I spent the afternoon doing adult things: grocery shopping, gathering snacks for the MLB playoffs, getting gas, and browsing Amazon for a mini-ITX case that could fit behind my TV. Then, while cleaning out the garage, I found my old homemade NAS just sitting there collecting dust. The Intel i9 and 64GB of DDR4 are dated, sure. But maybe they could serve a greater purpose.
For years I've been chasing a living room PC experience that feels as seamless as a console. Lately that's meant streaming my desktop to a nine-year-old NVIDIA Shield TV. It works, mostly. But something about it still feels off, and I can't quite explain what. Maybe I just need to tear down and rebuild a PC every two years to stay sane. Whatever it is, I've had an itch to give my old hardware a second life.
So I gutted the NAS. I found a used Radeon RX 6600 on Marketplace for roughly what it costs to fill my gas tank.
A used LGA1200 mini-ITX board is on its way from China any day now. By my rough math, I'm basically building my own Steam Machine. The goal was to stay under $300.
That goal is proving close to impossible.
Which forced me to step back and ask: why? Why am I doing this? Too often I spend hours, sometimes days, setting something up only to never touch it again. It's a sickness. It's also a hobby, and hobbies are supposed to be good for you. So I'm told.
Then there's the time budget. I figured this would be a week-long project. Then the case I wanted went on backorder with no restock date in sight. Used parts from China cost about what they did new. And, of course, they still have to ship from China.
This whole thing is dumb. Everything is expensive to buy, expensive to ship, expensive to eat. But I'm already in too deep. The case fans are en route. It's too late to cancel the motherboard. I told myself this would be a cheap build. The CPU, NVMe drive and RAM were all recycled. The expensive stuff was already covered, right?
Wrong. Everything is expensive. The savings are gone. Today's "deals" cost ten times what the same parts did three years ago. It's sad to say, but I think I've officially been priced out of a lifelong hobby, especially with no end in sight for rising fuel costs or memory prices. That NVIDIA Shield? It just went up $100 this week. The current model is seven years old.
I'm sitting here staring at the PETG test bench I 3D printed, birthed into this world for my little wannabe Steam Machine, and wondering if this will be the last PC I ever build.
A Frankenstein'd mini-PC full of geriatric components, molded before most of us knew what an LLM was. I never thought I'd be nostalgic for the days of fighting crypto miners for GPUs, but here we are. Maybe the good times are behind us.
In the end, this is a nothingburger. It's a symptom of a mostly sheltered life. I haven't been to war (yet). I can still afford to put gas on the table (for now). And I can always find a new hobby. Maybe I'll just watch more affluent people, Canadians probably, build fancy computers I can only dream one day of gluing together.
What started me down this entire mess
I'm looking at my eBay account now. The motherboard I bought three days ago still hasn't shipped. It won't arrive until the end of the month. All in, I've spent $541. Not a fortune, but not nothing. It's about half the price of a Steam Machine, and the finished product will be roughly as powerful and infinitely more customizable. Then again, based on current trends, that might not matter.
According to Google, that $500 could have gone toward other hobbies, like hydroponics, vinyl collecting or specialty coffee brewing.
I'll keep looking.
