"Not today, my good man; I'm feeling saucy!"

The cheapest used 3070s I can find online right now are $900~$1100 CDN (the cheaper of those are Kijiji pick-ups), and the new ones are hovering around $1400~$1600... And I just found a new MSI 3070 VENTUS 2X OC for $799. The same shop had a GIGABYTE 3070 GAMING OC for $769 (higher boost, one more fan, physically larger) as well, but it got sniped as I was adding it to my cart. $799 is a little high (this model started around $750) and I still have reservations about VRAM limitations; but times are strange, I totally got caught-up in the excitement, and when the 6800 street price turned-out to be $999 I got off that bandwagon... Sorry AMD, but I will eventually still buy your Ryzen 5 5600X (or equivalent) to properly support this new GPU.

My brother got me a Steam gift card for Christmas, so I snagged Boneworks, Half-Life: Alyx, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Streets of Rage 4 - all on sale. Finishing BotW first though, and distracted by THPS1+2 because it was on-sale on the Epic Games Store and I had one of those $14-off coupons :) Speaking of, decent free holiday game selection on there, but I already own most of them :(

Oldies

Turns-out all 1660-based video cards have been tough to find lately. Ended-up getting a 1660 Ti for $370 CDN from Best Buy to go into that i7-3820 Flight Sim computer; he says it runs great at 1080p on High :) The other 3820's onboard sound doesn't seem to be working properly - everything detects and output levels look correct, but only hear static - but that's fine because it's gonna be using an external audio interface anyway.

Dusted-off my Commodore 128 over the holidays - 1902 monitor still works great, but 1571 disk drive doesn't seem to be spinning. I plan to fix it, but decided to go with an SD2IEC as well; this one stuck with me because it's cheaper than all the others and appears to have a serial pass-through.

My partner imported the black Game Gear Micro for me, and tracked-down a new NES Classic Edition for a reasonable price... Kinda caught-up in it all now, and tempted to get the blue GG Micro, could maybe justify the SNES Classic Edition for StarFox 2, the quality and selection on the Genesis and TG16 minis are actually incredible, the Neo Geo Mini looks great even if they fucked-up the joystick and the HDMI output, and the Astro City mini... Oh man, that thing looks so neat... But now we're in the $1000 range (not including accessories and peripherals) for a bunch of easily-emulated collector shit that I own the originals of anyway 😅

Oh, and motion controls for BotW in Cemu using my phone over WiFi... Wild.

Two of Three

Got two new old computers from a studio that was decommissioning them; common parts between them are:

• i7-3820
• Cooler Master HSF (Hyper 212?)
• ASUS P9X79
• 4x4GB PC3-10600 (quad-channel)
• Cooler Master HAF (912?)
• LG M-DISC DVD burner

...Otherwise, they have decent 500~600W 80 PLUS Bronze PSUs. There's a third one coming, but they're still using it for a little while longer.

So I added a 500GB 7200RPM HDD to one, and I'm giving it to a friend who really wants to play Flight Simulator 2020 but only has an ancient Mac Book; I figure a 1660 SUPER will serve him well in there. Get a 27" 1080p monitor, toss-in an SSD, and then not really much more to do in terms of upgrades - and  it saves him, like, $500 up-front. Merry Christmas!

The other will likely go to that indie recording studio I mentioned a few posts ago, while the i7-930 will finally go to a friend with many hard drives who wants to build a 14-drive storage server :)

The fun part about these computers, however, was how poorly they were assembled! Upside-down PSUs! Horrible cable management - but there were zip-ties, so they tried and failed! An eight-pin PCIe power connector with only seven pins connected! A CPU mounted 180-degrees-off with both clamps latched and the huge HSF unit tightly screwed-into the motherboard! They couldn't figure-out why it wouldn't boot; I was surprised the CPU hadn't snapped!