A little bit of history...

As my parents were not very computerphile we had an own PC quite late. It was an 700Mhz AMD K7 with (I guess) 128MB RAM and some sort of Nvidia graphics card. At some point I was (together with friends from school) quite heavily into PC gaming so I had to replace this thing. I bought my first own hardware which was an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ on an ASUS board with an Nvidia GeForce 5200 which I later upgraded to a 6800GT. Woha.

When my friends went from Counter Strike 1.6 to MMORPGs I lost interest in gaming and used my PC for other things - such as running gentoo Linux. Which was nice but a problem at the same time: this still was the only PC we had and my mother wanted to use it as well - and yeah she was not really compatible with Linux.

One thing that changed the timeline a lot was when I started my studies - at university I got my hands on all these nice student licenses for Microsoft products. So I made sure my parents got their own PC bought another refurbished PC and installed Windows Server 2008. There it was. My own small active directory network. Including fancy thing such as booting and Windows installation via LAN.

At that time I also got something new and I wanted it to be small. So I put an Intel E8400 into an Shuttle XPC SG33G5M barebone and was happy for a quite long time until I somewhat outgrew the need of having a desktop PC and so it ended up in the attic.

Fast forward.

The 'server' (which was in the meantime replaced by something serious) is long gone, the barebone PC still in the attic and I got used to use my quite decent DELL Precision 5570 laptop from work for private stuff as well. But there were two reasons why this was not longer perfect for me:

the IT department got a bit restrictive over time and I didn't want them to spy on me in private time
I had no usable monitor anymore and the laptop screen is way too small (but the 4k IPS panel is quite nice) to do cool things such as PCB layouts

So I decided to have an own desktop PC again.

My parents had a DELL all-in-one PC for 12 years which I recently replaced (because of Windows 11) with the 27" version of a newer HP model. I took the old DELL with me and while playing around with it I discovered a little bit of love for all-in-one PCs at my end. So I almost bought the 32" version of the HP which cost ~2200€.

Almost. Because I did a little research about what else I could get for the money - which is:

Case: Fractal Terra Jade 169,00€
Mainboard: Gigabyte Aorus Z890I 300,99€
CPU: Intel Ultra 7 265KF 277,00€
Cooling: be quiet! pure loop 2 120mm 87,88€
RAM: Patriot 32GB DDR5-8200 188,90€
Graphics: Zotac GeForce RTX5060 SOLO 294,90€
SSD: Verbatim Vi5000 SSD 1TB M.2 59,00€
PSU: Seasonic Focus SGX 650W 129,20€
Monitor: Philips Evnia 32M2N6800M 665,98€
SUM: 2173,55€

Actually everything fit nicely - just with the cooler I had the 'issue' that i needed to put the fan 'behind' it in order not to collide with the front USB socket and to get the pump of the cooler more to the inside of the case. The spine is in the 2 position. And yes, I turned around the CPU cooler block during the assembly ;-)