Personal Hardware Survey 2025

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
Joined
Jan 17, 2002
Messages
22,692
Location
I am omnipresent
I'm just curious what PC systems y'all have that are in active use in 2025. Some of you guys have a PC in their signature, but I'm curious to get an idea of what's out there being used, and what they're used for.

The oldest PC I'm still actively using is a Thinkpad T420 with an i7 2640 in it. It has so many different ways to connect drives and oddball ports to it, so it is often used for drive cloning and actual RS232 for configuring network gear. It's the computer I actively carry everywhere I go; I keep it in my bag of tools rather than my backpack. I got it in 2011 and it's on it's fourth set of batteries now, but it's still a useful guy. It has survived car accidents and I don't know how many drops over the years and it has been rained on. I'm convinced it's never going to actually die.

My "main" laptop and technically newest PC is currently a Thinkpad P14s Gen 6 with a Ryzen 7 350, purchased this year. It's a really nice PC, although I have a kind of love-hate relationship with its screen, which isn't a clean fraction of 1080p and thus causes headaches if I use it for remote desktop sessions and forget to fix the window size. This PC gets used every day, unlike the old T420.

I also have an HX 370 mini PC, currently my desktop Linux system; an n150 micro-server that is my back-up Plex/Immich/Jellyfin server; an n150 with a couple 10Gb ports on it that I use for a router; an M4 Mac Mini that technically belongs to my partner; my video editing rig with a Ryzen 9950X; and my two servers: a Lenovo SR 630 that I'm trying to retire and my previous desktop, a Threadripper 3960. The biggest reason I'm using both is that the SR630 has 512GB RAM in it but slow individual cores. It hosts a bunch of duplicate VMs of systems my customers use. The Threadripper has less RAM but multiple GPUs and a total of 55 hard drives and SSDs. That's the PC I actually can't live without.

I'm about 50-50 Linux versus Windows. Almost everything I actively use is running a new-ish AMD CPU while the n150s are both in appliances I almost never touch. I have other stuff sitting around that barely gets used, but two desktops, two laptops and a bunch of serverish things are my main systems.
 

ddrueding

Fixture
Joined
Feb 4, 2002
Messages
19,868
Location
Horsens, Denmark
My main rig is the 9950X3D with 96GB RAM, and a 4090.
Laptop is a Dell XPS 15 with an i9-9980HK, 32GB, and GTX 1650. I like it for the amazing 4k OLED and the ability to run Civ V and Kerbal Space Program well.
My old desktop is now my server; i9-14900KF with 64GB and a 2080Ti.
One the boat I run a Raspberry Pi 5 compute module on a custom board that supports all the boat-specific interfaces and has an integrated UPS. When power consumption is a factor, the Pi is amazing.

All are windows except the Pi.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
Joined
Jan 17, 2002
Messages
22,692
Location
I am omnipresent
What are you doing with the server? Is it just running file services or do you have the *RR stack operating or?
I'm kind of curious to see where people have landed on Windows 10 vs 11 or if we have any consensus on Linux distros. I haven't seen any mention of contemporary Intel on SF other than your 14th-gen rig and the odd Celeron N appliance in ages. I'm wondering what's out there.
 

Handruin

Administrator
Joined
Jan 13, 2002
Messages
13,976
Location
USA
Here's where my PC inventory is as of now:

Desktop: (built 2020)
AMD 3950X
32GB RAM
1TB NVMe, 2 x 2TB SATA SSD, 1 6TB HDD
RTX 5080
OS: Win 10
Usage: games

Laptop
Macbook Pro M1 Max
32GD RAM
1TB NVMe
Usage: daily driver for most day to day stuff

NAS 1:
Motherboard: Supermicro A2SDi-8C-HLN4F
Intel Atom Processor C3758
RAM: 64GB ECC RDIMMs (2 x 32GB Micron)
Boot storage: 1TB WD Blue SN580 NVMe 1TB
Network: Mellanox Connect-X 3 10Gb SFP+
8 x Ultrastar DC HC580 22TB
OS: Ubuntu Server 24.04.3 LTS
zfs + samba

NAS 2 (backups):
Supermicro X10SL7-F
Intel Xeon E3-1270V3
32GB RAM DDR3L ECC (8GBx4)
6 x 20 HGST HDD
OS: Ubuntu Server 24.04.3 LTS
zfs + samba

Compute server:
MINISFORUM BD790i SE
AMD Ryzen 9 7940HX
RAM: 96GB Kit (2x48GB) DDR5 5600MHz
Boot: 1TB WD Blue NVMe
VM storage: WD_BLACK 4TB NVMe
OS: Proxmox VE 8.4.14

Usage: mostly Ubuntu Server 24.04.3 LTS VMs that host various docker containers for things like rrr stack, game servers, other projects.

Home automation system:
Beelink Mini S12 Pro
Intel N100
RAM 16GB
512GB NVMe
SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle
OS: Proxmox VE 8.4.14
(Home Assistant & other smaller tasks)
 
Last edited:

ddrueding

Fixture
Joined
Feb 4, 2002
Messages
19,868
Location
Horsens, Denmark
What are you doing with the server?
At the moment it is doing literally nothing, other than physically holding up my new desktop.

The plan is that when winter sets in here and my work slows down I'll finally get the house off the Alexa system by combining home assistant, voice recognition, a basic LLM, and text to speech. For this purpose it will very likely be running a Linux of some kind, but I haven't started the research beyond what I just wrote yet.
 

Chewy509

Wotty wot wot.
Joined
Nov 8, 2006
Messages
3,389
Location
Gold Coast Hinterland, Australia
My main desktop is a MacStudio (M2 Max), and an iPad for anytime I need portable compute.
My wife and daughter both have iMac's (M4) and iPads...
My son is still on a i5-11500 based PC, 64GB DDR4 with RTX3060 12GB and is on Windows 11 solely for gaming, otherwise he would be on Linux. He was hoping to get an upgrade next year, but that's currently looking unlikely due to RAM prices spiking (unless they crash sometime next year).
 

sedrosken

Florida Man
Joined
Nov 20, 2013
Messages
2,015
Location
Eglin AFB Area
Website
sedrosken.xyz
In regular, active use are my Precision (10850H/32GB/RTX5000 16GB, used rarely) and the Surface Laptop Go 2 (1135g7/16GB), though I do make use of the Evo N410c (PIIIM-1.2/1GB/Mobility Radeon M6 16MB) for a surprising amount of stuff -- that native RS232 is surprisingly useful, and it's strong enough to run Diablo II and Unreal Tournament and check my emails, run my mouth in IRC, or risk getting my 10-year-old Discord account banned for using Discord Messenger. It's also fine for reading text-heavy websites like wiki pages, with some patience while they load.

My server's in the background and on 24/7, running Proxmox with several Debian guests running various network services including but not at all limited to a pihole, ProtonMail bridge, SSL tunneling for both the local IMAP bridge and for my ancient stuff that can't negotiate a SSL connection to my remote IRC bouncer running off my website's VPS on their own, in addition to NAS duties, Jellyfin, etc. It's got an i9-9900HK ES (QTJ1) on a Maximus VIII Hero, 64GB of RAM, and uses the QSV in the iGP for Jellyfin transcoding.
 

Santilli

Hairy Aussie
Joined
Jan 27, 2002
Messages
5,405
1764784543480.png
This is the Living room computer for RMLisa:
Mine is in the sig.
I have Panasonic CF-53 and 54, both with double ram, and SSD's running Win 10.
Also a Chromebook, old with 15.4" screen
All storage is done on mine, with 14 gig drives to backup too.
Have 3-4 of them, and mainly use one, with periodic backups to the other two-3.
 

Will Rickards

Storage Is My Life
Joined
Jan 23, 2002
Messages
2,017
Location
Here
Website
willrickards.net
I built one earlier this year for my son:
AMD 9600X / ASUS B650M-PLUS WIFI / 32GB CL30 DDR5 (interestingly had to rma the first gskill CL36 batch and switched to teamgroup CL30) / Intel Arc B580 / Windows 11
The main one I use:
AMD 5600G / Gigabyte A520M DS3H / 32GB DDR4 / integrated GPU / Windows 11
Laptop I use fairly infrequently. I do use it to transfer files to my iphone as the usb connection on main pc doesn't work to the iphone for some reason.
Dell Precision 7510 / Intel i7 6820HQ / 16GB
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
Joined
Jan 17, 2002
Messages
22,692
Location
I am omnipresent
MacStudio (M2 Max)

Curious as to that choice in particular. You've obviously chosen to stick with Apple in general, but the Studios are a particular sort of investment, especially if you're getting one with a meaningful amount of RAM.

re: Linux gaming, it is extremely credible at this point and even moreso if you have a non-nVidia GPU, bordering on dead simple. There's a little bit of a headache if you are getting software from outside Steam/GoG/Epic and obviously there are deal breakers in a few online games with intransigent developers, but if you're trying to ditch Windows completely, games are no longer even remotely a stopping point. If you just want a game-playing appliance, you can just follow a recipe to get there. Your only likely pain point once you get a launcher set up will probably be Proton-GE updates.

Laptop I use fairly infrequently. I do use it to transfer files to my iphone as the usb connection

Apparently Google does have a working AirDrop implementation if you need it, but the multiplatform solution I found for moving stuff around between things is called ShareIt.
 

Chewy509

Wotty wot wot.
Joined
Nov 8, 2006
Messages
3,389
Location
Gold Coast Hinterland, Australia
Curious as to that choice in particular. You've obviously chosen to stick with Apple in general, but the Studios are a particular sort of investment, especially if you're getting one with a meaningful amount of RAM.
It was mainly for programming tasks, and have the ability to play games due to the beefed up GPU and cooling in it. Due to discounts, I managed to get one cheaper than an equivalent PC would have cost. They are excellent machines for their designed use case, and I don't see myself changing any time soon.
Plus the integrations between macOS, iOS, iPadOS and watch OS make having everything in the same ecosystem so much nicer. (My wife loves the ability to send/recieve text messages from her iMac and her iPad for example).
re: Linux gaming, it is extremely credible at this point and even moreso if you have a non-nVidia GPU, bordering on dead simple. There's a little bit of a headache if you are getting software from outside Steam/GoG/Epic and obviously there are deal breakers in a few online games with intransigent developers, but if you're trying to ditch Windows completely, games are no longer even remotely a stopping point. If you just want a game-playing appliance, you can just follow a recipe to get there. Your only likely pain point once you get a launcher set up will probably be Proton-GE updates.
His sticky point is that he likes games that use in-kernel anti-cheats which is the only blocker to him switching. If it wasn't for that, he would have switched. He's fully aware that you can game on Linux, as I did on my prior system (Arch Linux BTW), and Linux does meet all his needs otherwise. Also 90%+ of his games are via Steam which helps a lot as well...
We are getting him a small upgrade for Christmas, I just ordered a 9060XT 16GB during the Cyber Monday sales at a reasonable price which hopefully see him through for the next 2-3 years, which we may see prices get back to "normal" before the next pricing crisis hits. Should also be able to offload the RTX3060 12GB for some decent money as well. (most 3060's are going for AU$200 second hand).
 

DrunkenBastard2

What is this storage?
Joined
Dec 5, 2025
Messages
6
It was mainly for programming tasks, and have the ability to play games due to the beefed up GPU and cooling in it. Due to discounts, I managed to get one cheaper than an equivalent PC would have cost. They are excellent machines for their designed use case, and I don't see myself changing any time soon.
Plus the integrations between macOS, iOS, iPadOS and watch OS make having everything in the same ecosystem so much nicer. (My wife loves the ability to send/recieve text messages from her iMac and her iPad for example).

His sticky point is that he likes games that use in-kernel anti-cheats which is the only blocker to him switching. If it wasn't for that, he would have switched. He's fully aware that you can game on Linux, as I did on my prior system (Arch Linux BTW), and Linux does meet all his needs otherwise. Also 90%+ of his games are via Steam which helps a lot as well...
We are getting him a small upgrade for Christmas, I just ordered a 9060XT 16GB during the Cyber Monday sales at a reasonable price which hopefully see him through for the next 2-3 years, which we may see prices get back to "normal" before the next pricing crisis hits. Should also be able to offload the RTX3060 12GB for some decent money as well. (most 3060's are going for AU$200 second hand).
Howdy Chewy long time no chat. Sounds like you got it just in time before ram and gpu prices hit the stratosphere with AI bubble still going strong.
 
Top