Most builds on this website are extremely expensive, pre-planned builds that apply RGB lighting to everything. And those builds are amazing, I'm currently in the process of realising such a build for myself. However, I want to share the story of my current computer, my gaming pc that has stuck with me for the past 7 years.

It all started in 2013, when I was still mainly a console gamer, happily playing my favourite games on the PS2 and PS3. I was starting to gain interest in pc gaming however, so after some back and forth my parents bought me my first PC, the Acer Aspire XC600. A small tower desktop with an i5-3330, 4gb of ram, a radeon 7470 2GB and a 1TB hard drive. This thing was obviously not intended for PC gaming, but I was so young, and dumb. So I used it for that purpose anyway. I played CS:GO, Team Fortress 2 and other less demanding games on it for countless hours and had countless amounts of fun. Me being the dumb little kid still, thought that adding more RAM would instantly make it faster, so I bought an DDR3 8GB stick to add to it, leading up to a total of 12 GB's of RAM. Eventually, newer games (in this case, Overwatch) would not run smoothly on my pc, so it was high time for an upgrade. In 2017, I picked out a new case, psu and graphics card and kept everything else from the prebuild, and only around 250 euros further I had a very capable gaming pc. I could run most modern games at medium settings 1080p, which was more than enough for me. This powered my gaming adventures for the following years. In early 2020, a friend of mine, who had just upgraded his pc, said he had some ddr3 ram lying about and he gave it to me for free! One problem however, he said it was 8gb, but it was 2 x 4 gb, and I was still stuck on my acer prebuild motherboard with only 2 RAM slots. So, for some reason, he also gave me his old motherboard, the MSI B85 G43 GAMING, even with the cpu still included, the I5-4430. Now with my RAM and his RAM combined, I had a whopping 20GB of RAM, which is much more than I needed. The only problem was the stock Intel cooler that was on the cpu, which made the system noisy and get really hot (about 80 degrees celsius!). Recently I was fiddling about, where I broke one of the mounting pins of the stock cooler, which was a good excuse to buy a decent cooler, which was the Cooler Master Hyper TX3 Evo. Combine that with a good cleaning of the cpu and some higher quality thermal paste, my cpu now runs at a max of 50 degrees celsius, which is much cooler!

When I changed my cooler, I also cleaned the entire case and redid my cable management. This is the very first time I actually put some effort into cable management, and even though I could have done better, it looks a whole lot better than the loose cables I had before.

The main reason I wanted to share this build, even though it is a very unasuming build that is not even that good, is to showcase that you can build a decent gaming pc for very little money. I only paid for the case, one stick of ram, psu, gpu, cooler and some cables. Using used hardware and some good deals can get you a very capable machine.
Another reason is that this machine is very personal to me, and I wanted to eternalise it and give it a spot online. It currently runs and looks the best it ever has, but even when it didn't, it still powered my gaming adventures, which I will never forget. Even though it is outdated and not that fast, I still love this computer.

EDIT (24/08/2020) - Got myself a 24 inch monitor from home, so I finally have 2 1080p screens to look at! How lovely. It takes up considerably more space, but thats fine by me. Current plans for this computer are not that exiting, I will be removing the 1 TB harddrive and will be replacing it with a cheap 250 GB SSD and a 2 TB harddrive. This computer will be turned into a media pc (it will be plugged into my tv, no network or server hijinks) once my new computer is finally finished.

EDIT (25/09/2020) - The day has come for old bessie to rest. Nah, she is now plugged into my LG tv, so that she can sputter on as my media pc. And now with a 2 TB hard drive for storage of movies and such, and a 250 GB SSD, she is a whole lot quicker than she used to be. Sadly I had to remove the 1050 TI that was in her, needed it for a different build. Once the new GPUs finally come available I will put it back in.