This is Maya, named after the Marvel Comics cyborg Paragon of Earth-50701; it is my latest build used for streaming and 1080p gaming from my bed.

While Maya is a new build, literally put together a couple of weekends ago, it is actually made up parts from my gaming rig from 2014-2019. In fact the i7-4790K, which I upgraded to from an i7-4770K because of VFIO/GPU passthrough, and RAM were the things driving Scar before my Radeon VII shorted out and fried the Asrock Z97X Killer motherboard I had been using up till October of last year (2019).

The motherboard getting fried put a wrench in my plans to sell the CPU + RAM + Motherboard as a combo on eBay and put the money towards upgrading to the Ryzen 9 3950X in Scar 2.0. The upgrade was not planned for earlier than June-September of this year (2020) and was meant to coincide with a new version of elementary OS and AMD releasing the Navi20/RDNA2.0 GPUs. Sadly, I couldn't sell the parts as hoped because I wasn't sure what was causing the parity failure the motherboard kept giving after the Radeon VII died. To find out the root issue, I was going to have to buy either a motherboard (the third since 2014), or new RAM sticks or new CPU; all of which would be pointless.

Anyway, sometime in December I found an Asus Z97-C for $120 plus change on eBay being sold by a China/Hong Kong/Taiwan seller. The motherboard was claimed to be “99% NEW BECAUSE IT IS STOCK, NEVER BEEN USED, 100% FULL TEST,NO ORIGINAL BOX”; I got it with no CMOS battery, but at least thankfully it works and so too the RAM and CPU. $120 is strangely cheap for a Z97 motherboard on eBay, typical going rate was $300 and I was not going to spend that much to find out what was broken in a system I had planned to sell. It was also strange seeing a motherboard with PCI slots after so many years.

Once I discovered the only damaged part was the original motherboard and other components worked, I bought the ADATA 1TB SSD attached it to the SEDNA PCIe SATA III (6G) SSD adapter I had bought and used in my 2006 MacPro 2,1 (Motoko). Also took the 650watt PSU I had from a very old Athlon x2 rig I had tried to breath new life into as a NextCloud server, pulled out the Noctua NH-D15 and Cooler HAF XB Evo case I was using before I bought the DeepCool Quadsteller case I used for Scar/Scar 2.0. Finally took the Vega 64 out of Motoko and pulled out the PCI DVB-T TV tuner card I have had since 2007 from the box it was sitting in, connected everything and Installed elementary OS.

I now use Maya as a streaming and in-bed 1080p gaming rig connected to the TV in my bedroom.