (PC Clone) detritus that spans the last 25 years in ADDITION to my vintage kit, that I can't bear to throw out...

Tell me about it.. I cleaned most of them out last month, but I kept some CD drives, floppy drives and HDDs. RAM and CPUs too. Only 3 motherboards and one case.

[Stargorn]

just in case this thread becomes about biggest and best I drive a freehold bmw outside and another freehold motor in the garage and live in a brand new house (4 months old) (in an expensive upmarket side of town) and I have no payments to ever make, I dont have HP,loans or a credit card ! I owe no money and have no dependants, and do what ever I like because I am not tied to a day job, im 46 and havent worked for 15 years

That sure escalated quickly.

I use an AMD PC as my workhorse and gaming computer with Windows 7. I do my music recording on a 2009 iMac and we hooked a Linux machine up to the tv yesterday so my daughter and wife can watch stuff.

[acsi]

Yawn!

Anyway for my everyday machine I use a 2009 Mac Pro (Quad core Xeon) and this has been my main workhorse for several years now. It has Win 8 and Parallels installed which don't get much of a look in. Sitting next to it are my Atari Falcon and Amiga 2000

Currently its main use for the vintage machines is putting files on SD and CF cards, but I have been trying to get a drive wire setup working for the Dragon 64 and 32.

Although the whole setup is in a bit of a mess at the moment and the secondary use of the mac pro is as a shelf to hold my 2 ZXCORE machines, a ZX80, a ZX81 with colour interface and ZXPAND and a rather frustrating Jupiter Ace kit which has been bugging me for a long time now.

Must be time for a cleanup

[mangasurfer]

i7 laptop running windows 10. like all my pcs and retro gear it has almost no screws think it lasted 2 months before it froze and i had to pull it apart and remove battery. was locked in some toshiba death loop lol.
have macs pc and retro dont think i own anythink i havent pulled apart at some stage. have been electrocuted a few times.

[Carcenomy]

I'm not going to get into any dick measuring contests in a big way, I'm just a regularly endowed chap with a regular mortgage and some regular 80s cars, regular 80s and 90s computers...

My personal rig is an HP Pavilion 8120 circa 1999 refitted with an i7-2600K with dual overclocked GTX560s, 8GB RAM, 180GB SSD and dual 1TB mechanicals with a Zalman 1kW PSU and Zalman CNPS9900MAX-B cooler, running Windows 8.1 Pro. The HP case although extremely obnoxious for dead weight is fantastic for LAN parties because its body panels are predominantly plastic - it's pretty resilient to the knocking about in transit.

Home theatre PC is a Commodore PC10-III circa 1986 refitted with an i7-860 with Radeon HD7770 GHz, 4GB RAM, dual 1TB mechanicals, Hauppauge HVR4000 tuner, Silverstone 450W SFX PSU and AC Freezer 7 Pro modified for LGA1156, running Windows 8.1 Pro with Media Center. It's used as a combination of second TV tuner, MCE to use my 360s as extenders, BD player and casual PC gaming machine.

Workshop PC is a Silverstone low-pro HTPC chassis with some form of Athlon II X2 and some other cheap hardware, I only use it for reading service manual PDFs and playing music while working on the aforementioned 80s cars!

Retro rig is an old nameless acrylic ATX case with dual Pentium III 550s, GeForce256, 512MB RAM, SB Live!, 40GB IDE with Windows Me, 3.6GB SCSI with WIndows 2000 Pro, ZIP100 drive. Yes, sometimes we do get all the middle-aged PCs out and play some classic Quake with ye olde 10base2 cabling

Laptop is a Sony VAIO Duo 11, i5-4200U, 4GB, 120GB SSD. 11" convertible type deal, it's ridiculously badass and the smallest thing I could clap hands on at the time with an Ethernet port.

I believe that covers the ones I use with any regularity, there's a smattering of other assorted complete systems but most are packed in the racks in the garage now.

[informatik]

For my everyday machine I use packard bell notebook with windows 7 starter/Puppy Linux. Intel atom 1.67 Ghz.

[caluser2000]

Everyday home pc is a P4 3.0/mhz thing running xfce4 on linux. Quite happy with it- wifi, printer etc. no issues at all.
And it was free.....
I'm leaning back on an comfortable chair feet up on another typing this on a normal keyboard looking at 24inch lcd screen.

My normal oldy, 3rd most used box here, is a 286/12, 8megs of ram, nic, 50meg hdd running dos/win3.1/ with packet driver and winpkt/trumpet winsock for communicating on the interweb. Has external cdrom and ls120 drive. It's connected to an 18" crt.

That is my story.

THE END

[xjas]

Okay, I'll bite. Quite a few machines in active use right now, most of these were free-ish or cheap used or acquired in some non-monetary way. Ironically by *FAR* the most expensive system to me was the P233MMX build, I'm probably about $400 into that. (Yes, that includes the Macbook Pro which ended up becoming mine for around $200 thanks to a convoluted series of trades and a liquidating company.) So right now around the apartment I have:

Everyday / general purpose laptop: 2012 Macbook Pro - Core i5 @ 2.5 GHz, 4GB DDR3/500GB HDD, Intel HD 4000 graphics, OSX 10.8.4. No, I'm not going to upgrade to Maverics/Yosimite/El Capitan/whatever. Many, many tweaks to make it behave more like a Unix machine. Also has Unix machine problems (dependency hell, multiple versions, etc. - ask me about Python or Git or Java sometime) that most Macs don't.

Other laptop: HP Touchsmart TM2 (laptop w/swivel+foldable tablet screen & integrated Wacom stylus) - U7300 Core2 Duo @ 2GHz(??), 4GB/ 500GB, Intel GM45 GPU, (very outdated) OpenSUSE 11.4 (2.6 kernel) / KDE 4.4.

Retired laptop: Dell D430 - Centrino Duo @ 1.2 GHz, 2GB/120 GB, Intel GMA 3000, Linux Mint 13 (3.8 Kernel) KDE 4.12+XFCE+Awesome+Fluxbox, massive docking setup with a ton of expansions - sadly the LCD inverter went so I don't really use it anymore. Still works great with an external display though.

New music recording workstation: PowerMac G5 2.3GHz DC (dual-core), 7.5GB DDR2, some HDDs (whatever I have left from the NAS build, probably 320 or 500 GB), GeForce 6600 256MB PCIe, will run OSX 10.5.x as soon as I set it up. Shares a really nice 19" Hansol CRT through a big KVM.

Music *sequencing* workstation: Advantech single-board industrial PC on massive 14-slot ISA backplane. P233MMX, 64MB 72-pin EDO, 20GB HDD, AWE64 w/28MB and GUS PnP w/8MB (yeah 2 ISA PnP soundcards in one rig - and they play *great* together, no config issues!), S3 Virge PCI 4MB + Voodoo2 PCI 8MB, 4U rack mount case, internal IDE ZIP & LS120 "floppy" drives, Adaptec PCI SCSI, too many other expansions to list. Boots FreeDOS 1.1 *only* with NO GUI or graphical shell whatsoever. Shares a really nice 19" Hansol CRT through a big KVM.

Other rackmount PC: dual P3/1000, Asus mobo, 1GB SDRAM, 2x160GB IDE, GeForce 4 TI4200 AGP, M-Audio 2496 sound card, Adaptec SCSI, network card, etc. Internal 3.5+5.25+IDE ZIP drives. Dual boots FreeDOS and AntiX 15/Fluxbox (a nice Debian variant.) Not sure what to use this one for now, was going to be the recording rig until I got the G5 towers. Shares a really nice 19" Hansol CRT through a big KVM.

Other G5 tower: 2.0GHz DP (two physical CPUs, one core each), 4GB DDR, 200GB laptop SATA drive, Radeon 9600 AGP, runs Debian 8 w/Cinnamon 2.4. Presently in my office doing worky stuff. (Sits next to my 8-core i7 workstation running Fedora 21 but that one isn't owned by me so it doesn't count. BTW I have 5 monitors in an arc on my desk, the Dell has 3 heads and the Mac has 2. I should get a picture.)

"Arcade cabinet" (build pics coming soon!) - P4 3.0 (800FSB), Gigabyte mobo, 2GB DDR/80GB HDD, C-Media 4-channel sound card, MS Sidewinder 3D Pro on DB15 gameport, Radeon 9600 128MB AGP using S-Video out to a massive CRT TV. Runs ~2005 era games and various 8/16-bit emulators really well. Not overly desperate to play anything newer (except modern indie platformers which generally run on my Macbook.)

"True vintage" stuff: 386DX/25 now running my EPROM burner, TI-99/4a with modern expansions, Yamaha CX5MII/128 MSX MIDI Computer with peripherals

[SeanKennedy]

Just got me a PB6600 rig. Had to spring for an external BluRay writer because 0 external drive bays. NVidia GTX 980 Ti 6GB GPU, i7 Halswell overclocked to 4.5GHz and 8 virtual cores (I guess that's a 4 core with hyperthreading?) 16GB RAM, 250GB SSD, and 2TB scratch storage - awaiting a 4K 28" display and Oculus Rift.

Yes, it is for running Elite...

[SpidersWeb]

Mine was becoming a problem child so gave it a bit of maintenance and actually spent some time paying attention to it.
Really posting because I'm surprised it's lasted so long, motherboard boots up with a (C) 2009 message.

Anyway it's back running at 4.07GHz (rated for 2.8 ), dismantled the old RAID array and removed two Samsung 500's, so it's now 256GB SSD + 750GB Seagate 7200 (data) + 2TB WD Red (backups etc) + 500GB Samsung (meh I had room) for random stuff I don't care about. Running great - honestly when I built it, I thought it would be dead by now, but a bit of dust removal and some retweaking (which I didn't do after putting in new memory). Got Windows 10 running on it, feels like a new PC.

Friend of mine recommend upgrading to a 32nm Xeon chip - which overclock higher and have 12MB of cache - found some on trademe for $50.

Also wanted to add - don't rely on an Intel RAID for data backups, a single drive error can cause a rebuild and their software tools are awful.
Much better to just run two drives and have one backup to the other. My Intel RAID dropped two perfectly working drives off the RAID10 array and it took me many many hours to retreive my data using 3rd party 'forensic' software to rejoin the data between two drives.

Need a new video card, the new version of Catalyst (required for Windows 10) does not support my grey haired ATI 4850.

[Clym5]

Wow, that's a decent overclock! I used to have a 4850.. 512mb version. I loved the card but man, it was hard to keep running. Had to put it in my oven a few times to reflow it, bad vram (sometimes?) etc. I went from that to a GTX 560 and now a 280X.

I use my A4000 a lot now too. It runs damn well, and I can web browse on it, and do everything I need to do (usually). My Mac Pro 1,1 gets some use too, but mainly for rendering tasks. I don't like OSX much..

I'm also still using 8.1, as I have no issues with it at all. It's really great. I don't have a reason for 10 (yet) and people are talking a lot about all the intrusive settings it has.