Between my closet and my parents’ desktop PCs that they don’t use anymore, I noticed that I had enough parts laying around to put together a 1080p gaming PC. Although I did have a graphics card I could have used, I ended up buying a Radeon RX 640, low-end, low-profile graphics card to fit in this case. I got it on ebay for about $40. Aside from that I didn’t have to buy anything.
If I had used the other graphics card, I’d have needed to use a different case, too. And as you can see, I’m running out of room on my PC cabinet/bookshelf here.
The low-spec PC is the vertical one. The black cube is my new(er) one that I put together in 2019.
My first test was seeing if it could play Batman: Arkham Asylum, my physical copy that I got back when the game first came out. And it could! Installing with Lutris was easier than I expected. Unfortunately, you can’t save your progress without signing in to Games for Windows Live – a service that doesn’t exist anymore. Oh well, maybe I’ll find a workaround.
Other games I’ve tried so far are Batman: Arkham City, Bayonetta, and Defense Grid, all on Steam. There’s something kind of satisfying about playing a game on hardware from about the time that the game came out.
Specs:
- AMD A-10 6700 CPU (released 2013)
- AMD Radeon RX 640 GPU (released 2020)
- MSI A68HI motherboard (released 2015)
- 8 GB ram (DDR-I-Forget)
- 256 GB SSD
- A freaking DVD drive!
- Linux (Bazzite)
What is that case, and what does the display on the front do for you?
The case is a Sentey SS1-2422. They still had it listed on their website just a couple months ago, but seem to have removed all PC cases from their site recently. archive.org has a snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20260114203216mp_/https://www.sentey.com/en/ss1-2422
The display is supposed to show the temperature and whether the hard drive is spinning. However, it appears to have been kicked several times, so it doesn’t really show anything besides a few cracks now. :P