May I present? The Meow Machine! My entry for @shyra 's #CheapPCChallenge2024 !
A PC that turned out much better specs-wise than I initially planned. This thing sports a Xeon E3-1231 v3 with whopping eight threads running at up to 3.8GHz, 8GB of 1333MHz DDR3 and an AMD RX570 GPU with 4GB VRAM on a basic HP 280 G1 motherboard, all for under 50 bucks! Not too shaby!
Here are the eBay purchases for all parts that count into the challenge! Prices have been converted from Euro to US-dollar for each item during the time of purchase, shipping costs not included:
Motherboard + RAM combo: $10.80 (9.99€)
GPU: $22.38 (20.00€)
CPU: $15.59 (14.00€)
Total cost: $48.77 (43.99€)
And, of course, the most important stuff: The benchmarks!
In 3DMark03, the system managed to score 954.1 FPS in the GT2 run and 765.5 FPS in the GT3 run.
In Cinebench R10, the single-core render benchmark finished with 5646 CB-points, whilst the multi-core benchmark scored 21451 CB-points.
Both benchmarks were run through Wine (32bit) under Debian 12, I might try Windows 7 later to see if there's any noticable difference between the two.
Throwing the score numbers into the final score calculation forumlar, however ...
3DMark03 Total: (954.1 FPS + 765.5 FPS) * 25 = 42990 points
Cinebench Total: 5646 CB + 21451 CB = 27097 points
... the system reaches a total of 70087 score-points! I think that's pretty good? But I haven't seen what others have reached yet, so I'll be curious to find out how this machine compares in the challenge!
And of course, I'll use this system for the next 14 days as my daily driver, as long as nothing breaks in that time that is, for some extra points~
Starting with the publication of this post, from this very computer! 
Gotta say, though, I got really really lucky with that GPU, as with the motherboard/RAM combo for such a low price (and that it's normal ATX instead of HPs proprietary stuff)!
The GPU was sold as broken with intermittent shut-offs according to the seller, however even after playing GTAV on mostly high settings or Minecraft 1.21 with shaders didn't cause any issues so far! 🤞
Maybe I should check the thermal paste, but even then, it didn't get hot much or spin up the fans too fast
Before stumbling across the RX570, I had an NVIDIA GTX580 in there, which was... a bit less fun to work with.
It may work alright under Windows, but under Linux, being pretty much stuck with NVIDIAs outdated, proprietary drivers and no Vulkan support is a pain.
And I sure as heck wasn't gonna go back to Windows for this one either, not for two weeks! <w<
So, two weeks with this system went by really uneventful! So much so I might've forgotten to take proof of me using this system for two weeks, darn it...
For being such a budget oriented computer, it simply.. worked. And worked well. No hangs, no crashes, no real slowdowns to speak of, even with just 8GB of RAM.
I've gamed on this thing, compiled kernels and OpenWRT images, continued on coding projects and even used it for work as much as I could, I'm really pleased :3
I'll probably keep using the CPU and the two existing RAM sticks in combination with an RTX 3060Ti I got cheap from a friend and two additional 4GB RAM sticks on a better ATX board as my daily driver, since the CPU is plenty speedy and the RAM is already running at 1600MT/s, but that HP board is just so horribly barebones.
And whoever thought to put the 1x slot BELOW the 16x slot, I strongly dislike you!
The left over components will be used as spares to fix other PCs I know could use some TLC
Snep