Sub-$1000 VR, Gaming, Video Editing, and Unity Rig - Macklemore's "Thrift Shop" Physical Embodiment.

This is my computer. It's my only desktop, and it's the only one I'll likely have in the foreseeable future. I only got a job about 14 months ago, and this PC has been sort of a passion project for me. Originally, I had hoped to spend about $1000 dollars accumulated over a 3 month period on this rig, however, my expectations were out of line to say the least. At the end of last summer, I had saved around $350 for the computer I wanted to build. I had high hopes for this computer, and I wanted it to be able to handle anything I could throw at it right from the get-go as soon as possible, that including video work, Photoshop, Unity Engine, Virtual Reality, and more than 2 tabs of Google Chrome. Initially, I had started with an AMD Ryzen 2200G, no GPU, only 1TB HDD space for games (Yes it had an SSD in it to boot, I'm not that insane), a $28 dollar case straight off the boat from China, and a measly 4x3 LCD monitor from 1999. Luckily, I was able to net an AMD Radeon RX570 a paycheck after I completed the initial building process, so I wasn't stuck on integrated graphics for too terribly long. However, what I was stuck on for a long time was the dreaded POST codes. My motherboard was an older revision or something akin to that, and as such, my CPU just didn't work. Nada. Nope. It took me a good long while to realize why it wouldn't POST at all until I read up on AMD's Boot Camp program. So I ordered a loaner chip from AMD, an Athlon chip if I recall correctly, and was able to get the machine up and running a couple of hours after it came in. I ran this setup for a long while until around March of this year. I've gotta say, Virtual Reality does NOT pair well with a $100 CPU and a $80 GPU. I ended up finding a decently priced 1070TI off of eBay, and that's what I've been running for the past couple of months. However, a $100 CPU still doesn't pair well with Virtual Reality, so I ended up selling a PS3 I had jailbroken (My side hustle at the time) and my old RX570 on eBay for some high prices in hindsight. Both sold, and I upgraded to a 2600X that was on sale at Microcenter for $100 down from $210 as soon as I got my money from Paypal. Man, I love Ryzen pricing. We also ended up running some CAT5e cables through our house's rafters in the basement, and I was able to run a LAN connection to my PC that was previously all the way across the house from our WIFI router, an old Linksys model that just couldn't hold the 20+ devices on our network. I changed out my case for an NZXT H500 earlier this summer, and it is downright simple to build in compared to my old case. I no longer have any desk space, but at least I now have proper RGB! I probably won't upgrade this any time soon except for the PSU, which is just a ticking time bomb at this point. It really has no issue tackling whatever I throw at it and it tends to just work. I went from my old 13" Dell Latitude E6330 to a 128GB Surface Go just because I don't need another powerful device, just one for taking notes and one for doing workloads or games. It's quite a useful machine for the price and it was a lot of fun to build, especially considering all the money came from sweeping the floors of a local Mom and Pop shop. I'm glad to live so close to a Microcenter just because the deals there are just so good sometimes. The new parts in my computer are only new because they needed to be or they were at an extremely low price at a store that was only 30 minutes out. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.