About
About Mark
I source parts off eBay deals and Facebook Marketplace meetups. I built this site to document some of the crazy hardware I come across and fuck around with — full specs, condition notes, and the story behind how it ended up on my bench.
I'm not running a shop. I just genuinely love this hardware — the weird platforms, the obscure flagships, the stuff that never made sense to build a normal PC around but exists anyway. Some of it sticks around, some of it eventually moves on. Either way it gets documented first.
Based in Redlands, CA.
How I got here
I've been taking things apart since I was a kid. Electronics, toys, whatever I could get my hands on — I just wanted to know how it worked. My first real computer was a Pentium office PC I got at 14. Most kids would've just played games on it. I was running local Apache servers just to see what I could do.
From there it snowballed. I built up my collection the only way that made sense — flipping parts, hunting deals, and reinvesting every dollar back into the next weird thing. Best score so far: 48GB of DDR5-9000 CUDIMMs for $400. That's the price of a decent 32GB kit. Still think about that one.
What I look for
The sweet spot for me is hardware that almost nobody else is running. I want to be the only person daily driving it — that's half the appeal. If it's obscure, power-hungry, and makes no practical sense, I'm interested.
I have a soft spot for AMD's Fiji era specifically. There's something about that generation that just hits different. I've owned two Radeon Pro Duo Fiji cards and one Polaris variant — dual-GPU setups in general are catnip to me. The more watts it pulls, the better.
Outside of that sweet spot I go after high-end older workstation platforms and relatively recent server hardware that falls through the cracks on the used market — stuff that was insanely expensive new and now nobody knows what to do with. I do.