no one has ever told this dude ‘no’ in his life
the price is $80, which is down from $160 because it’s not new, it has two small flaw (one that can be repaired that I can’t bother to do) and i tore the entire thing to pieces and hand washed it, i don’t think im being unreasonable here. my labor is worth it.

the motherboard is an MSI P55-CD53 (Socket 1156, first-gen Intel Core). its not a bad board but not something you’d want for overclocking. i bought three of these new for $80 each back in 2009, one for myself, one for wifesling, and one as our file server so they’d all be on the same era hardware so I could swap parts easily (never needed to, they never failed). and this is the last one that remains, i sold or gave away the rest to make space for more interesting systems.

heres a view inside the case as it is now. just looking at it now i see a few things i need to clean and correct about the build

one of my friend’s systems included this really excellent motherboard, and I thought it’d be a good candidate for upgrading my workbech PC. the board in there now is very cheap and only had 8GB of RAM. my friend is a coder so this board came preloaded with 32GB, which was quite extravagant for the time (most “gamers” would have considered 16GB overkill then)

i’ve stuck with it primarily because it has this easy access SATA hot-swap uhh “bay” here at the top that you can cover with a provided shield. because i do a lot of repairs and disk testing, being able to drop an HDD into this and get data to and from it with ease, or just test and benchmark old disks has been a real treasure.

this is a Cooler Master 690 II, its a serious tower case for high-end systems that is a bit overbuilt for my needs; i really just need something that i can look at the web and transfer files around with.