Personal Battle Station

My current personal "battle station" (to quote the kids these days). Building gaming PCs back in the 90s really got me into computing, and lead me to working in IT. Building your own computer is the best way to learn.
I was able to get a Geforce 3070 from Bestbuy. It was a impulse buy due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was blind luck getting it. Ray tracing is interesting. The 3070 can run games with ray tracing at 1080p, but at any higher resolution, frames start to get dropped. DLSS is pretty good. Cyberpunk 2077 runs with all the ray tracing effects turned on at 1440p. However games running natively at 1440p with ray tracing turned off look much clearer. I'm not sure if this is the lighting effects, or the effect of the "AI up scaling".


 
^decorated with stickers from Portland area street artists^

I have been building my own PCs for 3+ decades now. Kids these days have no idea how easy they have it. :) The old k6 and 486 systems have me working on jumper settings. A selection of machines:

- Pentium II 400 MHZ, 32 MB of RAM, S3 Savage 4, Sound Blaster Live! This was then updated to a GeForce 2 MX and a PIII 450mhz.
- AMD K6-233, Diamond Monster 3d, some random S3 2d graphics card, sound blaster 16. up to 16 MB of ram.
- AMD 5x86 133 (their branded 486 DX4), 2x CD-Rom, Sound Blaster 16, 4-16 MB of ram.
- Various Athlon t-bird/Athlon xp systems.
- Too many systems for friends.
<-- the old college rig.