I really wanted to give this old gaming PC that belonged to my brother circa 2012 a nice send off. I had been sitting on some spare parts and old HDDs for a number of years since moving Yuri and I to all SSD gaming machines. Enter the rest of the computer in the form of this decade old gaming PC and I had my work cut out for me. PC part picker list for the curious: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/Steininger1/saved/#view=dQ3MCJ

Originally rocking a gtx 660 and Core i5-3450 I did manage to upgrade to the i7-6700 that I had been sitting on since upgrading Yuri’s PC. I think a friend of mine fished a bunch of those out of some office PC’s their employer was ditching. Huge W. I also got myself the 1660ti for just 70$ on marketplace after low-balling people for a while. That in combination with a 18TB drive from serverpartdeals.com turned this thing from a guest PC to a plausible home-server.

Originally just messing around with windows I taught myself the basics of networking and serving files over my LAN. It wasn’t long until I was tinkering with external access and jellyfin to host my video files. This was just a hop skip and a jump to a ubuntu based dockerized machine, running containers for my services, gamer servers (shout out to tekkit classic man, sometimes I just want 2012 minecraft back), and a backup solution for my other devices.

The real step forwards since have been on content. The graphics card can handle HDR, which has opened the door to streaming my main gaming machine to the OLED television next to my server. I have been dragging my machine into the living room for years now when I’m itching for couch gaming. Sunshine and Moonlight clown on Steam’s streaming so hard it isn’t even funny. I’ll still use steam streaming with the steam deck, but the desktop version is just not great. I completed RDR2 finally with this setup and I am really happy.

Lastly, the Bluray player. It is actually nuts how good most Bluray’s look, when you start to notice this you will despise Netflix and Prime for their video compression sins. 4k Blruay does look better, but it is really hard to find any Disc above $15, let a lone recent ones. Blurays made for the last 15 years though, particularly popular films like The Matrix or Inception are wildly cheap on eBay. We’re talking 3 dollars for an extremely crisp version of the movie you now own in perpetuity. Many Local libraries also offer Blurays for check out now, and you can watch a lot of films in excellent quality without paying monthly subscription fees. I have loved physical media for sometime, but Blurays have got to be one of the biggest boons to my collection ever.