Uses / My Setup
What's Inside My Very Average Desktop
- It's a Ryzen 5 3600XT with an RTX 3060 and 16GB of RAM. Nobody's putting it in a build showcase.
- The only impressive number is the storage, and that's mostly because I never delete anything.
- When a mod post says "runs fine for me," this is the bar. Your machine is probably better.
- There's also a laptop, some handhelds and a couple of printers, listed at the bottom for completeness.
A few of my posts are about modding games, and it's only fair to say what I'm running them on. Spoiler: it's not much.
This is a mid-range PC from a few years back. It won't win anything. It's the kind of build people upgrade from. But it runs the games I play, holds far too many files, and keeps limping along, so here it is. That way, when I say something "runs fine," you know exactly how low the bar is.
The desktop
| Part | What's in there |
|---|---|
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 5 3600XT (6 cores, 12 threads) |
| Graphics | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 (EVGA) |
| Memory | 16GB DDR4-3200 (2 × 8GB GeIL) |
| Motherboard | ASUS TUF Gaming B550M-Plus (AM4) |
| Boot drive | 1TB WD NVMe SSD |
| Storage | 8TB Seagate BarraCuda and 4TB WD Black hard drives |
| Network | Onboard Realtek 2.5GbE, wired |
| Monitor | ASUS PB278, 27-inch, 2560×1440, 60Hz |
| Webcam | Logitech 1080P Pro Stream |
| Keyboard and mouse | Logitech |
If you're into PC hardware, you just read that list and felt a little sorry for me. That's fair. There's no RGB, nothing liquid-cooled, and the monitor tops out at 60Hz. It's a very normal computer doing very normal computer things.
Note
This is the machine behind my Cyberpunk 2077 mod loadout and the Shadow of Mordor ReShade setup. If it works on this, it'll almost certainly work on yours.
Where all the space went
The one part that looks like I planned something is the storage, and I didn't. I just never delete anything.
The NVMe drive holds Windows and whatever I'm playing right now. The two big hard drives hold everything else: the media library, game backups, comics, ebooks, and a pile of archives I keep meaning to sort. Most weeks I'm shuffling something from one drive to another, which is honestly where half my media library scripts came from.
Someday
There are two empty RAM slots, and I think about filling them roughly every time Cyberpunk stutters. I also look at high refresh rate monitors more than I'd like to admit. Neither has happened yet. It still works, so it gets to keep working.
The rest of the desk
The desktop isn't the only screen in the house. For completeness:
- Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 3 running Linux Mint. My everyday laptop, and how that came together.
- Steam Deck with 512GB inside and a 1TB microSD card. Great on the couch, a little too big for a bag. Deckport exists because of it.
- Retroid Pocket Classic 6, the little vertical Android handheld.
- Nintendo Switch and Switch 2. Tears of the Kingdom lives on the Switch 2 for the frame rate.
- Meta Quest 2, which has had an adventure of its own.
- Canon Pixma Pro-100 for photo prints, and a Brother mono laser for everything that's just words.
That's the whole humble kit. If anything ever gets upgraded, you'll hear about it here, probably at great length.
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